Semesters taught: Fall 2020, Fall 2021
Discussion:
PHY 105 is a large-enrollment, GE course which was taught completely online during the Fall 2020 semester. No CTEs were administered for PHY 105 during the Fall 2020 semester, as per department policy for that semester.
For both years I have taught PHY 105, I have taught it using a team-teaching method, with Sean Nolan and Dave Kornreich. While that was very experimental and rather last minute during the Fall 2020 semester, given that courses were reassigned in August, we had more time to plan and execute this strategy for the Fall 2021 semester. As with any strategy, there are pros and cons, and I would like to speak briefly some of the specific trade-offs in the team-teaching approach.
Pros: One of the main goals of team-teaching is ensuring consistency of experience, terminology, and standards across multiple sections of a course. By splitting up the responsibility for content development we were able to deliver a range of new exercises and supporting material that were, in all reality, very well designed. Students absolutely received fair and uniform assessment, which is a thing that I believe we should continue to work toward.
Cons: On a personal basis, having more free time in 2/3 of the semester was a great boon to productivity. On the other hand, it was really quite exhausting to teach the full load of PHY 105 courses. On the whole, I am not convinced that there is a net win here, though also not convinced that it isn’t worth it. More importantly, we should consider the student experience. Based on the comments we have received, students really do not like this organizational strategy, even when well executed, and I suspect that we should take this as an experiment and return to the normal pattern.
Take-aways: While the team-teaching approach may not have delivered the big win in student experience that we were hoping for, I have no doubt that it was an experiment worth trying. What came out of this was a slew of new teaching materials and, most important of all, this strategy required three professors to closely collaborate and thereby share and develop new teaching strategies. I fully believe that I learned more about alternative methods of instruction in that one semester than in any prior. We would be wise to consider how to gain the benefits of this experience in other ways.
General course information:
Fall 2021 syllabus
Fall 2020 syllabus
Selected course materials:
Recordings of in-class sessions:
- Trig review
- Introduction to vectors
- Velocity vectors, part 1
- Velocity vectors, part 2
- Vector math
- The dangers of driving in the winter
- Introduction to spring forces
- Introduction to uniform circular motion
- Some uniform circular motion examples
- Rotational kinematics
- Introduction to the Work-Energy Theorem
- The Work-Energy Theorem in 2D
Lecture slides:
- Introduction to vectors
- Velocity vectors
- Vector math
- Force analysis, part 4
- Force analysis, part 5
- Force analysis, part 6
- Introduction to Rotation
- Rotational Kinematics
- Wheels and the Moment of Inertia
- Work-Energy Theorem, part 1
- Work-Energy Theorem, part 2
- Work-Energy Theorem, part 3
Miscellaneous notes:
- Worked example of the golfer problem
- Worked example of free-body diagram construction
- Worked example of force analysis with tension
- Additional notes on uniform circular motion