One of the biggest challenges in any course is managing the limited time available. The UMass semester is configured so that there are always 13 Mondays, 13 Tuesdays, 13 Wednesdays, etc. For a course that meets MWF, this schedule means there are 36 class sessions of 50min each. This is a really short amount of time to cover optics, electricity, magnetism, and modern physics as prescribed by the Physics 132 official course description. One way to save a little time each day, while simultaneously making the course more equitable is through the use of daily “broadcasts.” These emails, which I have been sending after each class since the start of the pandemic, contain both a summary of the day’s material and any announcements. After five-semesters of refinement, I feel I have a sense of the key features.
Hello all,
The slides from yesterday’s class and the Moodle quizzes are up.
Summary of the Day’s Physics
By the end of today’s class, you should be able to…
- Draw the ray diagram for any mirror setup.
- Categorize the image as:
- Real vs. Virtual:
- Do the light rays pass through the image –> real.
- If not –> virtual.
- Erect vs. Inverted (or 𝑚>0 vs 𝑚<0).
- Bigger vs. Smaller than the object (|𝑚|<1 vs. |𝑚|>1).
- Real vs. Virtual:
- Solve for the image position from the object position and focal length.
Announcements
- You should now be able to do the Toggerson-Unit2-AdditionalPractice2 Mirrors Practice. As described in the additional practice folder, for the “Mirrors Practice” and “Lens Practice” you may need to scale everything down to get it to fit on a piece of paper to draw a ray diagram. If you scale everything by the same factor, you will be fine. For example, if the problem says an object is 20cm from a mirror with a focal length of 100cm, this obviously will not fit on a piece of paper! However, you can scale down by a factor of 5 so that 20cm becomes 4cm and 100cm becomes 20cm. This will now fit on your paper. To interpret, you can scale back up. Say you find, in the prior example, that the image is 3cm from your scaled down diagram. You could then multiply this by 5 to get the correct value: 3cm becomes 15cm.
- Monday’s quiz will be similar to today’s but for lenses.
- I know folks are curious about the final collaborative exam grades. I am working on getting them propagated around (this takes some Excel magic). I will let you know when they are ready.
Have a good weekend and enjoy the nice weather!
-Dr. T.
As you can see, these broadcasts began by just including logistical announcements: quiz topics, exam signups, and the like. Sending this information via email has several advantages. First, and the motivating benefit, is time: when the announcements are sent via email, the instructor gains the few minutes of class time each day that would have otherwise been spent on simple logistical information. The broadcast can also serve as an indicator: I send the broadcast when the raw video is ready, the slides are posted, and the Moodle-based quiz is ready to go. Students the know when these materials are ready.
In addition to the temporal benefit, putting announcements in an email is also more equitable. Students who could not attend class for whatever reason, or are engaging with the course in an asynchronous mode, still have access to the information. Moreover, having the announcements in an email ensures that there are no “I didn’t get that” excuses. Like many universities, UMass policy explicitly states that students are expected to read their email. One key discovery over the past year is to use a dedicated Moodle forum for these broadcasts. I have tried integrating them with several other student communication channels (Moodle forums, Slack, Discord), and student feedback clearly indicated a preference for a dedicated delivery method. I now use the default Announcements [link]forum on Moodle. The student desire for a delivery framework exclusive to broadcasts was that having a dedicated forum made it easier to search and review the notes from particular days. In this vein, I now subject my broadcasts with both the course day (Unit X – DY) and the relevant calendar date.
While the broadcasts began as just logistical announcements, during the pandemic I began to add a “Summary of the day’s physics” as well. The first motivation for this addition was to ensure that I did summarize each day’s class. First, like most instructors, I recognize the importance of summary. Also like most instructors, I am terrible at actually doing it. An email provides an opportunity outside of the pressures of class time to ensure that I adequately summarize.
Another motivation for adding summaries to the broadcast email was in response to a frequent student comment in evaluations. A small fraction of students were commenting that they were unclear as to which material in class was the most important for exams. Summaries in the daily broadcasts help address this suggestion.
Finally, adding summaries has benefit to future instructors of the course, including myself. This past semester, I changed the format of the broadcast summaries to be written as formal objectives. This change in language was suggested by Chris Ertl in our own department. While the students do not, I think, care about the language, writing the summaries as formal objectives simplifies the compilation of a formal list of objectives as well as explaining the pace of the course to other instructors.
Student response to these daily broadcasts has been positive. In the words of one student during the Spring 2022 ForwardFOCUS, “I loved receiving end of the day updates to help us keep on track. Since we are taking in a lot of information, I get pretty forgetful so having these little reminders definitely helps.” Another student commented about the summaries specifically, “The email recaps were helpful for me to check over what I learned in class and make sure I understand everything.”