Spring 2023

I continued to be the course champion for MA 107 and iterated on the design from the fall. We had common quizzes and exams this semester, and students had to earn their late passes for the homework by attending help hours.

MA 220 had three grade categories: weekly tutorial submissions, weekly concept checks, and projects. The tutorial submissions were graded on completeness and served to check if the students had been in class and followed the tutorials that I provided for their CAD software. The concept checks were weekly quizzes on Nuoodle over the mathematical material we covered. There were four projects over the course of the semester. These required students to create something unique in the CAD software and then explain the mathematics that they were using. Sometimes the math was explicit and other times it described methods that the CAD software was implementing behind the scenes.

The spring version of MA 107 was very similar to the fall. The major changes were that students needed to attend help hours to get extensions on their homework and we slowed the course down halfway through the semester after it became clear that students were not keeping up with the pace of lecture. We dedicated class days to reviewing for the exams. I would have students get into groups and work on the review together while I slowly revealed the key so they could check their answers. We also dedicated other class days to working on worksheets or other group activities to reinforce the material.

As I mentioned previously, MA 220 had three grade categories: tutorial participation, concept checks, and projects. In terms of class time, I lectured for about half the time, and had them working in the CAD software the other half of the time. Each of my mathematical lectures was followed up with by a CAD tutorial that covered how to use that math in their architectural software. I would also include challenge prompts asking them to create something in their CAD software that met specific criteria, but without giving them exact instructions. While the students were working on the tutorials, I would go around the class and give individual attention to students who needed help.

Every Thursday evening, students had to turn screenshots of their work, showing that they had completed the tutorial, including the challenges. I graded these on a completion basis and gave detailed feedback early in the semester while the students were figuring out what a complete submission looked like.

Each Monday students would have to complete a concept check on Nuoodle that covered the mathematical content from the previous week. I allowed the students multiple attempts on the concept checks and programmed the concept checks to give quick feedback.

Finally, there were 4 projects throughout the semester. For these projects, students had to turn in their CAD files and a document explaining their design choices and the mathematics underlying their design. I provided students with a detailed rubric for each project and with a template to base their write-up on. I gave students time in class to work on these projects and gave them the opportunity to show their early drafts for feedback. The day that the projects were due I had students do a “gallery walk,” where they went around and looked at each other’s work and got to ask each other questions about their projects.

Student response to the course was very positive, as evidenced by course evluations.

Fall 2022

I served as course champion for MA 107. In that role, I worked with the other MA 107 instructors to get a consensus on the homework questions, quiz structure, exam questions, and on a common final exam. Students had access to late passes for homework and opportunities to retake quizzes for a higher grade. To reward growth, we wrote the final exam so that the different parts of it could replace earlier exams. Since Precalculus is a skills-based course, I think it is appropriate and rigorous to use students demonstrated abilities at the end of the semester to adjust their grade.

In MA 308, I structured the course around inquiry-based learning. The text for the course had definitions and statements of theorems, but the students had to provide all the proofs of the results. To help the students organize their work and share the load of writing proofs, I had them collaborate to form a wiki. This is essentially a shared proof portfolio, where the students must correctly cite and link to the previous results and definitions that they reference. I gave feedback and revision opportunities on the students’ proof submissions. The ultimate score of a wiki submission was determined by its correctness, its clarity, and its completeness. To determine their grade, I balanced the score of the wiki against their level of participation in the course.

If they contributed a little bit each week to the wiki, presented proofs in class, joined class discussions, and completed the weekly reflection assignments, they would earn the exact grade of the wiki. If they under participated they would earn less than the wiki, and if they went above and beyond, they would earn more than the wiki. I updated the student’s participation and wiki scores, and the wiki feedback on a weekly basis.

MA 411 tasks the student to do research, write up their results, and present their findings. The write up and presentation are scored by other department members based on a common rubric. To supplement this, I provided weekly benchmarks to the student, which accounted for a portion of the grade.

I provided a detailed syllabus and a calendar at the start of the semester listing the topics and assignments we were going to complete. I clearly labelled the Nuoodle site with what was due/available when and I kept the Nuoodle gradebook up to date.

To facilitate MA 107, I distributed note outlines through OneNote with placeholders for the terms we were going to define and the examples we were going to cover. For MA 308, we followed the inquiry based textbook and I would post messages to the class reminding them on what they were expected to have read/attempted before the next class meeting.

MA 107 has many topics to cover in a single semester. To accommodate this, I lectured most class periods, stopping as much as I could to give the students time to try examples on their own in a think-pair-share model. In contrast, most of the time in MA 308 students worked as a class to figure out the proofs for the results in the text. I would guide the discussion and act as a scribe, copying their ideas onto the board as they suggested them, or following the steps of their classical constructions in either https://www.geogebra.org/, or late in the course in https://www.cs.unm.edu/~joel/NonEuclid/. I also set aside time in MA 308 for each student to present at least two complete proofs to the class. I would then guide a class discussion over the presentation using the “compliment sandwich” as a framework.

For MA 107, their grade was computed as a weighted average of homework, quizzes, and exams. The homework was online and had instant feedback. They could try any problem as many times as they want, until they get it correct. I graded every quiz and exam problem on a 4-point scale: 0 for no correct work, 1 for some progress, 2 for significant progress with a major flaw, 3 for a nearly correct solution, and 4 for a completely correct solution. Students had one retake opportunity for the quizzes and the final exam was written in five parts. Each of the first four of those parts could replace the corresponding exam, provided the students had done better on the final. The coarse grading scale requires students to know what they are doing to succeed in the course, and the retake opportunities and exam replacement policy gives them time to develop that competency with feedback.

In MA 308, I used the score for the wiki that class created together along with the students’ individual participation score to determine their course grade. If they contributed a little bit each week to the wiki, presented proofs in class, joined class discussions, and completed the weekly reflection assignments, they would earn the exact grade of the wiki. If they under participated they would earn less than the wiki, and if they went above and beyond, they would earn more than the wiki. I updated the student’s participation and wiki scores, and the wiki feedback on a weekly basis.

For both courses, I updated the Nuoodle gradebook on a weekly basis. When I returned quizzes and exams to the MA 107 students, I provided detailed feedback so they could learn from their mistakes and do better on their next attempt. In MA 308, class participation was largely a completion grade, and I gave feedback if students were losing participation points by not contributing enough to the wiki or if they were writing one sentence responses to the weekly reflection assignments as opposed to a more thoughtful answer. They were allowed to revise their wiki submissions based on my feedback, and I posted updated wiki scores on a weekly basis, so they could see what they needed to work on.

As I discussed above for MA 411, I provided a weekly schedule of benchmarks for the student to reach and had the other department use the official rubric to grade their paper and presentation. The student had access to the schedule of benchmarks and the criteria for the paper and presentation from the start of the semester. I also gave them templates for both the paper and the presentation.

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