In the hopes of improving this awesome and unique class experience for others, I have a few improvements for Professor Lavian's consideration. I'd like to start off with stating each of these are only reflective of my own personal opinions on how I believe the course could be improved.
More guidance and less quantity on comment criteria
I feel the comments were one of the most useful parts of Social Learning, as they forced us to evaluate each blog for points of recognition and critique. However often times such points cannot be summarized in a 4 sentence long quote, and I would've appreciate a lesser number of quotes in order to spend more time quality on each one. Also it would've been helpful if a good quote or bad quote example was given in the beginning of the course, as the GSI continually stressed the important of quality comments without giving us definition of said comment.
Variety of Topics across Youtube and Blog
I really enjoyed both speaking and writing my thoughts about different topics during the course. However I feel writing both a blog AND a Youtube video started to become redundant with many videos simply reading off their blogs as a script. I would recommend instead that both the video and blog post be utilized, but allow for some digression in types of topics to address. I found Youtube videos were much more effective in expressing my personal opinion on topics and my reaction to points made in class, while blog posts were more effective in conveying facts and explaining concepts.
Post Weekly Assignments Earlier
Often times the homework assign would require extensive research, understanding, or internal comprehension which is quite time consuming in its own sense. If the assignments were posted earlier, I feel it would've given the students more time to conduct their research on the topic as well as address the homework while it was still fresh in their heads. Expanding the deadline to Sunday night instead of Friday night would also have the same benefits in my opinion. A regular checkup on students to inform them of any missing assignemtns would have also been most helpful, particulary in my own case.
Good work in not only addressing the benefits of using social media in learning, but also how the experience could have been improved. Though I loved the openness and ambiguity of the assignments, I, too, would have liked a little more direction and focus in the work. That being said, I still feel like I greatly benefited from this course and everyone involved. So for that, thank you to you Chris as well as everyone else in making my experience with Tal and IEOR 190G a great one. Great work!
ReplyDeleteGrat post Chris. You made some great suggestions to further improve this course through the use of social media. I think that the comment load was a little heavy too because sometimes I would run out of things to talk about. A variety of topics would also be helpful so we could learn about all types of real world examples from week to week. Also, I like the suggestion to post the assignments earlier, but I know a lot of students wouldn't have started earlier even if the assignment was posted sooner.
ReplyDeleteHi Chris,
ReplyDeleteI agree with all three of your points here! With regards to quality vs. quantity on the comments, I agree that it may have been helpful for all of us to maybe focus on writing a few helpful comments as opposed to several less helpful comments. I think that this same mentality could have been applied to the blog posts. However, I have to say that Professor Lavian did give us a lot of time to make up these assignments, no matter how long it took to do them. In that sense, I think that it was very feasible to write good quality comments and posts, given that our time frame was indefinite. However, I do see your point!
With regards to the content of the blog posts vs. the YouTube videos, I definitely agree that most of us found ourselves reading the blogs instead of coming up with original content for the video. This certainly resulted in redundancies that didn't add much value to the course. Maybe some more specific guidelines for the videos vs. the posts would have been beneficial. Great point!
With regards to posting the assignments earlier in the week, I would agree that would be helpful as well. But like I said, we had plenty of time to make it up!
Sincerely,
Mo Jomaa
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading through your feedback on how the course could be improved, and I must say that I agree with the points you bring up. It would be helpful to the students if we had some metric for success - feedback along the way throughout the semester would have helped us gauge whether or not we are doing well. I also agree that the Blogs and Youtube videos tended to become redundant. I think the purpose here was to coordinate and evaluate our thoughts through the blogs and then verbalize those thoughts through the video. This could be worked on for better execution in the classroom.
Sasha
Hi Chris! Great points! I like how you separated your blog posts into 3 different categories, making it really easy for readers to follow. I think by bolding your titles really make them stand out. Other than that, I really agree on your point about having more guidance and less quantity on comment criteria for this class. I actually talked about this in my own blog post. I personally think it is much better for the class if students can focus on writing one really meaningful post rather than writing four mediocre posts. If other professors are interested in implementing this method to teach their classes, I definitely think they should take this into consideration. Another problem I see with our current system is that for students to comment on eight very similar blog posts is pretty redundant. If professors are not interested in decreasing the homework count, perhaps they can encourage assignments that require external research. This way students can write blog posts on topics they are actually interested in, making blog posts diverse and interesting. These are just some of my ideas, let me know if you agree with them!
ReplyDelete