[TOS] Textbook -- feedback & 0.9 planning

Heidi Ellis heidijcellis at gmail.com
Wed Jun 16 11:44:13 UTC 2010


Hi Folks,

I think that providing faculty with a URL for comments is a good thing. I
had another thought which is that, in addition to providing feedback on the
text, students may also want to give hints to their fellow students or
provide additional resources. Would be good to provide a mechanism for this.
Some sort of commenting ability or even a forum, if we can find the
technical support for this.

Just my 2 cents.
Heidi 

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
[mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Karsten Wade
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2010 2:05 PM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: Re: [TOS] Textbook -- feedback & 0.9 planning

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 08:52:28AM -0400, Heidi Ellis wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> As for using the text in the classroom, the timing of the completion 
> of the text didn't align with the typical undergraduate teaching 
> schedule (not a complaint, merely an observation :-) ). Because of the 
> timing, I'm not sure that there are any faculty members who have used 
> the text throughout an entire term. So we might not get complete feedback
from classroom use.

Understood for certain.

We should probably expand the thinking, anyway, and include *any* input,
from either reading or using.

> The good news is that I know that there are at least three faculty 
> members at three different institutions (and possibly more) who are 
> planning on using the text in the fall. So we might get better 
> feedback after the fall semester.
> 
> Do we have a feedback mechanism for those who might want to comment on 
> their experiences?

We don't, especially for taking individual comments from students.
Should we cook something up?  Or is it better for instructors to handle that
and send results back to here?

I reckon that a deep introspection on the textbook is not normal for classes
:), yet this is a different, perhaps entirely new situation.
Putting the onus back on the instructor seems like it might not work out as
well.  Perhaps they'd be willing to pass on a URL to a comment collection
form?

Is there a more standard method for collecting such feedback that we derive
from?

In Red Hat classes, the instructor hosts a feedback form locally that
students use before they leave on the last day.  Are people doing things
like that in academics now?

- Karsten, who is happy his college was in the photocopy,
  post-mimeograph era.
--
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41




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