Comments on our Bespoke Survey

I'm very pleased to see that all enrolled students completed the survey (bribing with a t-shirt may have helped ;-) This certainly provides valuable feedback.

General comments

The results mostly speak for themselves. The course seems to be in good shape, overall satisfaction was very high, some critical comments notwithstanding.

We are grateful for all the positive and encouraging comments, I won't discuss them, but be assured they are well received by the team! Let's look at the critical comments that address issues under our control (and changing which would not obviously be at odds with the overall objectives for the course). Also, I'm skipping comments that are already addressed in the myExperience response.

Blue font indicates concrete action items.

Q1: Quick evaluation

It's great to see that all people involved (individual lecturers as well as the class of tutors) have received 100% approval, with "excellent" dominating. It's pleasing ot see that their commitment is appreciated.

Q5: Enrolment

Workload

While I fully appreciate the high workload of the course, that is not something that has changed in recent years, so it should not affect enrolments.

Less known due to pandemic, problems finding partners

That a pandemic impact we hadn't thought about: Less of a student community results in less of a vibe. And this might have also impacted the partner problem. Let's hope this goes away for next year.

Q9: Worst things

odroid infrastructure crashing :p

We had comments about Odroid issues last year, although found it difficult to get them confirmed. We did improve the infrastructure to reboot the Odroid in the case of a kernel crash.
From what we can tell it's not an issue with the Odroids themselves being unreliable, but the server that connects to them. We have experienced that ourselves, but not yet in a reproducible fashion. We'll hopefully get this sorted for next year.

Vlab

Talking to people, it seems the best way to address this is to more strongly encourage students to work locally on their Linux machine. We'll consider a lab session in W1 for setting the environment up on a local machine.

Disorganisation with consults/marking

This was a comment with no specifics, and talking to the tutors it's not clear what issue(s) the student refers to. It's only been raised by a single student, so cannot be anything major.

Q17: What should be added?

More on monolithic kernels

Peter could give a whole course about Linux internals ;-)
However, in the light of other comments, I suspect the majority would not be interested. We did in the past have a lecture on macOS, but we don't have the knowledge in house any more.

Writing device drivers

I assume this refers to the project, not the lectures?
I agree it's a shame we don't do a real driver. Maybe with the new seL4 driver framework, which makes driver writing much easier, we can include it, needs further investigation.

Q18: What should be excluded?

No clear votes for anything specific, and the things mentioned are all topics that were popular with the majority of people. My take-away is that there's no strong argument for dropping any specific content.

Q3: Encouraging in-person attendance

First apologies for Q3-4 being in the wrong place in the survey, I've moved them to a more natural place in the results report and the discussion.

Chance to ask Gernot Questions after the lecture

I take this as indicating why the person did attend, rather than what would make them attend.

Milestone dates too close to lecture

I appreciate that problem. Unfortunately, with centralised time tabling they move the lectures to a different time every year, which makes it very hard to align project deadlines with them. If I had my choice I'd have the lectures on Mon and Tue or Wed...

Schedule labs before the lecture

The problem there is that the labs run over and people don't show up after all. They'd have to be well before the lecture, but see above. All we can do there is wait and see what lecture time Santa Time Tabling gives us...

Short section every lecture on milestone advice (not recorded).

I'll consider something like this, but feel that not recording it will lead to a rebellion, and it will be difficult to put a strict budget on it. We'll think about it.

Q22: On-line vs recorded where in-person is not possible

The vote here is pretty evenly split, so my take-away is that it doesn't really matter. Of course, we'll continue to strive to deliver “real” lectures.

Q23: Other comments on virtual lectures

Audio levelling was really bad...

I'm not sure what this refers to, as the legacy recordings were from four different sources (EduTech camera person, my self-recording, Kev's self-recording and Echo360). I'm pretty confident they wouldn't all have the same problems.

Q25: Difficulty of various parts

This looks reasonably balanced, although M5 sticks out as being hard. Prior to trimesters we could afford another week for that one...

Q26: How well specified?

This looks fine to me, given that we intentionally don't want to be too prescriptive.

Q27: Quality of...

Supplied code

I think you guys are generous ;-) We made some improvements this year, but are doing further improvements for next year. It should then hopefully be reasonable.

Hardware platform

Odroid issues were mentioned before.

Q31: Final Comments

Thanks again for the very nice words, they are a great encouragement for the whole team. I particularly liked that one:

this course was the most fun I never want to have again

;-)

Final

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

Gernot