Response to Speech Processing feedback of 2020-10

[Simon]

Thank you for the useful feedback (from 36 responses), regarding the Speech Processing course. I have clustered your comments, and my responses are below.

I’ve responded to all negative points made by at least 2 people. I have briefly summarised the positive points without adding any response. Please do feel free to follow up and offer more feedback or clarification.

If you can’t find a written response to your feedback, it’s because no-one else commented on that issue. But I do take all feedback into account, and nothing is ignored.

[Simon]

Summary of the numerical responses, with my responses

There is enough ongoing technical support (for the VM, Festival etc): 4.4

This seems to be working fine.

The tutorial sessions are useful: 3.8

The tutorials appear to be mostly useful, but we accept that there is room for improvement. In the second half of the course we will shift slightly towards covering the core material rather than problem sets / Python notebooks. Tutorial groups vary widely in how well they are working – see response to written comments below.

I find speech.zone easy to use and navigate: 4.5

Thank-you. If there is anything you would like to improve in general about the site, post on the Requests forum.

I find the forums on speech.zone useful: 4.4

Also good – please keep using them!

The lecturers (Simon, Catherine, and Rebekkah) are helpful: 4.6 (no ratings below 3 ;5 responses of 3; the rest 4 or 5)

Thank-you for the positive feedback. We very much appreciate that.

The tutors (Jason, and Jason) are helpful: 4.1

Thank-you from the tutors.

The difficulty of the SIGNALS tutorial material is appropriate (1 – too easy, 3- just right, 5 – too hard): 3.8 (with only one response below 3 and all others 3, 4, or 5)

The best way for us to improve the course is to experiment a little each year. This material (new for this year) was designed to be challenging. It ended up a little more challenging than intended. We will be keeping this material in the course, but we will divide each notebook into levels of difficulty to make it clearer what is essential and what is optional.

The difficulty of the PHON tutorial material is appropriate (1 – too easy, 3- just right, 5 – too hard): 3.0 (with a spread of scores right across the range).

This area is where a few students will have a strong background and other no background at all. The wide spread of scores surprised us. In future, we will try to make this material more accessible for students without any background.

I would like a weekly timetabled lecture for the remaining modules (1-strongly disagree, 5-strongly agree): 3.4 (with 8 people rating below 3 and all others 3,4 or 5)

General positive feeling towards this, but not overwhelming. We have responded to this by providing a pre-recorded class video at the start of each week, then going over that same material in a live format on Tuesdays. The live class will be recorded, so attendance is not required for those who cannot make it.

[Simon]

The PHON material is too hard

In line with the numerical score distribution, around a third of respondents found the PHON material very challenging. We will adjust the delivery of this material in future to make it more accessible to people without any background.

For this year, the PHON material is being assessed in both items of coursework and in the exam. Our expectations of what students will master are realistic. Knowing the basics will be enough to do well on this course.

[Simon]

The SIGNALS material (especially the notebooks) is too hard

As noted in the response to the numerical scores, this was a result of our experimentation with this new material. We don’t apologise for conducting experiments on you! We need to do that every year to keep improving the course.

Several of you made excellent suggestions and we will incorporate some of these in future:

• Divide material into levels of difficulty, or prioritise into essential/recommended/extra like the readings
• Add walk-through videos or live classes

[Simon]

First assignment

Improve the documentation of Festival and/or the assignment.

It is not necessary to become a Festival expert to do the assignment. Some of you worried that you should be explaining precisely how Festival works, but the assignment didn’t require that. You were allowed to assume that Festival works as per the theory taught in class. We will make this more clear in future.

Walk-through examples of how to analyse some errors

Normally this would have happened during in-person lab sessions. We were hoping that tutorials and the forums would replace this, but that didn’t work as well as expected. In future, if we teach the course without in-person lab sessions, we will add walk-throughs, possibly as videos.

[Simon]

Tutorials and tutorial groups

This is the first time we have run the course with small tutorial groups. Our normal format is to divide the class into two large groups of around 40 students, and to run 1 hour 50 minute computing lab sessions with the lecturer and two tutors in attendance.

We decided to replace that with two sessions per group per week. Inevitably, a 50 minute tutorial will always feel short and will run out of time, but we were not able to resource double-length tutorials for the number of groups required.

We carefully designed each group to contain students from a variety of backgrounds, in the hope that you would help each other with some of the basic background skills. This was only partially successful.

There was a wide variation in how well tutorial groups worked. Many did a great job of meeting in advance of tutorials to study together and prepare questions. Other groups didn’t manage this. We don’t fully understand why this is and would appreciate additional feedback from all students.

[Simon]

Summary of positive points – these are things we will keep doing:

course structure and content – modules, interactive tutorials and live classes, PHON material, faster pacing than typical linguistics courses

videos – informative, clear, simple, visual, transcripts, route maps

notebooks – maths in depth, weekly exercises, animations

tutorials – twice per week, use of new/complementary slides and explanations, writing skills

teaching staff – accessible, helpful

speech.zone – generally preferred over Learn, well-organised, easy to search

[Author]

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