Evaluation Comments

Summary View

What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the instructor?

• Knows his subject extremely well, engaging, responsive
• Weakness: Sarcastically singled out an online student that was criticizing the course through a group email. The student's criticism was admittedly not coherent or specific, but the teacher's response was kind of rude.
• Very clear and organized. Every was streamlined and smooth. Always took the time to answer questions with live examples (why can't more professors be like this?) Not many weakness that I can think of...
• Very clear and fun professor. The grading is a bit tricky since the tests rely in minute differences in answers and tricky questions.
• Strength: teacher is creative in showing pitfalls/problems and valuable traits of programming languages concepts Weakness: I would have liked more homework or more problems in each homework assignment, or more work to do in the worksheets.
• Strengths: Knowledgeable, Smart, Organize, Logical, HumorousWeakness: Sometime going too fast in some hard materials. A little more explanation would be be great.
• Mr. Riley, you know your material and are nice person. But, unfortunately, the lectures are hard to follow. As a beginner, I had a very hard time understanding you. You have a wonderful technical vocabulary, but as a student, it was harder to understand you because you weren?t speaking to me at a level I could understand. Additionally, you went on tangents, jumping from one topic to another unrelated topic, that made it hard to follow. Many times, I felt like it was great you were exposing us to many things, but was puzzled as to how it was relevant to the topic at hand.Furthermore, the lectures were crammed with information with no clear direction on how it was all related or why it mattered. The lectures went very fast. I would have preferred to see less concepts introduced and throughly explained than simply introducing a million things and then rushing through reading and clicking through power points for 3.5 hours. Lastly, the test format, of multiple choice questions, was a poor way of assessing a student's performance in the class. You could have done short answer questions, etc. Thank you for introducing me to a number of languages. That was a strength. Moreover, I enjoyed your coding examples and, best of all, sense of humor. Thank you!
• Professor is really enthusiastic and he answers all questions well.

What aspects of this course were most beneficial to you?

• Made me study a lot, learned a lot
• Great intro to some of the mechanics behind the design of programming languages. Good introduction to functional languages.
• Being introduced to functional programming languages and the overall differences between popular programming languages.
• i really really liked the worksheets given to do before doing homework assignments.
• 1. Exposure to common programming language concepts. So I can quickly get started and find common ground in new languages;2. In depth understanding of the functional language. Especially experience in scala programming.
• Exposed to a number of languages including C, C++, Perl, Scheme, Scala, and Java.
• Just learning about general higher level concepts of programming languages. It taught me how to teach myself how to learn a new language if that makes sense.

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

• Extra credit
• None...
• Try to make the questions in exams more knowledge-based and less "I caught ya" questions based on small technicalities. Also please do not use questions where an answer is partially correct.
• teacher points to the screen, but online-students cant really see that clearly what the instructor is pointing to in videos. Not a huge deal because of context, but maybe highlighting or hovering over lines in lecture could help online students
• Besides scala, it would be interesting to have some assignment in javascript/c++/java etc.
• I am not a big fan of multiple choice questions. Maybe having some questions with short answer, or small coding snippets might help?

Do you have comments on the grading procedures and exams?

• Perfect grading system, but exams are a bit hard.
• Was just fine.
• Try to make the questions in exams more knowledge-based and less "I caught ya" questions based on small technicalities. Also please do not use questions where an answer is partially correct.
• The exam and grading are uperbly efficient and effective. The problems in the exam are well designed.
• Lastly, the test format, of multiple choice questions, was a poor way of assessing a student performance in the class. You could have done short answer questions, etc. A 68% class average on Midterm is low.
• I thought all grading was done fairly and quickly.

Other comments?

• Awesome professor