Lifting also encourages proper posture and stretching, both of which work -wonders-. :) I'll have to look into this program, though, haven't heard of it before!
I've had many teachers write their own books and give them to the local copy-shop for distribution to the students at printing cost (~$15). Or we can keep PDF copies of the books for free.
I don't know if it wins -everything-, but one purchase working on all my OSes? That's pretty awesome. And with the prices so close, I really can't justify buying Chocolat over ST2. :/
I can definitely see the appeal of this - like you mentioned in your blog post, there's always worry that others will think you're stupid or something for not understanding something.
That having been said, I had a few questions/concerns:
- How would it work when there were specific gaps? It might be helpful if comments could be included to the instructor when the rating is provided. That would allow the teacher to reinforce those particular topics.
- How would you guarantee participation? If, for example, only people that don't understand the topic speak up, wouldn't that skew the data presented to the teacher?
Great points. I'm definitely interested in allowing students to provide more in-depth feedback.
Participation is a much trickier issue. In the classes that I tested in about 40 - 60% of the students actually used it. I was thinking of weighting the confusion 'votes' based on 'active' users.
I'm hoping that through feedback form professors I'll be able to add features that make it more worth while for students.
That's a lot more participation than I would have guessed, that's pretty awesome! Thanks for the info, and I look forward to seeing this getting more widespread use :)
My freshman and sophomore years, I was taught Java... the rest of undergrad and grad, I was living in a world of C and Matlab. I have no idea why it was taught in that order, and I think they're in the process of fixing it, but I remember my first C course when we started doing pointer arithmetic... quite the experience!
Huh, thanks! I suspected it was a security thing, but I've seen some sites where other non-alphaneumeric characters were disallowed as well. :/ At least this makes some sense.
