E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Voor één van de vakken bij de opleiding Computer Science heeft de docent voor de projectbeschrijving gebruik gemaakt van een wiki. Het commentaar van de studenten hierop is:

Students would like to have a simple pdf-document they can print.

Gelukkig geeft de docent hier een uitstekende reactie op:

It is a simple website accessible by everyone on the internet.
It is also adjusted regularly in reply to student feedback to make assignments more clear and easier to understand. For example, just last week I had to add a note indicating that no essay was needed and students were only required to send me an e-mail. I did that after one group wrote an unnecessary essay!
The manual also contains links to video tutorials and web-lectures (for most assignments), and simply writing all the links in a PDF is impractical.

The students will need to make an account on the Wiki manual to use its comments and discussion features. We of course encourage this because we want to hear from our students. We know that e-mails are a known and trusted means of communication, but it should be clear to you how making all the questions about the course viewable to all students is more beneficial.
This Wiki portal also offers us (the instructors and not the students) RSS feeds that immediately inform us if there is a question or a comment posted on any page of the manual. This means that any of us can reply to the students in almost real time fashion.

Daarnaast moeten de studenten hun opdrachten inleveren via Google Docs ook hier waren ze niet blij mee. Het commentaar van de docent was het volgende:

We introduced Google-Docs for one main reasons, namely for its Collaborative Features.
Since most of the reports and documents in our course are going to be written by 4 members of a group, writing the report using MS-word is not practical. We know that from experience in previous years.
Google-Docs allows students to write on the same (online) file from multiple PCs even simultaneously. This makes it ideal for the type of work done in our course.

Het komt niet vaak voor dat de studenten klagen dat docenten te geavanceerde tools voor ze gebruiken. Dit verbaast me wel, zeker omdat het om informatica-studenten gaat, die bezig zijn met hun master.