Lecturer Response to myExperience Survey

Overall

Thanks for the great scores! Looks like people enjoyed the course and appreciated the learning (despite the pain!) Although the turnout this year was disappointing, with fewer students participating than last year, despite enrolment being almost 50% higher...

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. And I definitely much appreciate the nice words being said about me personally.

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.

Workload

Very much understood, but it's part of what makes AOS what it is. And we're quite up-front about it, including publishing feedback uncensored.

Forum questions unanswered

Two take-aways from this:

1. We need to appoint someone to keep an eye on the forum to ensure no important/relevant questions are left unanswered;
2. We need better expectation management: Often questions on the forum require more discussion than is sensible there, and are more appropriate for the help sessions, and students shouldn't expect otherwise.

ACTION: Assign explicit responsibility for monitoring the forum.

More time in help sessions...

The Week-2 sessions were overrun and we allocated additional demonstrators. We monitored lab load throughout the session, including getting additional staff in on short notice where there was high demand. Unfortunately these things aren't always predictable, and we had the additional complication of both the LiC as well as the admin changing.
ACTION: Allocate more tutors in W2.

Final

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

Gernot