- #1
bigfooted
Gold Member
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I recently was asked to create some new exercises for a course that are more suited for online learning. It is a grad-level course and involves working in an online environment (jupyter) and doing some exercises on specific physics concepts using python. They were given working examples that they then had to modify for the assignment. Knowing python was not a prerequisite so the exercises did not rely on fancy programming techniques. Usually it was a matter of changing the numbers, change some input file, plot the same stuff for more conditions, and thinking about what kind of information to put in the figures.
The prof/main lecturer for the course did not have python experience and he made the exercises in 2 hours. We thought it would take students approximately 10 hours. They spent over 20 hours on it.
What is your experience with estimating the time it takes student to make an assignment? We thought that a factor of 5 compared to us making the assignment was sufficient, but apparently they needed much more time.
I think in retrospect we underestimated the pre-existing knowledge of students, but also their inability to efficiently google things they do not know. Another aspect is that even though there was a chat in which they could always ask questions, this was hardly used and nobody indicated that they were spending too much time on the exercises until it was time to hand everything in and they were not finished.
The prof/main lecturer for the course did not have python experience and he made the exercises in 2 hours. We thought it would take students approximately 10 hours. They spent over 20 hours on it.
What is your experience with estimating the time it takes student to make an assignment? We thought that a factor of 5 compared to us making the assignment was sufficient, but apparently they needed much more time.
I think in retrospect we underestimated the pre-existing knowledge of students, but also their inability to efficiently google things they do not know. Another aspect is that even though there was a chat in which they could always ask questions, this was hardly used and nobody indicated that they were spending too much time on the exercises until it was time to hand everything in and they were not finished.