Working my way through my backlog of SPOTs, I now come to Spring, 2024. Months ago, I read these comments and highlighted which ones I want to address here. But it's a slog to copy and paste them here and then reformat everything. (People, Blogger sucks. Out of all of Google's products, it's gotten the least amount of love. It has not changed anything since I started to use it in 2008.) I have to switch to HTML view and hand-edit the mangled garbage that the Blogger editor barfs up. I need to find something better.
I got a really high response rate in this class (96.4%). That's abnormal. If you're lucky, you get over 70%. So how did I convince almost the entire class to do the SPOTs? Everyone got a bonus mark if a certain percentage of the class did the SPOT surveys. I don't know who does or doesn't do the SPOTs; I just have access to a running total of the class. Occasionally, students claim that I don't care about feedback and am not open to change. That is false. I go to great lengths to get feedback from as many students as possible--good, bad, or ugly (comments, not students).
On to the comments from PSYCH 258: Cognitive Psychology! (Trigger warning: there may be sarcasm ahead. You have been warned!)
"Lots of information packed into a small time frame but that’s unavoidable."(Please, spread the word on this. Students sign up for a Spring term course, and they don't realize how much has to be packed into six weeks. Its. A. Lot. You are going to have to work hard.)
"The general course quality is challenging but because of Professor Loepelmann’s efforts and interest in the course he teaches, it is challenging and stressful but in an intellectually interesting way. It is quite heavy in textbook readings and content memorization, but not impossible to excel in the course.The heaviness of the workload when preparing for exams makes the course quality stressful."
"We pay for the whole course so I do think its an instructor's job to cover all course content that are testable in the exam. Its a spring course and there is already too much to cover. Even he barely covered the topics right before the exam days. So to expect us to study everything he teaches in class and the textbook feels not right because if we can just teach ourselves why are we paying for the course? P.S lecture and textbook has a good chunk of non-overlapping content."
"Base exam questions more on lecture content than textbook material"
"put more content from the textbooks to the lecture, slower"
"It's OK. There's a lot of material at a fairly surface level making it difficult to fully grasp, especially in the 6 weeks. It feels very fast and like the value for my money isn't there because of it."
"No textbook-specific questions. If I wanted to learn by myself, I would have gone to Athabasca"
"I understand why he wants us to read the textbook but I don’t really like it. But that’s ok I guess, not everything in this world you’re going to like."
(I don't particularly like the 'paying customer' trope. It's my course; I am the subject-matter expert; I have extensive knowledge of pedagogy. So I have decided to have a required textbook. The textbook is a part of the course. Period. I know it's more work: I went to university for 10 years. Every course I took had either a textbook or an extensive coursepack. Every. Single Course. You took this course because you wanted to learn about cognitive psychology--at least, that's my presumption. Being able to read long-form text is a skill. I am helping you to develop that skill. This is how science works: we (mostly) communicate with the written word.)
(This one student made the same comment about "Athabasca" (Athabasca University) over and over. What do you expect from me? To be spoon-fed content? Part of university is putting in the work required, and part of that is reading a textbook. I know that many instructors are removing required textbooks from their courses. I (and many others) feel that they are not best serving their students. This is what's driving my decision: I'm not being a dick. I'm not trying to punish anyone. I'm not getting kickbacks from publishers. I 👏🏼 am 👏🏼 trying 👏🏼 to 👏🏼 help 👏🏼 you. Check out this story in the Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. Would you take a course on Shakespeare expecting to...not read Shakespeare?)
"maybe on the first day give guidance on how to read textbooks properly, i think a lot of us struggled with that. Due to experience from other courses, we all know how to approach lectures. But reading the textbook is something not all of us are really familiar with."
(I hate being right so much. See? This is what I'm talking about. At least this person had some insight. I actually don't think it's my job to teach anyone how to read a textbook. But what I have done is put together some resources that will help guide you, including--sigh--a YouTube video.)
"I do not think that the course needs improvement."
(That's nice, but check out the comment below.)
"We have midterms on Fridays. I think it would be better to have them on the following Monday and learn new information that won’t be on the midterm on the original midterm day of Friday. Having the weekend to study would definitely benefit everyone."
(This was great feedback that a lot of people gave. This upcoming Spring term, I've asked student if they would prefer the exams to be moved to Mondays. I'll see how the marks go. Thanks for the suggestion.)
"Instead of epolls, may I suggest Kahoot? Also,I suggest make the difficulty level of the chapter quizzes match the difficulty level of the midterm exams."
(No, you may not. Because it would cost me over $500 per year to run Kahoot. I have no control over the chapter quizzes; they're written by the same people who write the textbook questions. It's usually not the questions that are different, it is because you are not writing chapter quizzes under the same conditions as an exam.)
"The one thing I would say is that in lecture, the hierarchical organization of concepts does not always read as such, which can be confusing when trying to determine the relationships of the information we're learning. For example, occasionally in the slides it is unclear that a subsequent concept (ie. functional fixedness) is a subtype of a previous one (ie. mental set) and not a separate one. Or, the following concepts are the levels/components of a broader concept (ie. tri-level hypothesis). That one may have just been me being an idiot BUT I can assure you I am paying attention and not missing any classes/information."
(You are not an idiot. This is wonderfully specific, concrete information that I have used to restructure how I presented the information described, but I also spent hours last summer going over every single PowerPoint slide to enhance their clarity. Thank you for such great feedback. This is the kind of specific information that I need!)
"give us a way to get the blanks if we missed a lecture"
(Like the class Discord server? The eClass discussion forum? Shooting me an email?)
"I think it would be better if there was an easier way to look at the midterms rather than having to go to a review every time. I'd prefer having access to the answers so that I can review whenever I want."
("Every time"? My dude, it was twice. I need to maintain exam security so this is the only way to do it.)
"Review sesh before midterm would be nice. I miss some things when taking notes so my understanding of certain areas may be spotty. Review sessions are the best"
(I barely have enough time as it is. I don't have time to re-teach things that I've already taught. Review is an individualized thing that you do, not me.)
"I would love to see an even higher diversity in the psychologists mentioned in class (ex. more from outside of North America or Europe)!"
(Yeah, me too. It's really hard to do this in practice. Someone who is teaching at, say, the University of Lagos may be from a WEIRD country: white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. All I have to go on is where they work and what their name is. I don't want to make any (incorrect) assumptions about anything. Sometimes I don't even know the gender of the person. Still, I strive to be more inclusive of BIPOC and, well, people who aren't cis-gendered WASP males.)
"I was unsure about having lectures go until 11:10 as if there were kids who had 11 am classes they may have been late for them"
(Um, I did not go over time every day. The class is officially scheduled by the official Office of the official Registrar to go until 11:10. I don't get to decide when my classes are held, or where.)
"Love it, it’s engaging and fun. I work before class from 5:00-9:00am and since it’s so fun I hardly fall asleep."(Thanks for the kind words.)
"I felt as though even if some of the content may be perceived as ‘boring,’ the way it was taught in class made it interesting and did not ‘put you to sleep.’"
"Professor Loepelmann puts lots of care and effort into his lectures. He comes prepared for class, shows up early, is consistent with his energy, and answers questions with interest and honesty (if he doesn’t know enough about the topic of the question, he will say so). It’s interesting how he has his powerpoint up filled with words that he could simply read off of but he doesn’t. He has a separate booklet copy of his powerpoint placed on his podium ready to be looked over as he presents. He thinks of what will help the students remember more, engage more, and excel more in his class He creates epolls and fill-in-the-blanks notes so students would be encouraged to show up in class. He even asked one of the students that did well on the second midterm for tips on how to improve then shared with it with the class."
"You can tell that he really cares for his students success in his class and has a passion for the topics. I appreciate the epolls as an interactive way to test our knowledge at the end of each topic, and the dad-jokes to keep our attention during the sometimes lengthy days of spring classes."
"Brilliant, really into the course and understands the material inside out"
"So fun!"
"Wonderful. Professor Lopelman is very organized and responsive and goes above and beyond to ensure we have everything we need to succeed."
"The interludes of mini class 'experiments' were also fun and definitely helped create connections and deepen understanding of the material. They, along with the ePoll questions, also helped reinforce the studying techniques we were being taught. It was cool to have that built-in and have them being utilized within the course delivery itself to help us learn. I also liked the pace at which we were being taught."
"I really liked how he would have us participate in some of the studies, and the epoll questions also changed up the lectures from just a professor speaking at you for an hour. The cheesy jokes are great too!"
"Professor Loepelmann seems very passionate about psychology and making sure we do well in the course. I like how engaging his classes are with the references, videos, examples, etc, it all makes me feel much more invested in the content. It also feels like he has a very deep, nuanced understanding of the subject, which makes hearing his answers to questions interesting. It's also really nice that he consistently checks in with the class for feedback on the course."
"I do not think that the instructor needs any improvement."
"More jokes I suppose"
Why aren't you studying?
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