2024 January

In this course's iteration, it was part of the 'UPPMAX Intro course'. Due to this, the evaluation results were directed to this course or others.

Here, only the results that clearly applied to this course are shown. This selection may bias the evaluation results, but it is the best that could be done: the full evaluation results are only visible to the teachers of the full four-day course.

Anonymous evaluations

These are the anonymous evaluation results that clearly apply to me.

Note that I am the only instructor that got a 2 out of 5.

What did you like the most about the course?

This fulfilled all of my requirements as a beginner to Uppmax and basic coding in BASH. I liked the hands-on nature of the activities, especially with Richel. Although it was intense and tiring, it forced effective learning

This is great to hear! This was the whole idea: we know that learners prefer a passive lecture over active teaching, even though they learn less.

What did you like the least about the course?

At the Python section, i didn't like that we skipped some of the solutions. After trying out and failing i would like to see at least how to solve it, and we lost a lot of time on some of the easier exercises.

I agree with the learner that at the end of the day, I started skipping things. I did so purposefully, yet I did not expect this was problematic enough to end up on an evaluation.

Python scripts part

Too bad that there is no reason here...

How do you think we could improve the course?

more paired up exercises

I was the only instructor that did this. I am happy at least one learner liked it :-)

Do you have any additional comments or suggestions?

I liked the course overall, however Python may need its own course, because it couldn't cover much because of short time, and the exercises skipped from basic stuff to intermediate pretty quick at least for me as a person who didn't work with python before.

I wonder where that quick skip from basic to intermediate happened. I'd guess at file IO, which indeed is a jump from book chapter 3 to chapter 13. Next time, I should invest some time in bridging this gap.

For the Python session in the last day, we got a lot of practice time but time was much behind the schedule. I was also stuck with some errors. I suggest intead of only two students in a break room, assign more students in a room and the questions are likely be solved. Teacher show also provide correct answers after practice.

This is a new insight, that if a course is learner-centered (i.e. the pace is determined by the learners) and the schedule is not completed, this may give a negative effect. I will reshape the schedule to help learners get the opposite effect.

I am unsure about using more than two learners: in the end, learners that have finished an exercise were sent to help, hence rooms would fill up to three or four learners.

Indeed, here too, in the end I cut corners in not showing the answers on purpose. It is a more sensitive matter than I thought :-)

Informal evaluations

This evaluations had the form of an informal dialogue.

• From 1 learner

I had some questions, for example 'What is the interactive node going to do with my output?'. It is great that we practiced this!

If no video, the teacher cannot see when learners are lost: great idea to turn cameras on for that too!

• lovely
• fresh
• kept audience awake
• As a learner, you do not want to be berated when giving an answer. Richel tries to gently deal with a wrong answer and he does this great
• cameras on is great: else learners feel alone
• in a gentle way, Richel makes people feel that this is serious: there is a schedule, there are exercises and we are going to do it!
• breaks are great: two hours, 1.5 hours is tough!
• interrupting an exercise for a break is fine