CS4301 Class Postmortem

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.

Students were required to store all of their project work on web pages which were linked to the home page.
The TA made copies of the original project plan and tracked updates to the schedule and to the deliverables on those pages.
Reviews consisted of assessing those deliverables for quality and progress. The deliverables were also assessed for adherence to the project schedule.
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.
Reviews also seemed to be useful for keeping project groups on track. Last minute work was spread out over time.
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.

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).
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.
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.
Consider a workshop for how to give a presentation - including speaking skills. This could be considered to be part of project management.

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.
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.
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.
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.