Reflection of Middle of the Module Feedback

Results form the feedback in certain way place pressure upon me to step away form my own pedagogical principles which I abide and which I developed for last 15 yeas as a classroom practitioner. On the same evening and the day following the feedback, after examining the results I was ready to cancel the last task on the “Rain Drop” as a number of students indicated that there is too much work in this module. Someone asked me “Do you think that there is too much work for MSc students in this module?” Two days later, I asked my self “What are all these tasks that I am setting up for students and how do these contribute to their learning?”

My major objective is to provide students opportunity to develop understand of theory through application (not application through theory) and also to develop certain skills in line with their own capacity, that will be useful in context of their own work and further independent or formal studies. The initial tasks in the module were designed to take students form developing understanding and some skills in designing visuals with user-friendly tools, and then to progress into making these visuals a bit interactive. I understand the last task to be critical as “mind teaser” to get students to deeply consider and appreciate importance of their own knowledge when designing, as well as to deeply think about interactive elements that might bring static images into dynamic and manipulative tools of communication and learning. If I cancel this last task, I would deny my student the final step on this learning progression. In this context, my decision is to keep this task, even though some student might be further annoyed by perceived “heavy” workload. I examined digital portfolios of students (blogs) and I noticed that most students are progressing well. Form a perspective of a teacher, I am pleased with this progress.

Just some remarks about work load. In the MSc programmed I believe that in general students are expected to carry out module work outside class to the equivalent of a further 6 hours of study per week. I wander if this is practiced in other modules?

I would like to hear more from students about their thinking in relation to workload. In particular, focus should be in the workload is useful and leads to learning, in the thinking contribute to more useful understanding and if the workload results in useful skills development or is it just unnecessary. I would also like students to examine results of the survey and to describe any other pattern that they can see in this data. The survey results are given in THIS PDF file. Please contribute.