{"id":1109,"date":"2010-08-26T16:21:06","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T23:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=1109"},"modified":"2010-08-26T16:21:06","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T23:21:06","slug":"cmpt-470-feedback-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2010\/08\/26\/cmpt-470-feedback-wanted\/","title":{"rendered":"CMPT 470: feedback wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"

Along with my first offering of CMPT 383, I just finished my 13th offering (!) of CMPT 470. I haven’t changed the backbone of the course much in that time: it mostly feels good to me, and other than moving with shifting web technologies, I haven’t felt the need to change the course style.<\/p>\n

But now I’m taking a good hard look at the course. I still like the overall flow, but there are some things I want to change.<\/p>\n

I did a survey of the current students to get some feedback, but they lack perspective, having just finished the course. I figure I can get some eyeballs from course alumni here and am looking for some more meaningful feedback.<\/p>\n

Question 1: Weekly Exercises and Grading Scheme<\/h3>\n

When I did CMPT 383, I gave weekly exercises, thinking that they might feel a little bit hand-holdey for an upper-division course. Much to my surprise, they worked better there than they do in 120 and 165: more-senior students are in a much better position to appreciate the micro-lessons that the exercises encapsulate and better understand why they are helpful. It’s also a chance to give problems on everything<\/em>, not just a few things in major assignments.<\/p>\n

I have realized that I want to do weekly exercises in CMPT 470, replacing the three assignments. The problem is: the assignments are worth 30% of the course. The weekly exercises would receive minimal marking and feedback (likely marking scheme: 2=most\/everything correct, 1=some stuff done, 0=little\/nothing done). With that little “grading”, 30% is too much to give to them: 20% is more reasonable.<\/p>\n

So, I have 10% of the final grade to reallocate somewhere. Any suggestions about where an extra 10% of weight should be distributed? (The old grading scheme<\/a> is online.)<\/p>\n

[To give you an idea, I’m imagining that some of the exercises will be like “learn these three important CSS techniques and use each to style this sample page”; “find security holes in this sample mini-app I have created for you”; “pick Rails\/Django\/whatever and do the tutorial on their site”; “deploy your tutorial code on your group’s web server”; “do something with jQuery”]<\/p>\n

Question 2: Content<\/h3>\n

I have certainly done my best to keep with the times, and talk about new web-related topics as they have become relevant. But like I said before: the overall backbone of the course has remained the same.<\/p>\n

Are there things that I should have spent more lecture time on than I did? Things that took up too much time?<\/p>\n

I definitely want to move JavaScript stuff a little earlier in the course: it deserves to be at least a little more front-and-centre than it has been.<\/p>\n

Question 3: Other Stuff?<\/h3>\n

I have a few other smaller tweaks in mind, and am open to other feedback.<\/p>\n

In particular, I plan to (explicitly) open the technology evaluation to a wider array of technologies: JavaScript frameworks, databases. This past semester, I started to realize that the server-side frameworks (Django, Rails, Cake, …) are all fundamentally the same (at the depth that’s possible in the techeval). There are other pieces of technology that are more interesting choices at this point, and they might as well evaluate those.<\/p>\n

I’m happy to take any half-baked thoughts on any of this here, or by email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Along with my first offering of CMPT 383, I just finished my 13th offering (!) of CMPT 470. I haven’t changed the backbone of the course much in that time: it mostly feels good to me, and other than moving with shifting web technologies, I haven’t felt the need to change the course style. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1109"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1115,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions\/1115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}