The Awards: 18

I am honoured to have achieved the Department of Psychology’s Honour Roll with Distinction for my Spring, 2017 PSYCO 367: Perception class. Wait, what? Spring? That course ended 8 months ago! Did I just forget to post this? Am I too humble to post about winning an award? Nope and nope. The admin person who crunches the numbers for these department awards left and didn’t get around to this. And the new person had no idea there were awards or anything. It almost makes it seem like these awards are not that important. Well, it’s not like there’s a cash prize or anything. (But after I win one, I do take my family out to dinner.)

Warning! I may be a sarcastic jerk in making my snide little remarks. Comedy! If you are easily offended by overeducated, middle-aged white male privilege, turn back now. But if that’s your thing, read on!

The instructor made the information easy to learn and if students had any questions he was very good at explaining concepts in a different way. In a spring course, where some students are taking another course and/or working at the same time, it is difficult to keep up with the textbook readings and the lecture. It might be better to have lecture material cover 75% of exams and the textbook cover 25% rather than the 50/50 split. I'm not sure why so many students say this course is so hard, maybe it was the instructor that made this course better! I found the material to be fairly consistent with any other 300 level psych course. I really liked how the instructor had examples of illusions and concepts covered in class, and that he posted those and extra helpful material on his website. He was very organized!

(Thank you for the kind words and taking the time to write so much. There’s a lot of important information in the textbook, and you’re paying a lot for it. That’s why I make it worth a substantial amount on the exams.)

The final is too close to the last date of lecture. Not enough time to be fully 100% confident going into the final.

(I know--it really sucks to have the final the day after the last day of classes. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about that. You should give your feedback to the Office of the Registrar - Exams and Timetabling.)

Course was very fast-paced. Maybe less topics would be better

(It’s because Spring courses are packed into 6 weeks. I do not want to compromise the nature of content of the course, because it’s supposed to be the same as Fall/Winter courses. At least it wasn’t a 3-week course.)

Good course with a very interesting topic. It would however be nice if there were some assignments associated with the course. I do not tend to perform well on exams in general, and prefer classes where assignments are a part of the final grade

(Here’s where I have compromised the course. When I taught it in Fall/Winter, I had 10 “lab” assignments that students did. They were done on computer outside of class time. They were pretty highly regarded, fun, and helped students to understand concepts. But running these in a 6-week course is a nightmare, so I’ve had to cut them out.)

I really appreciate that the instructor presented some different material in the lecture than was in the text. Too many professors simply teach from the textbook, but the additional material in lecture helped to clarify concepts and made it more interesting. I also appreciated how animated the instructor was. This makes it so much more fun to be in class.

Dr. Loepelmann is a fantastic professor. I love his enthusiasm and humor, and I hope he continues to teach for many years

(Thanks!)

The iClicker questions were very useful in knowing what was to be expected on exams.

(Thank you for noticing that. I get a lot of complaints about there not being “sample exams,” but the clicker questions are basically that.)

Course was great. University making students pay for textbook they can't afford to pass the course is "a dick move." Still really good instructor

(It’s not the University, it’s me. I’m the one who makes the decision to have a textbook in a course. I’m sorry if you think I’m being a dick about that. I believe that the textbook covers a lot of important material that is essential to an understanding of perception. There’s no way I could cover that much material in lectures. I choose the same textbook being used in Fall/Winter terms, so there should be lots of used copies available. And I do make sure that there are copies of the textbook on reserve in the library--you can check those out for 2 hours at a time if you are unable to afford the (admittedly expensive) textbook.)

Hmm, all done and barely any sarcasm. Maybe next time!

Why aren’t you studying?

The Lecture Notes & Copyright

If you look at the bottom of each page of my lecture notes, you'll see a copyright notice, and a link to a more elaborate copyright agreement. Essentially, if you use my lecture notes, you are agreeing to certain conditions. One of those conditions is that you do not post my lecture notes online anywhere. The notes are not your property to do with whatever you wish. You are definitely not permitted to post them to an online notes-sharing website in order to earn credits or money. If you do so, you are in violation not only of copyright law, but also the Code of Student Behaviour. Whoa, that's pretty harsh, right?


Why am I being so sticky about this? Here's what happened a couple of weeks ago. I got an email from a student who had a question about something in the lectures they didn't understand. But the question they were asking was weird. They were asking about lecture material that was not in my lectures. At least, not any more. I thought for sure I had taken this particularly confusing section out, years ago. I double-checked, and confirmed that it was indeed gone. So I asked the student where they got my lecture notes from. Oh, an online lecture note sharing site, they said.

Argh.

This unfortunate student had stumbled upon long-outdated notes posted without permission by a student in my class a few years ago. The student had missed a few days of class and instead of asking another student in that class (or me) for notes on what they had missed, they just Googled it instead.

This is why I copyright my lecture notes.

I don't want anyone coming across old, outdated notes posted on some random website. Yes, they may be filled in with all the blanks you missed when you were unable to come to class. But you could potentially be doing yourself a disservice--learning material that you don't have to, or even misunderstanding something important.

Yes, I do want students to take responsibility for themselves. If you miss a class, my policy is to get you to ask another student in the class for the notes. Why? Lots of reasons. You will get to know someone else. Many students complain that even though the university is filled with people, they feel alone--because they are not forming new relationships. There are loads of smart, like-minded people all around you. It wouldn't hurt to get to know someone new. You could, say, share lecture notes if one of you is sick. Smart students will make additional annotations to my lecture notes--not just filling in the words. These students tend to do better on exams. Although I can give you the blanks if you miss a class, that's all I can give you. It would be better to get annotated notes from a fellow student.

Even worse than posting lecture notes, I have found students posting their old assignments and papers online. This is a dumb thing to do. Not only can I download these papers too, I have electronic records of all assignments, going back more than 10 years. If a current student is dumb enough to submit your old assignment, it's a trivial matter to bust both of you for plagiarism. Yes, both of you. See, it's against the Code of Student Behaviour to provide material to another student. How would you like the University contacting you after you've graduated, telling you that your degree is being revoked? Yes, it's that serious.

So I've had to spend hours over the past couple of weeks writing takedown letters to multiple online note-sharing websites, which is a major drag. I'd rather be doing almost anything else.

If you feel my policies are too restrictive (and your social anxiety prevents you from talking to strangers), I've come up with a compromise. I am willing to set up a note-sharing forum on eClass. You can ask for notes or share your notes. I don't have a problem with this because it's under my control. If there are errors in the notes people post, I can fix that. I don't have control over websites that profit from my hard work--and, yes, it's hard work. I spend hundreds of hours developing my lecture notes. In many ways, my notes are the sum total of my work as an instructor.

Please don't give them away.

Why aren't you studying?