Course Evals

by Mike Gleicher on December 12, 2011

We’ll due Course Evals (the traditional CS form, with the fill in dots and the “do you recommend the instructor” question) on the last day of class (Wednesday, December 14th). Please come if only to fill out the form. (we’ll also have a class, but we’ll end early to give you time to do the forms). The department actually cares how many people fill out the forms.

I do care what you think. This years class was a bit of an experiment (successful in many ways, less successful in others), and I am really interested in how it worked from the student perspective. I am going to run this class again next fall, so your advice can really impact future students!

While I do get the department forms (the department only looks at the fill in dots), and do read them carefully (honest! I care what you think), it doesn’t necessarily give you much opportunity to really give me a sense of the class.

I am asking people to do an addition “course evaluation” to help me with planning. I will keep track of who turns it in, but I will not look at them until after grading is done. You can send it to me by email, or give it to me on paper at the Festival of Games. If you want to be anonymous, do it on paper and put it in an envelope with your name on it. If you do it anonymously, please let me know what graphics class you had (I want to correlate impressions with this). (actually, even if you aren’t anonymous, please remind me so I don’t need to go back to the survey we did at the beginning of class).

I will be doing my own self-evaluation after I am done grading. If you want to see this, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

While you can write anything you want (including nothing), I would appreciate feedback on the following:

  1. What were the best parts of the class? What things should I make sure not to change in the future (I have a lot of ideas on things to change, but I don’t want to destroy what’s good about the class).
  2. What things did we not get to in class that you would like to have learned about? (somehow, the semester breezed by without covering a lot of the topics that I wanted to get to)
  3. What topics in class were most memorable?
  4. How did the Friday afternoon sessions work for you? This semester, we mainly did playtests and group work times. We tried a tutorial or two, but we never got to the group critique experiences, or other experiments we wanted to.
  5. This class took on a different flavor than previous years: we spent more time on design issues, and emphasized web prototypes over more technical details. What is your opinion on this shift? Did we sufficiently warn you about it?

With 29 people in class, I am expecting that there were 29 different experiences. In the past, I’ve gotten some great insights from students – although, there is rarely a consensus on suggesting what should/shouldn’t change.

Thanks in advance!

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