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Many thanks to the student who has given us elaborate feedback (it's anonymous, so that I answer via the news).
Would appreciate if the student can write a mail so that we can also talk face to face.
I just want to make sure:
- It has been perfectly appropriate (the student was unsure whether it was, but yes, carefully worded and clearly understandable). Many thanks!
- We will consider it seriously, and I would very much like to use one of the remaining lecture hours to discuss this also in class.
We've run through many cycles and we've changed the teaching method in many aspects (actually also to be honest "trying" things that seem fashionable or have been invented by the University as new tools). We have received the busy beaver award for two of our lectures.
- We started with a manuscript without any prosa, so that the class provides all information "between" the lines. We also linked to two very detailed books and have >20 samples of each of the books (Proakis and Oppenheim) in the CS library.
Feedback has been that students prefer a self-contained manuscript and that the background literature is just too much to cope with. - Consequently we changed to a self contained (PDF) manuscript, which BTW is still available if you prefer to have it. To stay very near to the material I used Xournal to annotate the script during the lecture. This whole process has been as self-contained and complete as possible.
- We accompanied the whole lecture by a MATLAB toolbox (a lot of effort to implement it) so that students don't simply need to "believe" in graphs (like in textbooks) but can play around with nearly every element to cross check their understanding. We also heavily fought for the MATLAB campus license so that everyone can use this toolbox without additional costs.
Feedback has been that it is complicated to a) find the right source codes and b) understand and use it. And it often simply fell of the priority list, so that only few students made use of it (with a high correlation to good grades, but of course it's hard to say whether only good students used it or students became good by using it...)
So during the summer term 2019 the team once again spent a really huge amount of work on changing the material to a new method. Purpose has been to enable having slides, HTML manuscripts (usable anytime and anywhere for the students) and a PDF book, all from the same source which therefore can more easily evolve over the years.
As an additional "bonbon" we are now able to integrate the code, so that there's no barrier to find it in a toolbox anymore. We also tried to simplify the code so that it -- even though not providing the best possible programming style (which CS students might criticize...) -- is easily readable and understandable.
It's important for us to hear that we're not yet there and that still the feeling is that the provided material is not ideal. It has been the first run with it, so there surely is room for improvement and hence I look forward to discuss which path would be one that students feel most comfortable with.
Best
Thorsten Herfet