Course evaluation results

Overview

Of the twenty-some participants in the Computational Software Engineering course, nineteen filled out the course evaluation. Of these all but two reported that their course expectations were "met" or "nearly met". Given that the course was given for the first time, and that the timing of the course was such that it was difficult to coordinate teaching activities, I think we can be happy with this result.

But after the course expectations, there was a wide variance in the responses. While all but one agreed or strongly agreed the instructors displayed good knowledge of the subjects, five were "neutral" on whether they were well prepared, and one "strongly disagreed". Frankly, knowing my own lack of time to prepare, I find this ambivalence justified. And yet, five said they "strongly agreed" that the instructors were well-prepared. The teaching speed was "too fast" for a quarter, "too slow" for a quarter, and "just right" for the rest.

The quality of the course material was generally considered ("good") but the quality of the hands-on sessions was felt to be significantly lower (seven "fair", four "poor" and one "very poor"). It is clear that the hands-on sessions need to be redesigned for any future

A key theme of the course was that participants felt the Software Engineering was not of central interest, and several mentioned that they specifically had wanted a two-week summer school concentrating only on parallel programming, in particular MPI:

Q13: What additional training should CSCS offer?

A 2 week course exclusively on MPI, and not on tools (cmake or math or shallow water equations).

Thus, while this summer school component itself got a relatively good mark, six reported that the course relevance to them was only "fair", two "poor" and one "very poor". My conclusion is that this component should not be part of a summer school, but it should be a standalone course for those who are specifically interested in Software Engineering issues. Indeed, it is not planned as part of Summer School 2014.

While the course organization and logistics applies to the summer school as a whole and is not really a topic here, it is worth mentioning that the participants complained that the course schedule was distributed fair too late, and that the venue was uncomfortable (non-functioning air-conditioning).

Interesting comments

Very good and enthusiastic lecturers. Possible improvements: - The last block of the day (1530-1700) I would always use for some hands-on session, because the end of the day is just not a time of peak concentration. The session on C++ could have been interactive if students were asked to study the manual that we went through before the course. This would not have taken too much time, and then we would definitely have gotten more out of it. Because just watching at some lines at code is not the same as actually trying to run them.