Evaluation
This is a tricky business.
As I see it, there are two reasons for gathering feedback. The first (and I am (as usual) being deliberately a little cynical here) is to create a pile of paper that sits in a drawer for QA purposes. The pile of paper demonstrates that "evaluation" has happened. The second purpose is to find out how the module has gone, and hopefully to gain ideas for the following sessions. This does not have to generate a large pile of paper.
For the first purpose I am provided with a "Module Evaluation Form". This gives the students the opportunity to rate such things as the audibility of the lecturer, the legibility of the slides, the difficulty of the material, and so on. I'm not at all convinced about some of these questions; I would like to think that I'd addressed "audibility" during the module rather than waiting ten weeks to be told! Still, at least passing these round generates the required pile of paper.
More usefully, I also ask the students to record on a separate sheet their answers to questions along the lines of:
- The best part of the module.
- The worst part of the module.
- The easiest part of the module.
- The hardest part of the module.
- Anything that they think should be left out next year.
- Anything that they think should be brought in next year.
- The advice they would give someone taking this module next year.
- Anything else they think I should know.
The precise questions can be modified if there were any pressing issues that arose during the module. The free-form nature of this approach actually forces (I hope) students to think about how the module has gone; it certainly requires them to do more than just tick "4" as a score for audibility!
I browse through these answers. They range from the banal to the truly incisive and useful. These form the basis for the module review that I am required to produce, and, where appropriate provide the motivations for any changes in future offerings of the module.
The small class size for PRF meant that a third different method of evaluation was possible. The students were all invited out to lunch, to chat about the experience. This was after the assessment, so they all knew how the module had gone for them.
On the whole, the students were pleased with how the module had gone. There were a reasonably heterogeneous group in terms of previous experience, so this is probably not too surprising. The module had certainly prepared them for the programming that they had been faced with in their other modules, so it fulfilled its purpose in the most important respect.
They were asked specifically about the use of two languages. They all felt that this had not been any hindrance; they had been able to start writing "proper" programs much sooner than they would have been had they started with Java. There had been few, if any, problems in moving on to Java. They particularly praised the way that Python allowed for experimentation with objects and classes; this had been a fine starting point for Java.
They recognised that they had been learning programming principles, and that the language had only been a framework within this was to be done. These principles were generally easier to understand using Python than Java, mainly because there was usually "less of it" to look at!