– I got to know the concept of office hours this semester, seems a great idea. Just go there to ask the assistants your question. Right now exercise sessions are not (primarily) meant for question answering, and theres sometimes not much time, or you feel reluctant to keep the assistant busy. And with office hours you dont need to sit through a full exercise session just to ask something specific.

– Might be even better: The study center that the math and physics departments has introduced a while ago. Supervised exercise solving, meaning it`s like office hours, but in addition you can discuss excercises with peers there.
Office hours might be easier to do though.

Disclaimer: I haven`t made use of either of these, yet. But they seem super useful.

The content can also be released as open source. This allows other teachers from other institutions to also suggest changes and new content which can be accepted or rejected by the owner of the document. The changes are managed with git. In essence, it brings the open source world of software engineering, to teaching.

What this course teaches
Here, I have written an example of how this may look like. The course teaches students to develop their own building simulation tool using python. By doing so the student will learn
– How to program in Python
– Basic applied thermodynamics
– How to solve thermal circuits
– Basic mathematical integration
– How to build their own simulation tool

Benefits of this style of material
This course can be taught entirely without instruction. The software allows students to
– Comment directly on the lines of text where they are confused. The questions are gathered in a list that the teacher and other students can see
– Solve problems directly in the text with direct feedback. See the bottom of page 2
– Have inbuilt youtube videos so video instruction can be combined with the text
– Embed code which can be copied and pasted

In this example, the student should teach themselves without complementary lectures. But in principle, this could be expanded to lecture material.

Time taken
So far, this document has taken me 6 hours to create, including the figures and code. It is not yet complete

Issues
There are still some bugs in the program. For example, the equations do not show without the browser being refreshed. However, with some work, this style of lecture documentation can be quite useful.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

– Prageeth Jayathissa (PJ)

Inspired by the British universities where students often have small tutorials with professors or PhDs I would like to introduce similar sessions for the superconductivity course that I’m teaching next semester. Instead of giving a 1.5 hrs-long exercise class, I would meet groups of 3-4 students at a shorter 45 mins sessions. Students would receive individual feedback on their solutions, have chance to ask specific questions about the exercises or discuss course material. More informal atmosphere while sitting at a round table would encourage students to communicate with the teaching assistant, identify problems causing the most troubles and potentially discuss among each other.

I am planning to ask the course’s lecturer if he would be in favour of this idea. This would certainly require more time for me as a TA but would be manageable for our class size (~ 20 students expected).

I would be grateful for a feedback from bachelor and master students about what they frequently miss at their exercise classes and if this idea could improve their learning experience. At the same time, I may need more information about the administrative side: perhaps there are faculty regulations regarding the students’ contact time with the TAs – would this idea be in line with them?

Best,

Dario

A preparation would be helpful. I think about a short quiz or a problem sheet before each lecture. It should make clear where the problem of the topic is and what the aim of the lecture is. This quiz could be treated at home or in the first minutes in the lecture. The problem that is given in this sheet should be solved in the lecture/exercise class/online podcast or whatever.
And it supports creative thinking since the students made their own ideas about solving these problems before they learn it in the lectures.