Survey 2019


I used survey monkey for this year's survey. Here is a PDF of the results.

 Thanks again for all your feedback, it is much appreciated.

Here are my overall observations:

I tried the following changes, which seemed to mostly work. Though  some further tuning is required and students did not really get started until week 2.

Part of the feedback was inability to cover all the questions - this was true in 12 (and 14) week semesters. The aim is to select based on demand/interest/need. I'll provide more guidance in 2020.

The etiquette guide seems to have reduced the noise a little this year, I'll point it out more explicitly.

I've contacted piazza with some suggestion on search improvements. They seem to be responsive and have made some changes to improve the search functionality.

I'll provide some guidance on reducing Piazza's spammy-ness.

It seems my videos are still positively viewed and are sufficient for most with roughly an even split between "lecture to fast" and "lecture to slow". I guess the downside is that I lose these students from the auditorium.

I'll see if Camtasia can be tweaked to have keyboard shortcuts which seems to be the most common feedback. I'll provide some guidance on downloading mp4s and the table of contents which some students seems to have missed being available.

The benefit of my videos over echo360 is reducing, so I'll keep doing them in 2020. I may make echo360 available in parallel.
It's a little concerning that about 20% of the cohort skipped the assignment prep tutorials.

The early bonus from past years to motivate starting early did not work as fairly under the tighter timelines (though they were not that much tighter). I'll look at how best to improve the fairness.

VScode was a surprising winner among editor choices, it positively dominated. It makes more sense to provide some more guidance on its use.

I'll switch to HTTPS for gitlab access to avoid UNSW firewall issues.