Which did you prefer overall: lectures or cartoons? (1 means strong pref for lectures, 4 means weak pref for cartoons)

Which contributed more to your learning?

Which did you enjoy more?

Which was more effective in preparing you for homeworks, projects, and exams?

Did you rewatch cartoons to help you prepare for class assignments/exams?

How many times (on average) did you watch each cartoon?

How much do you agree with the following statement: I wish the entire class was lectures only.

I wish the entire class was cartoons only.

I prefer a mix of cartoons and lectures.

I believe a cartoon-based class could be just as good as a traditional lecture class, with the right level of student support.

If you said Yes or Unsure to the last question, what specifically is needed (if anything) to make a cartoon-based class compare favorably to a traditional lecture class?

Any other suggestions for next time the class is offered?

Perhaps more office hours than you would have for a regular lecture class

support for homework / explanation of how homeworks are connected to lecture/cartoon materials

I wish the cartoons are offered before lecture and then students can come to lecture for questions

In general, my largest issue with this class was that both the lectures and the cartoons were watered down, compared to the lectures from previous quarters. I was able to understand the concepts taught in the cartoons and lectures at a high level, but when it came time to do the homework to apply them, I had to reference the previous class's slides, which had much more detail.

facilitate a better way of asking questions. The main benefit of being in lecture is the live interaction and discussion that happens.

The experiment is skewed in my opinion since while cartoon people could watch the cartoons as many times as they wanted, the lecture people had to go off slides that had few notes.

Depth of material, enough level of details that allow students to be able to implement what's learned in class

Personally I think the combination of cartoons and old-style lectures would be nice. Cartoon is good for motivating the topic and high-level understanding. And old-style lecture fills in the technical details that allow us to be able to implement what we learned and do something in practice.

I may just be old fashioned but I feel like I learned way better when I had lectures instead of cartoons. I understood the material much more in-depth and it was nice to ask real-time questions. However, I REALLY enjoyed the cartoons for exam prep and homework help / project help. The cartoons were super helpful when I needed a reminder on how something worked or needed to review a concept. They were much more helpful than the slides in that context. What I would personally suggest is that you provide both in class lectures and cartoons for students. They can decide whether they want to come to in-person lecture or watch the cartoons but all materials are accessible to everyone. You can also use the cartoons as recordings if someone misses class. I think the cartoons are great for when you already know the material / are introduced to it, but aren't actually learning it. I would to lectures but then use the cartoons as supplemental in my ideal situation for this class.

I think discussions in lecture also help me learn that topic.

Homework/practice problems to allow the ideas to sit in more

After watching cartoons, lectures seem pretty slow-moving and dull. It seems like tangentially related questions filled up most of class time.

I think a cartoon based class still needs written resources to refer back to. Learning initially with the videos is nice, but having slides of the contents is needed in my opinion

Opportunity to ask questions about certain parts of the cartoon.

There were some good Ed posts from the instructors that helped me focus on what I needed to know for the midterm.

Opportunities for questions as well as maybe some slides for additional explanations for complicated concepts

We are paying thousands of dollars a quarter to be educated by someone who is effective at teaching the subject matter, not to watch YouTube videos. The Unity learning stuff is free to a large extent, so if the course that we are paying for cannot provide more value than what we can do at home, then that is, in my book, a bad class. I'm sure a cartoon-based class could be just as good as a bad lecture-based class, but I think we deserve good lecture-based classes, and those should provide more than the cartoons.

Ed thread where students can ask questions pertaining to each cartoon/topic

The cartoons were amazing for reviewing, but I felt that the content didn't sit as well on the first watch compared to lectures. So, I think that a combination of both would be pretty effective. I see the cartoons as a more efficient replacement for the times that I would want to watch a lecture recording.

Lectures are able to go into much more detail than cartoons are, but the cartoons are great at introducing everything. Maybe for each topic have a cartoon to watch as an overview / review, and a 10 - 15 minute traditional style lecture video going over equations, problems, applications, and anything else that should be mentioned that the cartoon could not fit.

A lot of students were concerned about the midterm and how the cartoons might affect their performance on it, and I've heard from students looking to take the class next year that they are put off by the class having a midterm when it hasn't in the past. I understand that the midterm is important to gauge how well cartoons perform vs lectures, but the word "midterm" is kind of scary. Perhaps the midterm could be reframed as a participation thing and students get points just for showing up and taking the exam, knowing that it is part of the study and that their grade will not be effected by the efficacy of cartoon learning. A drawback to this would be that students won't spend as much time preparing for the exam by reviewing the lecture slides or rewatching the cartoons, but it would be a lot less stressful that way.

The lecture slides for lecture-only portions could contain more label text to guide the review process (don't just use the cartoon slides, since a lot of narration is not in the slides itself). For cartoons, sometimes it should explore deeper in terms of formulas to help with assignments.

I feel like a mix of cartoons and lecture would be great. The cartoons are very efficient but a little fast. Lectures give us the opportunity to dive a little deeper and clear up anything that we did not understand. Overall, I think I retained more information from the lectures than I did from the cartoons.

Have a Q&A to clarify or expand the topics

Lecture time could be OH time and Q&A to supplement the cartoons

I think the cartoons was perfect. Maybe having captions in cartoons would be helpful

Some easy way to ask questions should be easily available, such as through Ed or with office hours.

If this cartoon vs lecture comparison is ever made again, I would prefer if the lectures are recorded as well or for the pptx to be shared instead of only the pdf version. This would make it easier to review certain concepts that cannot be seen by only looking back at slides. I found the splices slides harder to review since the lecture used many animations of points and resulting splines moving around. It wasn't too clear what was happening in each slide in pdf form.

I think it very much depends on the syllabus. If the course content requires intense exercise or memorizing, cartoon would not work

I feel both cartoon and lecture is needed and thought that since we have both there is no reason to limit students from the resouces they can get

There are a lot of questions during live lectures that are helpful to be answered. It could be possible to do a flipped-classroom approach where the content is delivered through high-quality cartoons, and then expanded upon and clarified in live lectures (possibly fewer than standard).

The cartoons are really great! I personally feel like the visualizations, fast pacing, and tight scripting make the course content more memorable. And the five-minute videos are a great bite-sized reference material later as well, compared to reviewing powerpoint slides or a 90-minute lecture recording.

Extra practice material to help apply the content we learn

Proof read some of the assignments (code, requirements). Otherwise, great new content!

Additional practice around the basics for what is being introduced in each cartoon, as to build a solid foundation, so if there is any confusion from the cartoon, it will arise in the simple questions and the student will then know to ask (before having to struggle with something more complicated, like in a project).

I feel like there are benefits to learning socially with other people, and while watching cartoons, I didn't really engage with others, which could be a downside. Of course a benefit of watching cartoons is that you can go at your own pace and rewatch sections that you don't understand as well, so it will be a challenge to have cartoons while also having social learning, and I'm not sure what the solution to that challenge would look like.

I think cartoons can be a good supplement to lectures, but they cannot replace lectures. These 5-minute videos are good for revisions but not for first-time learning.

I think more examples or a day or a way to answer any questions students have

The extra reading material to support cartoons

provide lectures and also cartoons at the same time

I was in group A and I thought that the last couple cartoons we were kind of confusing to understand. I think this may have been because these were slightly more complex topics and only going over them in short formats was a little difficult for me to understand. I work better when I spend more time with a subject, but I did necessarily enjoy watching a 5-minute cartoon over and over again to understand a topic. I do think though that the cartoons with more supplemental mateiral, such as more worksheets or in depth explanations of topics, help with the learning.

I think assigning small "knowledge checks" with the cartoons could help because with such short video to watch for each topic, it helps to have a reinforcement of what I just watched. I think it will help the students better remember what they watched.

I think that some of the math could’ve been explained a little more. Sometimes cartoons were a bit tough to follow if the math wasn’t explained.

I think that cartoons should be the main method of class with lectures that supplement them. I think it would be beneficial to have quizzes that are participation based so that we could ask questions as well as test our knowledge on the work. This would be helpful for test as well as hw. It would also be helpful if you used these quizzes as a way to supplement our learning in class.

Very strong question answering support since that's missing without lectures

more office hours from the instructor

Projects and homework are too hard and the specs really need improvement

It'd great to offer cartoons as sort of pre-lecture materials that students can watch beforehand. If the students feel like cartoons are enough, they don't need to come to lectures. Else, students can go and ask questions during traditional lectures. Personally, I learn a lot too by listening to other students asking questions. Ed is great but I believe interactive learning is still better.

Specifically, one needs very rapid response from TA's when questions arise. Perhaps one can put one's question as a comment that refers to a timestamp in the video so its easier for others to help.

Perhaps even more content? I feel like it covers too little. I would like to have the course paced at 5 cartoons per week.

One thing I found that may be helpful is to provide the slides along with the cartoon. Watching the cartoon is definitely a super engaging and efficient way to learn about the material, but it's a bit tricky to do reviews on them (since I find myself not willing to take notes on the 5-minute video)

Longer, more detailed cartoons with slides

More words on slides so they are a more helpful resource for studying after the lecture

Include slides with the cartoons so students do not have to try to shuffle through the video in order to find the visual/place they want.

I think the cartoons where really cool and helpful to see such clear animations for topics, but I felt like I lacked explanation or examples of equations and hwo to apply them.

I think text-based approaches are much easier to parse. A written log, side by side with the cartoons would be helpful so I could pause and read the dialogue. Secondly, the cartoons don’t go quite in depth enough for some topics. I think they need more content and less narrative.

I feel that the lack of time dedicated to the class each week was detrimental to my learning. Perhaps if I were more organized, I would enjoy the cartoon-only version of the class more. For future versions of the course, I suggest following this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3478431.3499353

While the cartoons do a good job of presenting the material, in my case, they seemed to decrease my engagement with course material. The above paper discusses how to increase engagement in online and in-person classes by creating groups — cohorts.

I hope we have both lectures and cartoons for the topic we learned.

I hope we have both lectures and cartoons for the topic we learned.