Panlab: Brewing IDEAS

please check all of your most concern, and you can give more details by replying to this topic anonymously. thanks a lot in advance too

I am not the strongest typer and am used to taking all my tests on paper, so switching the online tests severely impacted my test scores. Ran out of time on both online tests.

I have never wanted to be an online student.
Setting my own pace, and schedule for a school/work/personal life balance is very difficult.

Class went entirely asynchronous so there's no sense of community, just spend time watching youtube videos. Class doesn't have a chatroom either. I see my other profs being tempted into pre-recording lectures more and more because its easier, but I don't think the student experience is good.

Difficulty focusing during lectures and midterms. Huge imbalance in load between courses. I don't think every professor takes into account how many additional steps there are to working on projects remotely (ie setting up meetings, accessing the VPN, setting up an environment on a laptop that can't really handle it).
I also personally find zoom/blackboard meetings/lectures much more draining than in person and some days I have back to back lectures, meetings, and labs without being to get away from it to walk across campus.
It also makes it much harder to connect with other students if you didn't know them ahead of time. While I know it might be complicated to implement, some sort of voluntary chat room, even a slack link, would be helpful for students to work together.

Not being able to talk to the professor in person after lecture for clarification is something that I think a lot of students will miss. Having virtual office hours is a band-aid fix at best, but it will have to do. If you or the TA's are able to respond to more specific questions via email or connex that would be very helpful!

A Slack channel for the students would be nice to have.

Challenges：1. Unreliable network links, 2. Harder for collaboration

Guest wrote:

I am not the strongest typer and am used to taking all my tests on paper, so switching the online tests severely impacted my test scores. Ran out of time on both online tests.

thanks for the feedback. we will have a written assignment (w1) in advance of the first midterm (m1) so can time better

User wrote:

I have never wanted to be an online student. Setting my own pace, and schedule for a school/work/personal life balance is very difficult.

time management is not easy---used to be a skill to master in grad programs http://tinyurl.com/panf11 and now everyone has to do it well with online learning

Guest wrote:

Class went entirely asynchronous so there's no sense of community, just spend time watching youtube videos. Class doesn't have a chatroom either. I see my other profs being tempted into pre-recording lectures more and more because its easier, but I don't think the student experience is good.

sync vs async each has its pros and cons. we will try to leverage both well to facilitate the interaction between/among students and the teaching team

Guest wrote:

Difficulty focusing during lectures and midterms. Huge imbalance in load between courses. I don't think every professor takes into account how many additional steps there are to working on projects remotely (ie setting up meetings, accessing the VPN, setting up an environment on a laptop that can't really handle it). I also personally find zoom/blackboard meetings/lectures much more draining than in person and some days I have back to back lectures, meetings, and labs without being to get away from it to walk across campus. It also makes it much harder to connect with other students if you didn't know them ahead of time. While I know it might be complicated to implement, some sort of voluntary chat room, even a slack link, would be helpful for students to work together.

we will have a chat room, although not necessarily by slack due to the data/storage location issue, to activate students interaction too

Guest wrote:

Not being able to talk to the professor in person after lecture for clarification is something that I think a lot of students will miss. Having virtual office hours is a band-aid fix at best, but it will have to do. If you or the TA's are able to respond to more specific questions via email or connex that would be very helpful! A Slack channel for the students would be nice to have.

we will have online office hours and a lot of q&a during and after lectures as well

liukaiyang wrote:

Challenges：1. Unreliable network links, 2. Harder for collaboration

http://tinyurl.com/tfhnsp can help and network to collaborate