End of Course Letter

Overall, this course ran well, but I want to make some adjustments. My thoughts and proposed reflections are given below.

Lectures

These lectures were less interactive than my usual style. I think adding small exploration exercises and 1 question quizzes to check understanding in class would help improve engagement and learning. Also, the class notes should link to a wider range of supporting resources beyond the Fundamentals of Numerical Computation book.

Quizzes

The general strategy here was to pick 2 questions from the question bank and create 1 open ended question. The open ended questions I found to be particularly effective at exploring core intuition of course concepts.

Assignments

Overall the assignments went well. However, the Krylov assignment felt too similar to the Othrogonal Polynomial assignment. The Krylov assignment should be updated to differentiate it from the Orthogonal Polynomial assignment. The Orthogonoal Polynomial assignment needs an exploration section.

Project

Some students expressed a desire for more clear guidelines on exactly what the project presentations should cover; though this would constrain exploration, which is the intended purpose of the projects.

I think the group projects went well, but the individual projects could have gone better. Specifically, sharing of the individual project presentations was not as widespread as I wanted to see. Perhaps there needs to be a “comment on two projects” phase?

Journal and Goals

I think this was the weakest part of the implementation of the course, specifically due to not enough feedback from course staff to encourage regular usage of the journal and goals. Specifically, I should include the expectation of journal updates every week, with an explicit section for reflection upon course progress.

The goals seemed to be the portion that had the most confusion. Perhaps switching the goals to be 1 for the current block and 2 for the current week would help the students appropriately scope the activity.

Finally, I think that checking in with the student goals and journals at the end of the bock would help improve the overall feedback loop and encourage the students to be more regular with these activities.

Grade Interviews

This was the most valuable addition from my previous courses I have run, in my opinion. I appreciate the students trusting the process. The students who used the journal the most seemed to have the best overall assessment of their learning outcomes and process itself.

I think a midterm self assessment, including an analysis of what the student believes they should “start, stop, and continue”, with the student proposing a midterm grade to themselves, would be valuable. In this process, the course staff would comment on the student’s reflections but not the proposed grade.

Ultimately, this course experience helped me see first hand what the literature and research says about alternative assessment schemes and ungrading. In the face of proliferation of LLM tools that hurt student outcomes and learning, focusing on the human interactions with communication and feedback seems to be right way to design courses to facilitate student understanding.