TC101 course review

--Originally published at Programming

As my last blog post of this semester I’m going to be reviewing my experience with the flipped learning TC101 course. I’m going to be completely honest by saying what I liked, what I didn’t like and give some suggestions that could help to improve the student’s experience as well as their desire to learn.

To start I want to thank ken for what he is trying to do. He’s encouraging people to learn by themselves by changing the traditional educational system that we have in our country. Technically he’s “breaking” TEC rules and imposing his own grading system (abolish grades) which is good! He wants people not to depend on a teacher to learn, he wants them to think out of the box and do research, find their own solution to problems and stay connected. He wants his students to work in pairs because that way they can learn from each other. This doesn’t mean that he won’t help you, he’s encouraging you to learn but if at some point you get stuck he’ll be always there to help you and make sure you understand the topic.

Now the video reviewing this semester’s TC101.

BONUS: Course Review #TC101

--Originally published at TEC GDL 2016

Dear Reader – Welcome to this blog post where I try to review my experience throughout the Programming course at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Campus Guadalajara).

In the beginning I would like to start with a small exercise:

Close your eyes and think about all the experiences you had when it comes to teachers grading your performances – no matter if it was a presentation, an essay or an exam.
When you think about this, try to focus on the emotions you felt in these moments and maybe ask yourself:
Did I deserve this specific grade? Is a teacher capable to decide how each of their 30 (or more) students has learned throughout the past months and grade them by using multiple choice questions?

Our teacher Ken Bauer probably also faced these questions and in his development as a teacher there must have been a point where he said: Hold on! Isn’t it the task of my students to learn as much as they want to learn and set their limits and ambitions themselves? Shouldn’t they be able to learn in the pace they see fit best with their own time and learning capabilities?

This is how I see the use of the #AbolishGrading policy that our teacher introduced and which I haven’t seen anywhere so far. But after this course I have to ask: Why don’t we see this more often? This policy asks for the students to grade themselves based on a specific rubric, given out to all students before the partial exams. The students are entirely free in the pace they want to work in and the class itself was really interactive because each student had an individual online blog where they were able to cover the 22 so-called mastery topics that Ken identified as the most basic concepts

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Course Review

--Originally published at Codebuster

Here we are, at the end of the race, the literal last classes of the semester. As always, it feels a little bitterweest. The undeniable yearning for classes and finals to end mixd with the knowledge that a whole semester has passed in the blink of an eye. So it’s time to look back and reflect on this past months, what we’ve learned and we could have done better.

Specifically in programming class there are a couple of things I would have tried to improve. Juggling the other courses that had a more conventional way of grading was sometimes easier and sometimes I believe I did procrastinate in the creation of blog posts. However that does not mean I did’nt learn. On the contrary, I feel like I learned a lot.

I did learn the course materials, I had my fair share of mistakes when programming, still do, but I feel like I learned the concepts, not just applying them in certail problems.

On the other hand, I feel like I learned a lot about what the learning process should actually be, I learned to look for resources myself, especially at this age where all we need is a cellphone or computer to access worldwide information. It was a fun,different, sometimes nervewraking experience. Below I leave a quick video summarizing this.