Forum Replies Created
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Reading lists for each lecture
(in addition to the readings specified per topic / per video)
Done! Find them within each course.
Video speed control
Already answered on the forums.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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This is the new version. Still under construction.