What I learned from my students' projects

This is a follow-up post to the one where I asked for people to take my students' surveys last term. I had hoped to write it right after they submitted their projects, but the great marking monster swallowed all my time last term. So, the first think I learned, don't make 2 major projects due days before the final exam. You'll spend all your waking hours marking. And, to me, the worst part of teaching is marking.

Anyhow, what did I learn? Maybe I should start with what did they learn?

Some of the students let their survey respondents fill in answers. You know, free-form text. They learned this is a very bad plan. If you let someone write in their choice of university, you'll get answers like:

• Loyola
• Loyola University
• Loyola University Maryland
• MIT
• UofA
• U Alberta
• ...

A couple of problems that become obvious when you see all the data - there can be many ways of referring to the same school (not including the typos), and some of the names are a bit ambiguous. There is more than one school called Loyola (although in the context, it's pretty safe to guess everyone meant Loyola University Maryland). And, there is more than one school with the abbreviation UofA (U. Alberta, U. Arizona...others?). So, disambiguation becomes a bit of a nuisance - and they had to clean their data if they wanted to use it.

The second problem? Well, where do you stop? They lost control of what schools they would need to look up information about. So, a better approach is to identify the schools you're interested in comparing and then giving your survey respondents a list to choose from. If you really want, you can have an "other" category, but then that becomes different information for you to consider.

In the reports that students wrote, this free-form text issue was the number 1 problem they identified.

Now, for me, what did I learn? One thing I didn't learn was the free-form text problem. I actually left that one out for them to discover. Nothing teaches like experience.

• I (re)learned that technology is unpredictable - you think you have the possible problems sorted out, but that's just because you haven't tried enough things yet. 
• Sometimes what we intend isn't what the student hears.
• Everyone leaves things to the last minute. Yep, I was marking things as late as I could just as many students were clearly writing things as late as they could. 
• My instructions really need to be simplified.

The last point is the one I'm working on this term. Even as I'm piling on the technology - new tools to try to help with collaboration and communication. We'll see how things go.