3 ms·

An interesting point. I don't really understand it, so please allow me a question. Is there anything you would find disagreeable or unfriendly about, e.g., the

An interesting point. I don't really understand it, so please allow me a question. Is there anything you would find disagreeable or unfriendly about, e.g., the following? http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/ http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/ To my way of thinking, this is obviously the way to present my course materials. Any friction points I'm not thinking of?

jkimmel 13y ago
Another student here with my two cents. Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly) Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. For all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates, announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep track of everything. TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of information acquisition from a student's perspective.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. It's worth noticing that this is a symptom of a much larger trend in academia: professors tend to be naturally siloed and need to put in effort for presenting themselves and discovering others' work. Journals seem to have some positive effect, but Elsevier seems to negate a lot of that effect. Contrast this with something like the open source community, with its registries of projects and package managers and the current (long-lasting) trend towards platforms and APIs. I think what I'm describing is what SCORM is supposed to be, but I've never actually used it, and I suspect SCORM is the XML of it. The "Yes, it does the job, but ohgodclunkymassivehugepain, save us Douglas Crockford, you're our only hope."
jkimmel 13y ago
Another student here with my two cents. Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly) Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. For all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates, announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep track of everything. TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of information acquisition from a student's perspective.
tylerritchie 13y ago
As a perspective from a biologist who was a student and took calc I'll give my impressions. First jkimmel's comment about keeping track of pages I never found to be the case. I can keep track of all of my course pages, that's easy. Okay, page impressions: - Homework downloadable, awesome. - practice exams, awesome - I'd grab both of the above a year/semester ahead of time or from a different professor, in case you were to remove them and then dole them out throughout the course - no downloadable notes, boo. But it's calc and I actually enjoyed the worked problems in the lectures so it's okay. - not on Blackboard, yay! - this means I can easily use DownThemAll! to grab all the links you have - also, I can check out your page, so I know what to expect - "[the text] has not changed since last year, so please feel free to buy a used version from an upperclassman." - Awesome - "We will use a custom edition of this book, available in the campus bookstore" - Not cool. - on Amazon.com that used text is available for $10 - The campus bookstore has it available starting at $173 - Especially since that text is 90% problems which could be randomly generated by a CAS given appropriate parameters for each section. The remaining 10% is good, but your lectures and math tutors are probably better. tl;dr:, I like your stand alone page, but I would be pretty upset about the textbook.

jkimmel 13y ago

Another student here with my two cents. Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly) Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. For all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates, announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep track of everything. TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of information acquisition from a student's perspective.

saraid216 13y ago
> Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. It's worth noticing that this is a symptom of a much larger trend in academia: professors tend to be naturally siloed and need to put in effort for presenting themselves and discovering others' work. Journals seem to have some positive effect, but Elsevier seems to negate a lot of that effect. Contrast this with something like the open source community, with its registries of projects and package managers and the current (long-lasting) trend towards platforms and APIs. I think what I'm describing is what SCORM is supposed to be, but I've never actually used it, and I suspect SCORM is the XML of it. The "Yes, it does the job, but ohgodclunkymassivehugepain, save us Douglas Crockford, you're our only hope."

jkimmel 13y ago

tylerritchie 13y ago

As a perspective from a biologist who was a student and took calc I'll give my impressions. First jkimmel's comment about keeping track of pages I never found to be the case. I can keep track of all of my course pages, that's easy. Okay, page impressions: - Homework downloadable, awesome. - practice exams, awesome - I'd grab both of the above a year/semester ahead of time or from a different professor, in case you were to remove them and then dole them out throughout the course - no downloadable notes, boo. But it's calc and I actually enjoyed the worked problems in the lectures so it's okay. - not on Blackboard, yay! - this means I can easily use DownThemAll! to grab all the links you have - also, I can check out your page, so I know what to expect - "[the text] has not changed since last year, so please feel free to buy a used version from an upperclassman." - Awesome - "We will use a custom edition of this book, available in the campus bookstore" - Not cool. - on Amazon.com that used text is available for $10 - The campus bookstore has it available starting at $173 - Especially since that text is 90% problems which could be randomly generated by a CAS given appropriate parameters for each section. The remaining 10% is good, but your lectures and math tutors are probably better. tl;dr:, I like your stand alone page, but I would be pretty upset about the textbook.