> I really hate these type of questions. The open ended questions that is about myself is not something useful. Yes, it can be helpful for a professor, who cou

> I really hate these type of questions. The open ended questions that is about myself is not something useful. Yes, it can be helpful for a professor, who could see what is interesting for the audience and modify their lectures according to it. But I believe you underestimate usefulness of such exercises for students. It triggers them to reflect on themselves, why they are studying and what they want to achieve. It is useful as a general lesson on reflection, on consciousness, on active learning, but even more useful for this particular course. When you think of your goals, verbalize questions you hope to find answers for, then you direct your mind, your attention. You become more of an attentive and active learner instead of a passive one, who just listens and tries to remember as much as they can. One of the recommendations I heard about how to read a book, was "formulate a question that the book can answer, then read the book searching for the answer". I believe it helps. I struggle to read some books if they are not particularly interesting for me, if I'm reading them in a "fishing" mode: maybe I'll find something useful or at least interesting? But if I had read the title, the introduction, maybe some reviews, to understand what book talks about, if I had then selected questions to the book, and then read the book looking for answers, I have no issues with focusing my attention on reading. If my attention wanders, it does it to think about what I had just read, which is a good sign. Such reading mode guarantees that the time wouldn't be wasted. > They were forced to do it and they just did it for the grade. The purpose was to encourage communication and collaboration but in my experience this rarely work. People will just put bare minimum to just do this. Yeah, I know. It is sad. I took an undergraduate course at 35, I studied with people of 18-20, and most of them just trying to fulfill the formal requirements that needed for grades, without trying hard to see what happens. I ended with a small group of students who really tried. Even when we didn't understand the purpose of some exercise we tried hard, got some results (grades, yes, but not just them), and then speculated on what was the point of the exercise. Sometimes we asked professors about the point of the exercise. Most students started with speculating about the point of the exercise and when they didn't see any, they didn't really tried to do the exercise, they just chased grades with the minimum effort.