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by anocendi
3653 days ago
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It is very cool to see that the class is being taught by a group of juniors/seniors (checked the top two, first one was a senior and second one was a junior), and an appointed faculty is listed only as a supervisor .... I am really interested in the class outcome, and would love to hear what the students in class feel about this arrangement .... I can see the good things about this. It gives the instructor/TA students an opportunity to grow while giving the peer-learning atmosphere to students in class. Plus, the students in class will learn from their peers who has the latest working knowledge of CUDA fresh in their heads, and this arrangement also frees up a faculty (or two) from having to prepare the course so that they can do their faculty/research work (prepping and teaching a class, especially an interesting and engaging one, is a really draining experience on the part of the faculty as well.) Only downside I can see could be managing the class well enough so that class time is efficiently utilized. But I believe this should be covered by the faculty who is in supervisor position .... |
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The motivation behind the student taught class is that it allows for more classes to be taught than could happen otherwise.
As a student: Like any other class, the quality greatly depends on the work put in by the instructors. I think a student instructor is more likely to care about the quality of teaching, but also more likely to be overworked and not have enough time to dedicate to the course. I didn't think the course was particularly good when I took it due to lack of time from the instructors, but I'm glad the course was offered and that I took it as it got my feet wet with GPU programming.
After taking the course, I did an internship doing GPU programming. Doing this internship, I learned a ton and had a lot of ideas about how to improve the course. This put the idea of teaching the course in my head.
As an instructor: Myself and one other student designed the curriculum, gave the lectures, made the problem sets, did everything. We had a 3rd student who helped with grading. Teaching the course was hugely valuable to me, and also a ton of work. The course was hugely valuable because I learned a ton about GPU programming by teaching it and answering questions. As part of my motivation for teaching was to make the course more how I thought it should be, I didn't reuse many materials from the year before and spent many hours making lecture slides and problem sets. Towards the end of the course, I fell short on time and the lectures and problem sets weren't as good as they could have been. We made the class have a large final project of the student's choosing, and a few awesome things were made. Overall, I'm glad I taught the class, and I think I mostly accomplished what I wanted with improving the learning outcome for students.