Survey 2018

The raw survey results are from the  myexperience survey this year (apologies for not having the usual detailed survey from previous years).

Here are my observations:

• Me leaving the course half way through was mentioned several times.

Me leaving was unavoidable and unexpected (my wife passed away from cancer in the middle of semester). I, more than anyone, wish I didn't have to leave.

My absence was not taken lightly by the school. The head of school, myself, and the most qualified candidate to take the lectures consulted early on and it was agreed that a replacement lecturer would not have been as good a standard as the video I had from previous years. So we decided to go with video until I returned, which was later than I expected. Third year courses usually have quite specialist content and lecturers are challenging to find.

The general satisfaction was still higher than the school, faculty, and UNSW average - actually it was one of only two large third year courses in the school with a satisfaction greater than 95%. So given the exceptional circumstances, the course ended up okay despite my limited direct involvement. I'm truly glad it worked out.

• Piazza is generally viewed positively

Piazza has the potential to be an awesome timely resource for support during the semester. Some of the positive aspects were touched on. For the negative aspects (duplicate questions and a lot of 'noise') I'll attempt to minimise them by publishing a Piazza etiquette guide at the start of term to encourage the positive aspects and avoid the negative.

• GIT versus SVN

This gets mentioned regularly. Yes, git is more relevant to learn, but SVN had a lower learning curve. However, given git's use in earlier courses at CSE and it's dominance over SVN, I'm switching to git for 2019!!!

• Trimesters will make it hard to retain the challenging assignments.

Yes they will :-( Here are some of the things I'm doing to retain the essence of the course.

• I'm releasing a the warmup before semester starts so students set up their environments prior to semester
• The warmup has more wiki-based guidance on getting set up
• I'm providing more guidance on using your own machine (which is more efficient than remote CSE usage.)
• The warmup is less exploratory and more focused on simply learning to build and submit and assignment.
• It's due earlier in the semester
• I'm changing the order of the lectures to move concurrency earlier so in course so the assignment can be started earlier.
• The first substantial assignment is done as an individual so can be started ASAP.
• I've remove some of the components of the later assignments, and aimed to remove common pitfalls that were good for learning, but potentially time consuming to get out of.
• Nearly everything will be revised in some way to fit into the trimester model while retaining the original essence of the course - at least that is my aim.
• I've removed some of the tangential support material
• The course material is restricted to the website (lectures, tutorials), wiki, piazza, and gitlab.