Created: 19.10.2022, Last edited: 22.10.2022

Our third webinar was a little different than the first two. Instead of creating a lesson, we had to evaluate our colleague's blogs. We had to do our assessment before the webinar and prepare to give feedback during the session.

PREPARATION

In preparation for the event I reviewed my blog posts and made some modifications: I wanted them to be actually useful to those reading them, so I extended the reflection sections and linked to my past teaching experience as well. I also included those suggestions coming from our tutors.

I also evaluated two of my colleagues' blogs:

They were nice to read. I feel closer to my colleagues now, after learning some of their struggles and thought processes.

WEBINAR

The webinar started with a learning session, where we learned about assessment bias. It was a very interactive session where we were split into groups each focusing on different types of biases. Our group had to consider:

Dunning Kruger Effect
Barnum Effect
Framing Effect

For reference we had the following image:

Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/50-cognitive-biases-2.png

I was already familiar with the effects beforehand, but, nonetheless, it was very interesting to see what my colleagues had to say about them. I really liked when my colleagues pointed out how we are experiencing the Barnum Effect at the end of every webinar when our tutors give general comments and many of us always think it is us who they are talking about. I also liked my colleagues' example of the Framing effect using this image:

Source: https://marketingpsych683922759.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/what-you-say-and-how-you-say-it...

Afterwards all the groups gave a brief summary of what happened during their session. I liked learning about the IKEA effect and now I see it everywhere, like when my students claim their code is better (pretty much because it is written by them).

BLOG FEEDBACK SESSION

We then moved on to discuss our blogs. I don't want to comment on my colleagues blogs publicly here, so I will just point out here the issues we identified on my own blog. These were:

Some links not clickable
Some links do not open in separate tab
Not enough: "what was difficult?"

After the session I modified my blog to include some improvements to these.

The final part of the program was a teacher's development plan presentation given by a former student. I particularly liked the section about the short programming courses (Python) tailored at adults looking for work, and the success stories of those who got a position at Nokia afterwards.

REFLECTION

Feedback is important. We rarely do something for ourselves; we do it for others! And if we don't listen to feedback, our result will be heavily sqewed (biased) towards what we think is good, not what is good in a general sense. When giving feedback, the negative parts should be balanced with positive aspects so as to be encouraging to the student. Negative feedback should be constructive and give advice on how to improve (not just point out the flaws). We must learn to accept feedback, even when mostly negative. Fact of the matter is that if we don't listen to feedback and accept that we need to change, we never improve.

At my work, most of my feedback has been positive, however, I will choose one negative aspect and explain how I considered it over the years. The comment was regarding the quality of my lecture recordings: that they are difficult to download and hard to navigate.

In the beginning, I used to record the lectures .mp4 files and uploaded them to university server. This was a problem for students attending remotely, especially from abroad because it took a long time to download the content. So, then, I switched to using YouTube as the video platform. Feedback improved, however, negative things were still that the videos were too long (over 1 hour) making content hard to traverse. Following year, I divided the videos into small sections. Here is an example of a long video:

The same lecture was split into 4 parts the following year:

Since then, I learned that YouTube updated to support adding chapters to long videos and nowadays I upload even really long videos, like this 12 hour one with no real complaints:

Webinar 3