The lab instructor for the Thursday morning lab repeatedly showed up
at 9:00am or later - even though the lab was scheduled to start at
8:40am. In addition, he did not offer much help overall. He was more
interested in his own schoolwork or chatting on AOL's IM than helping
students. In my opinion, this was very inadequate. When learning new
programming languages it can be almost impossible to figure
everything out from the lecture only. I think the lab should have
been of more help for the finer details. I believe that is why
students stopped going to lab - not as much because they wanted to do
the assignments from home - but because the lab instructor did not
offer the level of help required to make it worth going to the lab.
However, overall, my learning experience was not affected by the
quality or ability of the lab instructor. I managed to find the help
I needed elsewhere (i.e. online discussion boards, fellow students,
and Dr. Chen office hours.) |