Looking Back - The First week

I am very pleased with our work in the first week.
There was almost 100% attendance. All students have very quickly adjusted to the method of online forms and shared documents. Finally most students seem to have adopted to reading the blog regularly and following the assignments and instructions from the blog. The Teachning Assistants are very involved and have shown excellent initiative. I am sure, very soon we all will get adjusted to this style of working and collaborating.

I started out with a questionnairre because I wanted to find out what you already know and avoid wasting time on teaching something that you already know. You overwhelmingly voted that you already know Gmail and Voice communication.
Following graph shows what you told us,

Almost every one is very good user of GMail as well as Chat and VoIP solutions. This was expected but I was not expecting such overwhelming confidence. More than 50 students said they are not just good users, they are experts. So, we decided we will just show some advanced features of GMail and start introducing you LinkdIn and Delicious which many of you had indicated you dont know.

To decide which advanced features in GMail we should cover, we got another poll to pin point the your weak areas. We got following results.

While Communications as overall, the students had indicated their knowledge index at about 4 out of 5, the knowledge index for advanced features dropped to 2.3. Again we find some features are already well known by students, so we eliminated even those and then the Knowledge index drops to only 1.9. I have therefore explained you and given exercises for only those very few features that are not known by most of you.

In the following week, our assessment will reveal how much you have learned.

We could not start Lab sessions because we can not have Lab sessions unless classroom sessions are complete and on Thursday we had this problem of lack of communication. Many of you thought we have Lab sessions on Saturday. I hope now all of you are quite clear about the schedule. All Lab sessions are on Monday (11AM-IB, 3:30PM-Sec A),Tuesday (3:30 Sec-B) and Thursday(3:30 Sec C)

Unfortunately, in Seminar hall, we do not get proper WiFi, and we will have to live with it. Labs will be in Computer Lab with wired desktops. So, in Lab sessions I am hopeful of not having any internet access issues.

Look forward for a good week ahead,

AR