Teaching reflections, end of semester

A note to my future self before next year's prep.

What worked

The distributed systems module benefited from moving the Raft material earlier. Students engaged with the consensus problem before they had been taught it formally, which made the eventual formal treatment land. Will repeat.

The OS coursework — implement a copy-on-write fork — was harder than I expected and the pass rate suffered. But the students who succeeded learned more than from any previous assignment. I will keep it but with better scaffolding.

What did not work

Live coding in databases module. I have done this for years and it is increasingly clear that it does not serve the majority of students well. Either they are following ahead of me and bored, or behind and lost. Will move to recorded code-walkthroughs with timed pauses for questions.

The reading group for the masters cohort had four reliable attendees out of twelve. Either the papers were wrong or the format was. Probably the format. Try a fortnightly cadence next year and switch to one paper per session, properly discussed, instead of three sampled.

To plan for

• Revise the algorithms exam — Q4 had a 18% mean. Either the question was unfair or the teaching missed something. Investigate.
• The networks module needs HTTP/3 properly integrated rather than bolted on.
• Stop using the institutional VLE for code samples. It mangles whitespace.