Response to Speech Synthesis feedback of 2021-03

[Simon]

Thank you for the useful feedback (from 25 responses), regarding the Speech Synthesis course. I have clustered your comments, and my responses are below.

I have briefly summarised the most frequently mentioned “Keep doing this” points without adding any response, then responded to each “Change this” point made by at least 2 people. All feedback was carefully considered and even points made by just one person are still taken into account.

Please do feel free to follow up and offer more feedback or clarification.

[Simon]

Keep doing this

Number of people mentioning each point is given in parentheses.

Videos (14)

Interactive classes including individual/pair/group work (9)

Reading papers in class (4)

Use of diagrams (3)

[Simon]

Improve the coursework

There were various valid criticisms of the lab-based assignment. We plan to improve the assignment and would like to introduce an element of state-of-the-art modelling. However, this course has no programming pre-requisite, and we need to keep the assignment accessible to all students.

Requiring students to record some original data is very important – it’s something that most people in industry lack experience of – so we will keep this.

[Simon]

More guidance on the coursework report

Only a small number of responses mentioned this, asking for a prescribed structure. That was done in Speech Processing, and you are expected to use what you learned there in this course. You should no longer need a prescribed structure to know what makes a good report.

[Simon]

A better classroom

I wish I could promise that, and especially offer a room with work surfaces for your notebooks and laptops, but I have no control over this. Asking for a different room would probably mean somewhere even more obscure and certainly much further from George Square. (I don’t know what to say to the person who complained the room is too far from Appleton Tower…it’s less than 10 minutes walk!)

[Simon]

Miscellaneous

There was one suggestion to use Piazza, which is a good tool. The University has a track record of changing the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) every 5 or so years. The current platform is a tangled mess of many tools, ‘integrated’ in Learn. Critically, a previous VLE change led to total loss of all past student-contributed discussions for this course. I do not want that to ever happen again, which is why I built speech.zone

Some things were mentioned that we are already doing: release the videos earlier (they were on speech.zone from the start of the course) and provide lecture recordings (which are on Learn, and mentioned on every class tab within the course on speech.zone).

[Author]

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