Mid-Semester Feedback

Responses

Please rate your agreement with the following statements:

In the table, the numbers in parentheses following each statement indicate the total number of responses.

Statement	Responses
The learning objectives for each lesson help me learn more effectively. (26)
Graded events cover the learning objectives identified for each lesson. (26)
I complete all the learning activities for each lesson (i.e., those listed in “How to Complete this Lesson”). (26)
Listing long-term assignments (e.g., programming exercises and project deliverables) in the learning activities for each lesson is essential for me to complete them on time. (25)
I receive timely feedback from the instructor. (26)
Feedback from the instructor helps me to improve. (26)
I prefer a course with synchronous class meetings to an asynchronous course. (26)

SQL Resources

In the table, the numbers in parentheses following each resource indicate the total number of responses.

Resource	Responses
Synchronous Class Meetings (25)
Select Star SQL (11)
SQL Bolt (7)
SQLCourse / SQLCourse2 (11)
W3Schools SQL Tutorial (20)

What is going well in this course?
- Having worksheets or other resources to practice learning objectives and the languages helps a lot.
- In-class review, the SQL PEX helped me learn a lot, but I should have done the SQL Practice Assessment first, because I was SQL-ing way more than I needed to.
- Lessons line up well with objectives. I also like that the objectives are posted in advance, as these are what I use to structure my reading/class notes.
- The homework assignments are helping me the most in this course
- Content and all.
- The I feel adequately prepared for graded events, including projects/GR, due to our assignments.
- I really enjoy the “programming” assignments we have had to SQL and now HTML and CSS. They are useful to allow me to learn the material and I genuinely enjoy working on them
- The database project is really cool
- The pace seems to be a little rushed, but overall I think it is all going well.
- In class examples and lectures.
- The synchronous class aspect is very helpful. I also think the in class examples are very useful and help me understand the topic much better
- This class has made the learning objectives clear and laid out a nice easy to follow schedule.
- I really appreciate the quizzes. They keep me accountable for learning what’s important, but importantly, they let me know what I make mistakes with, and I can reference them when studying.
- I really like how class meetings are structured, using the whiteboard and going through examples.
- I think the links are typically pretty helpful.
- Doing lots of examples for sql helped a lot. Practice GRs are also very beneficial.
- I think I have a good grasp of the material.
- In class exercises
- The synchronous class lessons and assessments/projects are working well for my learning.
- I enjoy the projects, I believe they’re great for solidifying an understanding of the material
- Synchronous classes are extremely well organized and helpful in learning the material, probably the best way I learn. This class very good to me.
- Examples in class
How could this course be improved?
- Having comments for our grades for the project in canvas or another format that is not in the file that was submitted would help me review the feedback and apply it better.
- More insight on what graded events (GRs, Quizzes, etc.) will look like. The more examples (in-class or provided), the merrier and easier to understand the concepts in different potential scenarios.
- Quizzes are a grade tanker. In the beginning of the semester, we were told, “If there was a course where you could get away with cutting corners with the reading, it would be this one.” With that, I expected the course to be pretty easy. However, it is one of my lowest grades… Please consider removing the time limit from quizzes.
- Doing great already
- I feel like the difficulty on some of the early quizzes could have been a bit lower as we are often just learning a concept when we take the quiz.
- I am not sure if this is a thing, but if you would be able to post your whiteboard pages to the teams page because it might be easier to look for that than have to scroll through the old videos to find what I need.
- Some form of extra credit or ways to re-take quizzes as I have lmk had very little luck on the quizzes even on days that I thoroughly complete the lesson outline/reading
- If there is any way that the Canvas assignment submissions and quizzes could be transferred to the course website in the future that would be the most beneficial thing.
- Maybe sending out the SQL code, or posting screenshots of the Microsoft whiteboard with the examples we did in class to the course website so we have something to refer back to other than the in class recording. This would make it more efficient than having to go through the 40+ minute video and finding what we need.
- I think the course is going well so far.
- More step by step examples. If there isn’t time in class to do more then it would be nice for them to be posted after class.
- I think this class is being done really well, but I wouldn’t complain about in-person lectures.
- N/A
- The textbook is pretty meh. I appreciate that it’s a later edition so it’s inexpensive but it doesn’t feel well suited for this course.
- More practice materials where we can check our work.
- This is already happening but I really like the practice tests since they give me a really good idea of what I need to study!
- More focused learning activites. +2hr of learning activites outside of class each lesson is not going to happen, with 6 classes that’s 6 hours of hw every day.
- None.
- N/A
- I feel the quizzes being both closed note and timed are detrimental to measurement of learning. I feel closed note but not timed allows us to really think of what we know (or don’t) and reach deep to find it and thus helps learning. In contrast, the time limit occasionally forces you to skip a question or guess it and then go back and find it in your notes, but without the nice serotonin reward of implementing the solution/getting it right, only a little frustration like dang I coulda had that. I do get if they are to understand the timeframe of a GR but even so, if we find we use a lot of time on a single question on the quiz we still find out how that would not be ideal on a GR and we need to study it more.

Comments

An immediate takeaway is that many of you are relying on synchronous class meetings to cover the course material, which is reflected by the number of individuals who don’t complete all the learning activities and the resources used to learn the Structured Query Language (SQL). While I understand the sentiment expressed in one comment (“More focused learning activites [sic]. +2hr of learning activites [sic] outside of class each lesson is not going to happen”), this course is worth 3 credit hours, which means that there should be approximately 3 hours of learning activities for each lesson. I am glad, though, that most appear to find the synchronous class meetings valuable.

I will be making a few immediate changes based on this feedback:

The time limit will be increased to 30 minutes for all future quizzes.
I will post my “whiteboard” at the end of each lesson so that you can refer to it rather than trying to re-watch the recording of the synchronous session.

Both of these are great suggestions for a synchronous online course that I didn’t consider when transitioning from a face-to-face setting.

Thank you all for your feedback! If anyone has additional suggestions or requests after seeing others’ comments, then please let me know.