Video 0-1: Welcome, teaching mode, prior knowledge survey

0:00 Introduction

0:03 welcome to comp 526 i'm glad to find you in this new format uh i'll be live streaming these lectures and trying out different uh different things i hope to make it a good experience despite the fact that we're all stuck at home um and we'll try to incorporate different elements to make the learning experience as valuable as it would be if we were on campus even though it will surely be a bit different um before we get started i'd like to ask another little question

0:42 maybe i should introduce myself first change the slides here good so i'm i'm sebastian here um please don't make me feel old it's fine if you just call me by my first name oh usually i would be in in this office but how relevant is that these days if you want to reach me the email address is the more useful piece of information you will also have tutorials in small groups which are run by by ben smith my phd student we plan to introduce him today with a zoomed in or uh a shown team's call but that didn't work out but he will do a tutorial introduction session this wednesday which is the normal slot for the first tutorial so that first slot in your in your timetables just show up on that one on the link that i posted on canvas and ben will talk you through what you do in the tutorials and will also give you a chance to meet in smaller groups which as part of the lecture i think they're they're nice in terms of getting content to you in this format they're not so nice in terms of you meeting each other so we'll try to make the tutorials more worthwhile in that respect the main source of information about

2:16 anything on the module is is this public website just on my on my private website i try to put everything there because then it's easily accessible you don't have to log in when you do it on five different devices you might want to you might appreciate this and there's a couple of other um tools uh and and uh uh platforms that i want to use for different reasons and we'll discuss that in more detail either today or on wednesday something i i should have added to that slide maybe we will normally meet each week on tuesday and wednesday at 11 and only for this first week the

3:08 tuesday slot has been replaced by this uh late monday afternoon slot because there's a clash with a project discussion all right um so father for that uh if at any point you have questions then on the right you should see right off the live stream you should see the slido tab where you can switch between the pulse and the live q a so maybe you can just see if that works go to the audience q a tab now and just send a random question of you people

3:56 for that to work i have to unlock it of course i forgot something before we got started here so now you should be able to send questions on on the q a tab so just head to the right that direction okay seems to work um great so what i would usually do is then to switch to this one [Applause] switch to this screen discuss those questions um and uh as long as uh there are other things to this to be discussed um stay on that and then

4:43 we would go back to the slides so if at any point in time you have questions just pop them in the q a and i'll try to keep an eye on those and weave them into the lecture whenever it's whenever it best fits all right

5:04 so far so good now the next thing i want to do is another little poll i just before i talk about my approach to remote teaching i've already done that a little bit but before i make it a bit more a bit more concrete when it comes to this class i'd like to see what uh what your thoughts are so i try to put here uh different types of teaching face traditional lectures is what well what you might not have experienced this year maybe not even last year but what is a typical setup for higher education smaller group seminars are also widely used or have been widely used not at the moment when no one can be on campus but they're also known to be effective then of course we can have video conference calls like teams and zoom and whatever else you might have had quite a few of these i suppose in semester one the other option for lectures is online but asynchronous that would be pre-recorded videos or the option that i chose a live stream plus some form of back channel like the slido questions

5:08 Poll

6:36 um among other things or an option that's maybe not so often used in computer science but in other subjects essentially a website that where you click through the topic and then there's all sorts of videos and podcasts etc sprinkled in

6:56 that's pretty much the forms of teaching that i i could come up with i think most most um universities use some of these or a combination of these i'll give you a a little more time to answer on these

7:18 to finish the ranking and then i would switch and briefly discuss the results which might be quite interesting i think while some of you are still um putting these into nice order uh let me go briefly over

7:47 some comments about my teaching style for this for this year i'm sure you have noticed that this academic year is a little different in that put me on that side and that this here is is is weird a lot of things that used to work fine don't work fine this year a lot of things that were unthinkable certainly were commonplace now uh what that means for remote learning is it's also very different the experience will vary a lot for you but i guess i'll fight with staying motivated to keep going with your studies while you're stuck at home in a place struggling to socialize with others i mean you could do some things remotely but it's uh it's just not the same and uh the third point that listed here is is keep a routine for study i mean you're doing your lectures what i found hard in in a remote setting also and as part of my research is to stick to a schedule to stick to it to go to all the the talks etc um and obviously some of the reasons why this could be hard and this will be uh where every little every everyone situation differs but uh i list a couple of things some of which are relevant to me as well

7:50 Conversacin

9:21 so if you if you hear kids screaming in the back you know what happened there's lots of things that can go wrong and being at home is not always easy so i'll try to be flexible and accommodate your your uh restrictions as much as possible um but of course there's limits to it when it comes to to marks etc but i'll try to be flexible uh what that means um for for this class is basically uh i thought what is what is it that makes um a good lecture and one thing that irrespective of what mode of teaching you use if you can convey good intuitions especially in a topic like like ours where we talk about algorithms and the theory and mathematics behind it giving good intuitions is very important and structuring the material in a way that helps you absorb it is very important but those two things are really independent of what type of mode of delivery you use uh then among the big alternatives for how to deliver lectures i find that synchronous live lectures like this one where you and i we meet at the same point in time even though physically different distinct um and far away from each other we still meet at the same time we keep in sync

10:59 we have these lectures that makes it much easier to keep uh to keep up with the routine to stay stay in sync with with each other recordings are great so i i will record i am recording i mean it's on it's on youtube live streams are instantly recorded on youtube um the recordings are great and we want to keep those but i would i would very much encourage you to attend these life

11:38 now uh the alternative obviously was to use seam zoom or teams calls i think they're very great they're very effective it's it's great tools uh for having meetings etc but if this the groups go beyond a certain size it just doesn't seem to work so well um i don't know how you feel about the uh just unmute yourself and ask a question and please show faces uh i found it more annoying than helpful when i was part of the audience so i would i tried to find other back channels other ways that you can get back to me asking questions on slido is is one way and we'll find others inside class and outside class and i hope i hope this will turn out effective for you as well i also find that uh on youtube the audio and video quality is just usually way better than what zoom in teams provide and the third point was yeah if you want to make content and lectures memorable you have to provide some form of interaction uh just to keep everyone awake and so i will always sprinkle in these slider tasks that you've seen over there you can't see it okay so that's the point for me to switch to the ranking that you produced

13:20 so um maybe i can make this a little doesn't want to go smaller so if you if you see what what people like most uh face-to-face teaching but in small groups is what people liked most and i'm not at all surprised by this i think this is um oh it's it flipped interesting that's very interesting i was i was about to say this is easy to say because the seminar style in small classes that's very effective it's a long um tested

14:05 way of way of teaching that's how uh famous universities um try to provide that things seem to flip around and so it's not as clear-cut as i thought that's interesting maybe let me close the poll note so that we have um oh i see i can't show you the results then

14:35 can i just show this without re-running it i don't want to reset the results okay whatever i have to keep it open i'm still practicing with slido a bit

14:56 so what do we have people like the face-to-face lectures in both ways very much and synchronous online is almost the same there's a gap between those and zoom and team calls and um

15:22 well another small gap to the asynchronous sessions but not as not as stark a difference if you look at the bars i would definitely say the uh synchronous forms of teaching are feud as slightly better than the other three and that's um that's the only trend i can see that's interesting okay thanks for taking part in in that little exercise um good let me switch back so uh yeah uh sounds like i made a good choice in going for the for the synchronous sessions um i hope this will be as effective as as it can be before we move on to the actual content of this class

16:16 Learning Experience

16:20 okay one more comment um what will be part of your learning experience at large in in this class the lobbies be obviously be the lectures in the synchronous form as i as i said and we'll sprinkle in these slider questions but there are a few other things that go alongside with it which are not happening in this lecture slot but which are as important for the overall experience i would say one thing is tutorials you might have had tutorials in other lectures so you probably know what these are like we will also use something um well it's it's called campus wire it's a system for staying in touch and for answering questions we'll mostly use it as a question and answer uh platform for you guys among other things yeah it also has has chat rooms so uh i'll give you an introduction into that uh on wednesday probably

17:18 in the long run i also want to use campus wire as an additional back channel for you essentially a chat room that you can use during classes but we'll we'll come back to that um then i have some something that might be a little more controversial uh class tests which are also marked in a sense think about this as taking some of the uh the weight from the final exam and spread it over the term that usually makes it easier for students to accumulate good grades and i think it's overall helpful just to keep you engaged i will try not to make a lot of additional deadlines um coming from this well we'll discuss all of these in more detail and then there will be continuous assessment tasks one will be a presentation of a paper and form of a video that you will do in groups and then there will be some programming puzzles

18:31 yeah um i wanted to briefly address your very kind questions before we move on with that uh i've heard the comparison with slaughter on zlatan ibrahimovic um from at least three different people independently so that's quite interesting it's an interesting one and i've seen he lately also has the same kind of beard i i didn't know when i decided to go for this one it's weird that's probably enough to be said about that

19:06 um subtitles on youtube uh you can you should be able to just turn these on but i can have a look at that uh again if if it doesn't work that's probably left over from before uh i have to blank on this i think i'm not sure i know spencer from criminal minds you have to explain the offside

19:29 okay the uh we'll talk about campus wire maybe that's a good point to uh say now i know this this slot has only been scheduled for 1 hour so we'll run till 5 pm sharp and some of you might have something right starting at 5. my hope is that many of you will not have something scheduled and you have a couple of minutes to join me in a in an informal session on zoom i'll send a link for that at the end of of of the lecture part it's essentially just a an informal um social meetup i i thought i'd introduce myself a little more informally in in that setup as opposed to um the one on youtube here and you have a chance to ask questions ask me about other famous football players and their relations to me or whatever and we can also have a look at campus wire at that point so i would i would defer the question till then in roughly half an hour

20:38 Prior Knowledge Survey

20:39 okay now you roughly know what the lecture will be structured i haven't talked about what we will cover but before we talk about that i actually want you to take a little test with me um so this is a pre-prior knowledge survey it is uh not an exam it will not be graded you do this anonymously um i'm sending the link over slido as a as a dummy question so uh you can you can vote on it or you cannot vote on it doesn't matter it's just so that you have the link and you can click on it and copy it out and open the site i think you will need essentially the remaining 30 minutes of the lecture slot to do this uh i want you to do this basically for two reasons um first of all i want to know what you know and there's a lot of questions in this uh in this prior knowledge survey that i don't think you will know and i don't think you have to know for this class but if i happen to find out that you do know this stuff i would approach some of the teaching differently so i know it's late in the day it's it was the first day of lectures and

22:00 you're probably a bit exhausted so am i uh but please try to focus and do your best on on this and yeah try to answer the questions as well as you can one important point is each of these questions has a an option for i don't know so please don't guess if you really don't know the answer to one of the questions just tick don't know as i said it's anonymous it's not graded it's just for my information the second reason why i want you to do this is so that you see what others know or maybe what others don't know either i think that's that's helpful and it will it's it's always helpful to get data as opposed to guessing that's that's to summarize it um yeah so i would suggest

23:00 you head out for this i'll leave the live stream running but turn myself off for now and if you have any troubles just shoot up the audience q a

23:23 and um i think we meet again here five two 5 alright hi welcome back uh the slider chart says 30 people have voted but on google it shows actually 39 responses so probably some of you have just not clicked on the slider poll either way the the google forms will stay open for a couple more days at least till wednesday when i would like to very briefly discuss the results of this but again as i said don't stress out too much i know there were lots of questions that probably were tough for you and that's on purpose i wanted to uh to test out how much you know about this a couple of people were asking questions during the time and it seemed to work fine i don't know if you've seen you can also reply on slido and i've tried to reply to some of the questions there in in text you can join campus wire with this code but there's also a link on the module website so

24:57 maybe it's worthwhile showing this so let me briefly do this um it's a bit small but i guess you can make it out so that's the that's the website for the module and this is

25:19 if you click on campus wire here it will bring you to the tool but to sign up you should use the link down here where it says please register and join campus wire if you click on that you shouldn't need the code that i sent the 5578 i think it should work just as is but in case it doesn't work let me know we can also discuss this again on zoom if you want we can use the the zoom social to just have a canva a campus wire join party in the olden days we used to have have installed parties linux installed parties were a thing when i started studying that was before everything was online and it doesn't really matter which os you're on but rather what browser you're using now i feel old so that's a good place to stop i guess and i would head over to zoom in a few minutes uh i will i will send the link over in a second but i wanted to give you a chance to ask any last questions that we should discuss for everyone and again remember we'll meet again on wednesday

26:50 so the next dates for this week after today are on wednesday 11 a.m uh we meet again in the same setting you just click the same link again hopefully we'll all work the same and will be just as smooth as today or better and then we'll also start with some actual content