Posts

Improving the return rate on student evaluations

Image
Return rates on student evaluations of instructor, course, and course materials have been low in online courses. The evaluations are anonymous to encourage respondents to respond honestly without fear of retribution. With thanks to a colleague for the following concept, the following is one way to encourage return of evaluations. The concept is to have students submit a screenshot of the evaluation submission confirmation for credit as seen above from summer 2026. The following directions were given for the assignment: Upload a screenshot of the student evaluation response recorded image after completing the evaluation. Just the response recorded image.  After you finish the evaluation, submit the response recorded image so that I will know you completed the evaluation. The evaluation is available at: [link redacted] Course prefix, number, and section: MS 150/O1 Course name: Statistics Instructor last name: Lee Ling Instructor first name: Dana Advance thanks for completing the eval...

Electricity

Image
This term November holidays drove a change in the order of the laboratories. Lab thirteen Ohm's law was moved up one week and optics was pushed back one week. No renumbering was done. This term also saw new resistor values.  And additional battery holders. The 8:00 session proceeded with groups each using a single multimeter. This was changed to using two multimeters per group and leaving the settings at 20 Volts on one and 200 milliamps on the other. The morning included an addition to the car collection along the fence line. One of the new transistor values. 220 Ohms at 1% 470 Ohms at 1%. Both of the 1% tolerance resistors were beyond 1% away from the color band value, on the order of 2% to 2.5% different. The 11:00 setup minus the batteries. This worked better and meant less dial twirling. At 8:00 there was too much confusion. Not to mention that there was no schematic diagram put up ...

Colors of light

Image
Monday opened with The Limits of Light as an introduction to the electromagnetic spectrum. Wednesday a cold open was again used. While Niki's Indigo was playing, students who were still  arriving were handed CD spectroscopes and asked to list the colors they saw in the order in which they saw them. After class the realization landed that Indigo should be a playlist of variations on the song to run as background music to the whole opening. Full length gray even including the shoes.  Demonstrating that the shirt is indeed gray under the microscope.Then the photo of the shirt was taken with a Motorola Moto cell phone and placed under the microscope. No more gray. Just red, green, and blue. This term no videos were shown, although the new indigo playlist was running while students looked into the microscope. Then the physiology of vision was explained using the white board.  Later in the period the HSV color system ...

Floral morphology

Image
The session opened with the use a cell phone yo enlarge Sphagneticola trilobata . An attempt to use a compound microscope failed badly. Had the microscope worked, considerable time would have been chewed up with a video playlist.  Instead a photo taken with a Pixel Pro 10 was mirrored onto the Smartboard. The five pointed disc florets include stamens and pistils, the ray florets have a visible two lobed style. Following this a playlist was run to cover floral morphology and reproduction. Although Sphagneticola trilobata should logically follow the playlist, part of the function of Sphagneticola trilobata is to delay the playlist start to allow for the inevitable late arrivals. The lead video in the playlist, Flowers , is also in place to delay the start of the core material. Having an image of a solitary inflorescence might make a better first image to show on the Smartboard. Images should be on the tablet to facilitate connectivity - the tablet has a more stable conne...