Evaluation Comments

Term:	Fall 2017-2018
Course:	CSC 447 710
Course Name:	Concepts of Programming Languages
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Summary

Summary View

What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the instructor?

His way of explaining new concepts makes them seem easy to understand. His sense of humor and levity contributes to making the class feel like a nice place to be. He's also clear and pedagogical in terms of making sure students understand concepts (e.g., he goes over all quizzes and the exams, drawing diagrams and writing code on the board).A weakness is that he overestimates the ability of the students in the exams.
Explains topic very well
He is very passionate about what he is teaching and presents the material in an easy to understand way. The amount of time he shows examples and different cases of the topics that were covered was great.
Writing on the board. The board wasn't capturing all his notes.
Professor Riely is an engaging instructor who clearly explains complex topics. In terms of his general instruction he was one of the best professors I've had during my two years at DePaul.
Strengths: he's clearly brilliant, and very interested in his work! Seems very passionate. Weaknesses: doesn't always seem prepared for class - I get confused when he starts explaining something one way, apologizes because he misspoke, and then goes back and explains it again. I think maybe since he has so much other stuff going on he doesn't always review the material before the class.
Lecturing, worksheets, and homework, combined well to teach me the course material. The midterm was not a realistic assessment of class knowledge. 1/3 of the class earned 50% or less on the midterm which indicates poorly written exam questions, and or not enough time to complete the exam, and or a disconnect between how the knowledge was transferred and how it was tested on.

What aspects of this course were most beneficial to you?

The worksheets were very helpful, as were the homework assignments
Learned a new language
The introduction to Scala was awesome. Previously most of my CS experience was using C++ for almost everything (I did my undergrad 12 years ago) and had minimal experience with other languages. The mixture of languages that were used to compare and contrast C, scheme, sml, Java, and Scala really showed the different paradigms in a concrete manner.
Going over homework assignments and exam.
The assignments that required recursive solutions only. I know what recursion is and even occasionally used it, but these assignments really helped the full value of recursion click for me (and I've found myself using it more naturally outside of class).
Seeing how programming languages differ from each other was very interesting and gave me a new perspective on programming as a whole
Looking at paradigms across programming languages.

What suggestions do you have that could help improve the course?

None.
Teach all professors on how to use the technology of writing on the board.
I took this course online, and in general it can be difficult to see what a professor is pointing to on the slides when they say "this means ..." Professor Riely was very responsive to follow up, but in general it would be nice if he 1) explicitly indicated what he is referring to on the slides/screen when explaining "this" and 2) if he restated students questions for context since it is difficult to hear what other students are saying in the recording.
The slides are pretty hard to follow. There's not really enough information on them to actually explain what's going on, so going back and reviewing later it's hard to follow what's happening. They're very vague. The coding examples are also very vague. Might benefit from using "real world" type examples to make them easier to follow the logic through the program (for example for class A extends B write class animal extends bird on the slides- that kind of thing throughout the slides would be way easier to follow).
Prof. Riely like many instructors lectures to the projection screen. This makes it more difficult for online students to know exactly what he is talking about. It is helpful to highlight points of importance with the mouse rather than physically pointing to them. Otherwise lectures were great.

Do you have comments on the grading procedures and exams?

I did better than average on the exam (which isn't saying much), but I was still disappointed with my score because I thoroughly prepared--and I did all of the homework assignments and worksheets. I think the questions are fine, but always having an option of "this code will not compile" or "this will cause an error" is too much to ask of a student who's only been coding in that language for a handful of weeks.
None.
Some homework assignments were not graded on timely manner. Please send email if an assignment is taking longer than usual to grade.
The format of the midterm (and final) is unlike the format a lot of us are familiar with. I feel like a lot of people had trouble with the midterm because of this multiple-choice format; we're all used to writing code and/or short answer to express that we understand the concepts even if we might not know EXACTLY what the compiler is about to do. I just don't think the multiple-choice format for THIS type of class is appropriate because it doesn't allow students to show that they actually DID understand the overall concept even if they can't perfectly predict the outcome.
The printed format of the exam could use improvement. There were some questions where the first sentence of the exam started on the last line of a page and the rest of the question spilled over to the next. There is a disconnect on how the material was tested as 1/3 of the class failed the midterm.

Other comments?

Great instructor, great course.
I really enjoyed this class. Thank you.
The course was great as it exposed me to programming languages that I've heard of but never worked with.
Sometimes students reply to him a second or third time on the google group and he misses it - if the google group feels like a good way to keep the conversation going, it might be good to review the responses a little more thoroughly
I got a lot out of this course, thank you.