Student Feedback

Students in Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) use a 5-point scale to rank instructors on course evaluations. Below is a reproduction of student scores on key evaluation categories along with write-in feedback from TA-ing Columbia MECE E4602: "Introduction to Robotics". (Full copies of teaching evaluations are available upon request)

In Fall 2020, students were beginning their first full semester run in a fully-remote, non-classroom learning environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Columbia MECE E4602: "Introduction to Robotics" followed a Flipped Classroom model, in which all lecture content was pre-recorded and made available to students ahead of the synchronous live sessions (US Eastern time) that were devoted to discussion and problem-solving. These sessions were also recorded and made available for review each week. Extensive written handouts were designed to be viable substitutes to watching the video lectures. The focus of the course was programming projects to implement concepts on simulated robots, which each featured an autograder module that enabled students to self-evaluate as many times as they wished before submitting their final code for grading. The online message forum Piazza was the main method for students to interact with each other and with instructors, and we encouraged students to post questions on class material (but not code snippets) so that everyone could see and benefit from student- and instructor-contributed answers.

My main duties as Teaching Assistant were helping students understand and troubleshoot their assignments (including debugging whether issues were related to conceptual understanding or instead to their home computing environments), via Piazza messaging, email, and Zoom office hours. We found multimodal and flexible communication methods to be particularly crucial for accommodating students having varying timezones, computing resources, and other pandemic-related complications.

Overall Quality

"Ava was always there to answer my questions and was very knowledgeable. I could not have gotten through this class without her."

Knowledgeability

Approachability

Communication

"[We] only interacted via piazza - very quick and helpful responses!"