Response to Speech Synthesis feedback of 2024-02

[Simon]

Thank you for the useful feedback (from 35 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 and flipped classroom format (17)

In-class interactivity (16)

Whiteboard group exercises (9)

Quizzes on speech.zone (6)

[Simon]

The assignment is overwhelming

Including: too open-ended, instructions long and hard to follow, unclear expectations, and similar comments

The open-ended and slightly under-specified nature of the assignment is by design, so that students need to actively think about what they are doing, and why they are doing it, and not merely follow a sequence of instructions.

The goal of the assignment is to consolidate and test your understanding of the course material.

But I agree that this can be overwhelming and we should provide a little more structure and guidance. For this year, I have already added two class elements to address this:

1. On 2024-02-13, we went over the whole assignment and made links to the relevant parts of the course material. The key takeaway was that you should develop your understanding of that course material by doing that aspect of the assignment and then demonstrate that understanding in the write-up.
2. On 2024-03-12, we will go over the newly-revised structured marking scheme and see how to get a good mark. In other words, we will see how to demonstrate understanding.

Further coursework guidance may be added, depending on your feedback about the above.

[Simon]

Lab sessions are unstructured

This is only partially fair feedback. The lab sessions do generally start with an overview from the lead tutor (usually Korin) about what to focus on that week. We have noticed that many students do not pay attention to this overview (we know this from the questions they ask later in that lab session).

We will continue to provide guidance at the start of each lab session about where you should be in the assignment (e.g., with reference to the milestones) and what to focus on.

[Author]

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