Most of the feedback was positive, thanks for letting us know that we did a decent job this year. Many of you think this course was useful and helps you to move from learning the theory to applying it in practice. The individual "learning-by-doing" approach was given praise in some feedbacks. Many of you also gave positive feedback of using demos as a knowledge/skills evaluation method. We like it too, because it saves us (and you) a great deal of time.

As usual, the negative feedback also had its share. Thanks for bringing out the things you think do not work or were done badly on our part. Constructive feedback will definitely taken into account when we develop the course.

I'll now try to address some of the negative things I picked out from the feedback. Sometimes there's a reason for doing some things the way they were done. I'd also like to clear out a few things of how the things were done behind the curtains.

First I want to discuss the grading. As you might have noticed, it's really hard to do consistent grading when you have many course assistants receiving the demos. We used a fixed format evaluation sheet to record the information from the demos. However, the grade wasn't fixed when the demo ended. In order to try to keep the grading consistent, we had a meeting where we decided how the final points would be given. Obviously, the result isn't perfectly consistent, but a lot closer to it than without. We also tried to circulate the assistants between the rounds and rely on the fact that during many rounds you would be evaluated by many assistants. Coinciding weekly schedules, unfortunately, seem to lead to having a same assistant in many rounds. Similarly, fixed demo slots for everyone would lead to having the same assistant throughout the whole course.

One student commented that we didn't provide a way to easily discuss the assignments between the students and the course staff. This is partly not true, because we had the IRC channel available. However, IRC is supposed to be used as a real-time communication tool, and a non-real-time tool, such as a Web forum might be a better choice. The problem has been noticed already (I even wrote my Bachelor's thesis about this problem and finding better tools), but no resources have been allocated to solve this (yet). Hopefully, we'll someday have a tool that provides better staff-student and student-student communication.

Another issue we cannot change is the personalities of the course assistants. Some like to ask difficult questions (which didn't affect the grading, hopefully) to check you general knowledge, some are more talkative, and some of us are more "teacher-like" than others. What we could do next year is to emphasize the feedback in the demo. Short demo times are challenging for this, but let's see what we'll come up next year.

Then I'll address the course schedule. There were some complaints of the general schedule (biweekly demos and the distribution of slots during the week). However, that's the only way we can reasonably manage the course. The course assistants have to revise the assignments, and everybody doing the same assignment at the same time allows the assistant to concentrate on only one task. Some of you would even have liked to take all the demos at once, but we do not see how we could provide a fair grading for all students that way (more about the grading below). The weekly available times depend on the assistants (because of the reservation system), who are also students like you and have their own school stuff at the same time. In our opinion, holding demos and receptions when we have free time should provide enough appropriate slots, assuming that we provide enough slots.

The assignments were mostly seen as instructive and OK, but there's, naturally, always room for improvement. We haven't had any Microsoft-related assignments, and it's likely that we won't have them in the near future, either. Also, some of the assignments might have been a bit outdated. Hopefully we'll have enough resources next summer to update (at least the most troublesome of) them and, perhaps, find a better order of assignments to ensure compatibility for the ones done at the same time in the 10cr version.

Finally, some ideas about developing the course further for the next time. The virtual machine system requires some thought, because now fixing any problem with the machines (misconfiguration or otherwise) required course staff and sysadmin effort. Perhaps letting you fix your own problems would be easier/faster for everybody, and more educative, too. A more problem-based learning approach in the assignments is also in consideration. However, limited resources also affect what is done and what is not.

Thanks for participating, hopefully the course was educative and useful in your future career.

-- Course HTA