CS4301 Class Postmortem
Notes to Instructor
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This quarter - we adopted an interim review process. Rather than
a midterm review report, the students were reviewed on a weekly basis after
submission of their project plan.
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Students were required to store all of their project work on web pages
which were linked to the home page.
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The TA made copies of the original project plan and tracked updates to
the schedule and to the deliverables on those pages.
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Reviews consisted of assessing those deliverables for quality and progress.
The deliverables were also assessed for adherence to the project schedule.
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Students were given feedback on the direction of their deliverables.
This was especially useful for helping to keep them on track (except in
the cases where students chose to go off track anyways). They were
also notified to contact the TA in instances where they deviated significantly
from the schedule, stated goals, or in deliverable quality.
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Reviews also seemed to be useful for keeping project groups on track.
Last minute work was spread out over time.
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We stressed that the reviews were not grading them on the quality of the
content and only marginally on their ability to manage the project.
This was necessary to reassure students so that they would be less inclined
to use poor schedule management activities such as changing the dates and
deliverables to match what was done for that week. A small portion
of the final project grade (10%) was used towards the overall management
of the project, including scheduling.
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We also adopted homeworks as a way of reinforcing the class material.
Homeworks this quarter were designed to encourage students to reflect deeply
on the issues given in a particular lecture. We've discussed using
homeworks in lieu of a midterm as they may be a better learning assessment
tool. If so, they need to be designed into the syllabus and graded
with tighter guidelines than they were this quarter (the homeworks were
usually created on the fly by the TA during the lecture).
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One or two lectures were spent conducting simulated activities - conducting
an organizational chart from the class, for example. It may be useful
to encourage engagement with the material.
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4 out of the 5 projects concerned Real World Lab. We need to develop
better coordination procedures with the RWL manager as we had some group
and coordination problems appear during the quarter because we underestimated
the impact that these projects would have on the manager's time and the
time of the other RWL groups.
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Consider a workshop for how to give a presentation - including speaking
skills. This could be considered to be part of project management.
Notes to TA
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The grading documents below are in Microsoft Word 5.0 format. The
TA would, for some, type up the grades and responses in the document, print
them out and deliver them. The documents were designed to present
a level of formality in the class - we practice what we preach.
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Part of the TA's responsibilities in light of the review process is to
be the Project Supervisor - the one who monitors the project team.
In giving feedback, it's helpful to give a balanced view of what's good
about what they've done and what needs to be improved. It's also
important to have a relatively good feel for the project plan so that you
can assess where they are in the project and whether they're behind or
not. It's much better to catch these problems early.
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The Final Project Deliverable page
is a good example of how to specify the expectations of the class.
However, the checklists do encourage a literal interpretation of how the
deliverable should look, independent of what makes sense.
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The Final Presentation Grading Sheet wasn't that effective and needs to
be redone. Mainly, it's difficult to record the numbers during the
presentation. It may be better to reduce the number of criteria.
Grading Documents Used