Evaluation Comments

Summary View

What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the instructor?

• Oh, and this class is leagues better than what I thought an online course was going to be. Last time I had an async class there was NO participation from the online users, and instructors didn't even ask. Prof. Riely actively promoted activity from both in-person and online students, even setting up a Discord server so that we could discuss amongst ourselves.
• His video lectures, were informative, interesting, and he had no wasted words. His explanations were not boring, and actually conveyed the point in a simplistic way.
• His examples and explanations were excellent for teaching new concepts, the use of code examples to show how different languages interpret code was very insightful.
• I loved everything about the instruction.
• Strength - responsiveness, provided clear understanding
• Strength - Professor seems open minded in going beyond just using D2L Weaknesses - Lectures are scatterbrained and disorganized. More focused on what outputs are vs learning actual concepts of programming. Exams are infinitely more difficult than subject matter presented to me. Processor accused a third of the class for cheating when instead there was an issue with him uploading the wrong assignment file. No exam prep offered. Discord was used sparingly. No feedback on homework or constructive criticism on code. In person lectures were just going over examples versus any meaningful learning or engagement with the class.
• He was present and engaging during class and used Discord well during the week. I think more one-on-one time with the instructor would be beneficial. I felt that some of the get-to-know-you parts of the class could have been better used for getting to know each person's coding background. I would like to see the professor get to know his students' computer science interests, background, and knowledge during the first week of the class. Sometimes it felt as though professor was talking to us like fellow professors as opposed to students.

What aspects of this course were most beneficial to you?

• After taking a break to pursue my master's for 9 years, this was the perfect class to come back to get back into the swing of things. It kept me accountable to doing work every week but also didn't have me going through assembler to debug some crazy C++ undefined behavior.
• Learning better how compilers, or program runs let you know about the errors in dynamic, static programming languages. Learning some coding in Scala, more practice with recursion.
• The pre-recorded lectures and worksheets.
• The overall structure of programming languages.
• The videos were well composed and helpful.
• This course taught basics of Scala, scheme, C Pointers and assignments and lectures really helped me to gain more knowledge .
• YouTube playlist format is useful structure for lectures with remote learning.
• Being exposed to so many different computer languages and having a crash course in a variety of programming concepts. The professor is very expressive and he speaks with diction which makes his words easy to understand.

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

• I already suggested to add Promises/Futures to the course, so that everyone can share in my misery.
• Some of the worksheet instructions were outdated, or sort of cumbersome to complete, updating the worksheet content, and maybe improving the flow of the worksheet contents would match the video content quality.
• Quiz/exams would be better if they tested understanding of the material rather than emulation of the compiler/interpreter.
• Some harder concepts like the homework with the delayed function made sense after explanation in class but with no example to work off of from the recorded lectures it was hard to start. When making points in live lecture sometimes professor would point using hand instead of a mouse cursor making it hard to tell which part of code he was pointing to for online viewers. More concise instructions on the storage.scala homework for getAndSet functions (super confusing)
• I'd be much easier for me if the quiz due and home work due could have been listed along side with the course schedule. I missed a couple of quizzes because of confusion on due days (T_T)
• I think everything was fine.
• Exams are extremely different than homework and lecture content. You are not adequately prepared. Huge disconnect between professor and remote students. Discord is not enough. There was no engagement
• I think the professor assumed that we knew more about the concepts than we did. He sometimes went through concepts very casually, quickly, in a "review" fashion instead of explaining things thoroughly. Also, it's important to have an atmosphere where students are respected by the professor. A more thorough, slower review of C would have been nice. Pace was a little fast.

Do you have comments on the grading procedures and exams?

• Quizzes were graded instantly and I understand why it takes a while for submissions to be graded because code has to be run.
• Stuff from hw assignments didn't feel to relevant to midterm.
• No.
• Grading procedures for exams and assignments were good
• Exams were extraordinarily inappropriate given difficulty of homework and content of lectures. We were ill prepared. His previous online reviews reflect this as well. It’s a shame DePaul has such a low standard for professors in this program to allow this to continue for years without the option of an alternative professor to take who may actually teach content beyond Scala syntax
• Grading seemed reasonable. Tests were multiple choice. Maybe I missed some material, but it felt like some of the concepts on tests and quizzes were not always related to topics discussed in class and in homeworks/worksheets.

Other comments?

• Maybe consider adding some Python to the course alongside JavaScript, though that's because I love Python.
• The scope and depth covered in this course is just great for what I think I want to know about programming languages. As a data science concentration student in my 30s, I really didn't feel I had the energy and intelligence to learn everything about software engineering. However, this course offered the right about of knowledge as an introduction to grasp the big picture of programming languages in the computer science field. It definitely serves as a foundation for all students.
• NA
• One of the worst classes I’ve taken at DePaul
• N/A