Response to Speech Processing feedback of 2016-10-20

[Simon]

Thank you for the very useful feedback, from about 60 of you. I have clustered your comments and responded to every topic that was raised by more than one student below. I have also responded to points raised by individual students, when I felt they may apply more widely.

Please do feel free to add your own follow-up comments here too!

[Simon]

Website structure is too deeply nested

I accept that the nesting has gone too deep in some places. Restructuring the pages part-way through a course is likely to cause more problems than it solves, so this feedback will be acted upon in the future, for both Speech Synthesis and Speech Processing.

[Simon]

Need more “big picture” / recap / overview

In the next part of the course (speech recognition), I will include a short section at the start of each 10.00 lecture, summarising what you should know at that point, and how the current topic fits into the overall picture.

[Simon]

Provide the lab instructions further in advance

I think this one is the students’ responsibility: be more proactive and read further ahead in the course materials. This is level 10+11 course. The materials have been available since before the start of the course.

However, I will find some time within each 10.00 lecture to highlight how far through the 2nd assignment you should be by that point.

[Simon]

Lab session are too short to finish all the work required

This is by design. You need to spend a substantial amount of time in the lab beyond the tutored lab sessions. You can obtain an unlimited amount of help by using the forums.

To get the most out of the tutored lab sessions, it should be obvious that you read all the instructions in advance. I’ve noticed some students spending time in the tutored sessions simply going through the instructions. This is not a smart strategy.

Ideally, I would like to offer 2 hour lab sessions. However, the current lab facility is not big enough for this and is in high demand. I hope to do this in future years when we might get a larger lab.

[Simon]

I don’t like the lecture room

There is an instant poll to find out whether this is widely-held view.

[Simon]

Results of the poll: of students who expressed a preference, 73% prefer the current room with its arrangement around group tables.

[Simon]

Lectures are too short

When combined with 1 hour of tutored lab time per week, each student has 2 or 3 hours of contact per week. This is consistent with PPLS guidelines for 10 and 20 credit courses.

To get the most benefit from the available lecture time, do the following:

• Do all essential reading well before the lecture
• Ask your questions in advance
• Come to the 9.00 lectures
• Use the lab sessions to ask further questions

[Simon]

Record the lectures

This is already being done and the recordings automatically appear on Learn, usually just a few hours after each lecture. This was announced at the start of the course.

[Simon]

Provide the TopHat questions for review after each lecture

I’ve now done this for all the questions used in the course so far, and will release future questions after they have been used in lectures.

[Simon]

Not enough time is spent on the answers to TopHat questions

On the other hand, some students thought we should not spend too much time within the 50 minutes of a lecture on TopHat.

I hope that releasing the questions to you for review after the lecture will mitigate the limited time we can spend on the answers within the lecture.

If 70% of students get a question correct, but 30% get it wrong, it’s hard to decide whether to spend a long time on the solution within the lecture. However, of course I want to help those 30% of students understand why they got it wrong.

Keep giving me feedback on this, and we can try variations in the lectures to see what works best overall.

[Simon]

TopHat is buggy

Yes, I know. I do not know what the problem is. Please let me know if it is only buggy in this course, and works well in other courses (in which case it might be something I am doing wrong), or whether it’s a general problem.

[Simon]

I don’t like TopHat questions

I’m afraid you are in a minority. In an instant poll, 76% of students wanted me to use TopHat.

I’ll continue using them, but only a few per lecture.

[Simon]

The lab tutor(s) just read out the instruction sheet

I have given them more training and they will no longer do this. In fact, they will assume you have already read the instruction sheet all the way through before coming to the lab session.

[Simon]

Glossary of technical terms

That’s a great idea, and I will implement it. I want to do it properly though, so it’s going to take some time.

In the meantime, simply post your requests for definitions in this forum topic and I will provide them “on demand”.

[Simon]

PDF of the lecture slides

This is already done and was announced at the start of the course. You need to get them from Learn, because I don’t want to make them freely available on this site.

[Simon]

Video speed control

Already answered on the forums.

[Simon]

Reading lists for each lecture

(in addition to the readings specified per topic / per video)

Done! Find them within each course.

[Simon]

Videos sometime seem a little disjointed

Yes, that’s to be expected if you watch the videos passively; you will not get the most out of this course this way.

The course comprises videos, readings, blog posts, forums and lab exercises, plus of course the lectures. Part of your job as active learners is to integrate the information across these multiple modes of delivery.

I am hoping that asking you to find some of the connections for yourself encourages this active behaviour, and ultimately you’ll arrive at a deeper understanding of the material.

The flipped approach makes learning more effective, and hopefully more engaging and fun, but it does rely on you putting in this little extra effort.

Ongoing feedback about this aspect of the course is particularly welcome.

I agree that some sequences of videos, which are currently created from edited recorded lectures, do have gaps and discontinuities. I may poll you later in the semester about whether custom-made videos (as in some blog posts) would be better.

[Simon]

Provide explicit links from lab exercises to the corresponding theory

For now, I am not going to do this, for the same reasons as above: I want you to develop as active learners. The act of finding those connections for yourself is part of the learning process. Giving you all the answers “on a plate” would encourage passive learning, and so would be less effective.

Of course, if you are completely lost and cannot see where to start, then I have failed. If that’s the case, you must tell me.

As above, keep giving me feedback on this: am I finding a good balance between giving you comprehensive material versus encouraging active learning?

[Simon]

Place the readings above the videos on each page

I’ve now started interleaving the readings and videos in a suggested order, rather than always having a video first, and readings afterwards.

But … see the previous post about being an active learner: you can find your own route through the material.

[Simon]

Some videos don’t capture everything on the screen

Yes, unfortunately some of the lectures were captured using an older university system which didn’t always correctly switch between inputs. Also, I used to teach with a dual screen setup – this was nice in a live situation, but not helpful for lecture recording.

If you use the forum to flag video clips which are hard to follow for this reason, then I will prioritise those for improvement (within this semester).

[Simon]

Provide a hub page for the course

The intention is that the left menu (when viewed on a computer, or in landscape mode on an iPad) shows you the complete course structure, with colour used to highlight where you currently are.

I may use a poll later to ask what other functionality would be helpful. For example, a “mark as completed” facility for logged-in users, or “show me what to do next”. These would probably need custom coding in WordPress, which I can do but would take time.

[Simon]

Automatic notification of changes on the website

Currently, you can receive notifications of forum posts and replies (not only to your own posts), simply by subscribing to each top-level forum that you’re interested in (e.g., http://www.speech.zone/forums/forum/readings ).

Notifications of other changes are not currently available, I’m afraid.

[Simon]

Provide direct links within the calendar

The calendar is implemented as a Google calendar, pulled in to the website as a feed. That restricts the entries to have only plain text titles and descriptions. However, an advantage is that you can all subscribe to this feed.

Changing the calendar method is a relatively major change, and so I won’t be doing it in the middle of the course.

From the results of a poll, it looks like only a minority of people subscribed to the calendar feed. So, in future, I could implement the course calendar differently, which will allow me to include clickable links into the course content.

[Simon]

Videos would be easier to follow if we could see your face

In previous years, students said that seeing me (using “picture-in-picture”) was distracting and they preferred just the slides plus my live annotations.

There are challenges in making videos in which you see the slides and annotations, plus my face. This is because I cannot look into a camera at the same time as looking at the screen that I am annotating.

It would only be possible to include a high-quality video of my face with custom-made videos (i.e., ones I make at home, not in a live lecture). I will experiment with this, but it won’t be done this semester.

I may poll you later regarding different formats of video with/without my face and so on.

[Author]

Posts