Weeknotes 2024 week 7

Course prep

This week was the start of the large enrollment BSc course I’m teaching at ME this quarter (‘Integrated Mechanical Systems’). It includes a project that ends with a written report. In discussions beforehand, a colleague said we really can’t assess learning goals in the area of general analysis and evaluative, critical thinking with a report anymore, what with ChatGPT and all. But after the experience of administering the group formation for hundreds of students, I think we should realize that we were never able to adequately teach those sorts of things simply do to the number of students, the fact that we’re forced to make it a group project because of those numbers, and the very limited time we have to engage in actual discussion with students.

I played around with redesigning my personal homepage (bobvanvliet.nl). More and more often I wish I had a central online repository of my stuff to point people to. Ended up going with a barebones block of text for the time being, after also sketching out some more fun stuff (see below). Took too much work to make responsive, though, so I opted for just getting something out beyond just an email address (which was what I had before). I would like to find the time to prepare and publish more of my educational materials for reuse by others.