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Lecturer Response to myExperience Survey

Overall

Thanks for the great scores! Looks like people enjoyed the course and appreciated the learning (despite the pain!)

Free-form comments

We love reading all those comments on the best things about the course. They line up well with what we're aiming to achieve, and it's great to see students appreciating them.

Having said that, we're also grateful for the critical comments, they help us keeping the quality high. I'm not going to address every single one, but will comment on the common themes.

More/longer lab sessions

We did schedule more than twice as many lab slots as last year, and did not receive feedback from demonstrators about a lack of labs during the term. However, this comment was made repeatedly, so we explicitly followed up with tutors.
The ones we talked to did not experience overfull labs. However, many students would walk in towards the end of the lab period and expected to get marked, and the tutors ran out of time. We had very specifically directed the tutors to not go overtime, but close the shop at the end of the hour. It would really be unfair to expect them to do otherwise.
So, based on that feedback, we can only conclude that the lab times were sufficient, but some students had unreasonable expectations.

Video walkthrough of milestones

This is one of the places where COMP9242 is “advanced”: we place great emphasis on students working things out for themselves.

Draft final report, more warning

See above. The due dates are well known since the beginning of the course.
TODO for next year: Add warning that the report is significant work.

Reduce M7 penalty

While we sympathise with this request, we arguably already bend the university's rules on late penalties in favour of late submissions. We can't go any further than that, sorry.

Requiring Posix is sad

Philosophically we fully agree!
But Posix, for all its failures, at least gives you clear guidance. Doing a proper cap-based OS would make the project even more challenging, so we don't think that's an option.
Having said that, we do have such a project, and it's very researchy. If you're interested, come back to do your thesis on this project!

Present alternative OS designs

Fair point, would have to push out some other material instead.
TODO for next year: Consider adopting this suggestion.

Codebase issues, local setup

We thought we ironed (almost) all of them out.
There is a narrow set of tool versions which work for all the various bits involved, some of the older than what is in standard distros.
Ideally things would work with recent toolchain versions, but reality is different. We installed the most recent compliant version of gcc in the class account and instructed students to use those. It seems that many students instead used the default version that comes with their distro, and ran into problems.
This isn't easy to solve, and the best we can do is to tell people to follow instructions...

How interact with seL4?

Hmm, this is pretty much the content of the Week-1 lectures, and the ample code examples (both in lectures as well as the supplied code), plus the help sessions. We're unsure what's missing here, more detail would help.

Specs vague, show-stoppers unclear

A degree of vagueness is intentional, to give you freedom with the design, and encourage independence (as opposed to hand-holding). However, it is clear that a significant number of demos were show-stopped, and we should avoid that.
TODO: Revisit show-stoppers and provide preventative spec improvements.

Non-issues

Looking back at the issues raised last year, it is good to see that there is almost zero overlap with this year's list. This means that we seem to have successfully addressed the following issues raised last year:

• Ed forum dead
• Specific issues with some milestone specs
• Inconsistent feedback/assessment by lab demonstrators
• Odroid reliability

The one exception is on lab times and availability of help, despite keeping our eyes on this. See above for our comments.

Final

Thanks for the feedback, and your participation in the course!

Gernot