Preparation for a new term

Am I alone in thinking that preparing for a new term featuring modules that have prerequisite material clearly includes revising the old material? Judging from the lack of prior knowledge from some students in my practical lab this afternoon it's not an obvious thing to do! What do they expect? To be taught the same stuff every year for three years? <groan>

Starting as I mean to go on

1^st lecture of the new term today for my Web Technologies module. I tried a novel (insane?) trick today that I'd been toying with last year but hadn't got around to: After the break, when the talking began to increase and the first mobile phone rang I stopped talking and wandered up to the young lady whose phone was ringing, asked if I could borrow it and (without doing-so) pulled out of my pocket another phone that I'd bought off eBay for the purpose (�2 well spent!) I then threw my phone towards the front of the lecture theatre where it smashed apart with a loud crash. <grin> it had shock value if nothing else (& I was careful to lob it over the heads of the class and check that no-one was near the crash site. Probably a health and safety violation all the same...) I've no idea if my subsequent plea to turn off mobile phones will have more weight this year (or have I just inadvertently challenged the class to disobey?!) but they seemed attentive for the latter half of the 2 hour lecture period, which is unusual in itself. Now what to do next week?

Wasting a day on management bull

The new term starts next week so it's rather busy at work. Apparently that means it's also the perfect time for management to decide we need a team-building event with the school we'll be merging with in a year's time! So myself and fifty members of academic, admin and technical staff spent today considering the journey metaphor as a means to coping with the merger ... madness! We apparently surprised the hired management consultant with our cynicism and could have achieved a similar level of networking over morning coffee or evening beer, either of which would have saved money, time and effort all round. Ho hum...

New voices in my head

Got an MP3 player? (Mmmm ... iPod!) Get some inspiration from IT Conversations.

Currently marking and listening to...

I'm currently marking Web Technologies resit coursework :-( and listening to the rather excellent Finnish metal band Nightwish ... oh for sound-proof offices and a big hi-fi :->

Hellboy

What can I say? <grin> good fun, no idea if it's faithful to the comics, but pretty cool, Hellboy makeup/CGI is excellent and Selma Blair is rather cute!

Resit test day

Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic... In fact today's the day that the students who failed the module not too egregiously get a 2^nd chance to pass (with their mark capped at 40%/D-) and (I hope) the CBT will be no picnic <grin> ... after-all, this one test + some Web Tech. exercises substitute for a whole module's assessment! It has to be tough to be fair to those who passed at the 1^st attempt. So the work deadline was mid-day and the test is at 2.30pm and the whingeing has started:

• I only just failed last time (got between 30 and 35%) so can you be lenient this time? [Ha! No favouritism ... if you deserve to pass, then you'll pass!]
• My computer got infected with a virus and after a few days it stopped working so I lost my work. [What? No backup after three days?!] Rather than fix the virus I've bought a new machine [!] so I can do the work now ... in fact it's nearly done, oh, but it's at home so I can't give it to you yet. Can I email it to you on Monday for no penalty?
• Can I do my test in the earlier slot rather than the one you scheduled me for as I {have a Halifax appointment, am off on holiday}? [As it turns out the Halifax guy turned-up at the correct time despite claiming Halifax could not reschedule his appointment ... was he lying?]

Update: Surprisingly the recently-upgraded Blackboard v6.1 system worked very well for my 40-strong test subjects (none of the oft-repeated problems...) so kudos to our ETU for finally getting an upgrade worthy of the name!

How many hours do students put in?

I love reading other lecturer's blogs -- it's the shared experience, I suppose. However I've been "off blog" for over a month and missed jill's post about student feedback questionnaires. For comparison, my modules are ¼ of a semester so maybe students should expect to spend 9 hours per week ... my University suggests something like 13 hours (maybe we have a longer working week <grin>) Feedback for my two modules is as follows:

Answers to survey question "On average, I spent the following hours per week on independent study for this module"

Hours	Web Technologies	Databases and the Web
Over 10	10%	7%
7 to 10	17%	30%
4 to 6	39%	52%
1 to 3	29%	11%
None	0%	0%
No response	5%	0%
Responses:	76	27

Independent Study is in addition to the 4 hours per week of lecture and lab sessions. So, like Jill, there are two students putting in more than the equivalent of a full working week on the 3^rd year module and 8 on the 2^nd year module -- well done them! The module evaluation questionnaire is anonymous (I suspect like Jill's) which is a good and bad thing in some ways ... it would be interesting to know whether the extra hours have a positive benefit and also how truthful the students are in their self-evaluation! (E.g. their attendance rates usually seem to be higher than my records ... even with their friends signing them in.)