A new worked example was introduced, one of the assignments was revamped, and quizzes were tweaked.
Roughly half of the students enrolled responded in the evaluation. The overall impression was favorable, with around 80% of students reporting the course to be “excellent”. Student’s valued the structure of the course, including the self-paced aspects and well-produced video lectures.
Suggestions for improvement included more worked examples, more focus on business data, and a suggested schedule for following the course.
The course is quite stable now and worked well in general. One aspect which I have mixed feelings about is the peer review component. Some students take peer reviews seriously and provide detailed feedback and point out mistakes and issues that even I as a teacher missed. But many students do not seem to put an effort into their peer reviews.
I am happy about most parts of the course, except for the course literature, and possibly some of the assignments.
Out of 19 respondents, one gave the course a “satisfactory” score, 5 “very good”, and 13 “excellent”. As before, most of the respondents were equally positive for most of the other questions. The students reported that they spent, on average, 13.1 hours of work each week on the course.
As far as constructive feedback goes, the most common issue was that people thought the course was too demanding for the amount of credits. There were other suggestions and feedback as well, but none of it was shared between the participants.
Several of the more demanding quiz questions have now been removed and others have been simplified. A few smaller parts of the course have been altogether removed. As a result, several of the lecture videos have been revised.
Several of the lecture videos were completely remade as a result of revisiting and revising large parts of some sections of the course. A few demanding quiz questions were also removed to lower the overall difficulty of the course.
Overall the student’s responded favorably to the course. Out of the 24 respondents’ impressions, 16 were “excellent”, 7 “very good” and 1 “good”. Among the most highly valued parts of the course was the pre-recorded lectures and general quality of the content of the course. When it comes to things students thought would improve the course, students wished for a slightly lower overall course load, better course literature, and more content to support more difficult parts of the course.
I thought the course went well overall and that the changes introduced all turned out quite well. The lowered difficulty and course load seem to have had some effect, with a higher proportion of students finishing the course. For some reason, however, the course activity on the course was lower than usual. For the last few workshop sessions, only a single person attended. There was also less activity on the course forum (slack workspace) than last time.
There were a few areas where student’s repeatedly struggled throughout the assignments, such as formatting figures properly: in particular, writing good captions and sizing figures correctly. It is also clear that quite a few students struggle or do not find time to deal with the last module that contains the more difficult parts of the course. This material is not handled in the assignments, which might create less incentive for students to finish. There were also a few errors in the quizzes, which created dismay for some students. Finally, it is clear that some students do not treat peer reviews seriously and miss obvious errors in the reports.
Out of 19 respondents, one gave the course a “satisfactory” score, 5 “very good”, and 13 “excellent”. As before, most of the respondents were equally positive for most of the other questions. The students reported that they spent, on average, 13.1 hours of work each week on the course.
As far as constructive feedback goes, the most common issue was that people thought the course was too demanding for the amount of credits. There were other suggestions and feedback as well, but none of it was shared between the participants.
Several of the more demanding quiz questions have now been removed and others have been simplified. A few smaller parts of the course have been altogether removed. As a result, several of the lecture videos have been revised.
Among the 19 respondents, one gave the course a “sufficient” score, 4 “very good”, and 14 “excellent”. Most of the respondents were equally positive for most other questions except for the one regarding literature, which was regarded as “sufficient” by 2, “good” by 6, “very good” by 4, “excellent” by 5, and “don’t know” by 2. Everyone except one respondent reported that they spent between 0 and 17 hours per week on the course. The mean amount of time spent was just below 10 hours.
When it comes to constructive feedback, here are a few things that students thought might improve the course:
Several coding videos were added and also a course overview. Some of the quiz questions were simplified or removed. One assignment was completely remade and another majorly revised.
Feedback on the course was positive across all items in the course evaluation. We received one specific request, which was to make the workshops (help sessions) weekly instead of bi-weekly.
The workshops have been changed to be held on a weekly basis instead. Many small changes to the course content and fixes to errors in the quizzes.