Edward Brown edited future-steps.tex  about 9 years ago

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\section{Next steps}  \label{sec:next-steps}  The impression among the instructors is that the synchronization of lecture and lab topics, and especially the focus on statistics in the first half of the semester, has improved the quality of student work in the lab. Finding the right balance of topics in the lecture will require further iterations of the course. In addition, further revisions of the course can take advantage of the newly written course notes to increase peer-to-peer instruction within the class. Building on these improvements requires archiving the course materials in an easily distributable format; improving the gain in student learning requires us to measure that gain.  The material for the lectures, including syllabus, notes, \ipython\ notebooks, pre-test, and quizzes, is currently stored in a private git repository. At the end of the Spring 2015 semester, the notes and \ipython\ notebooks will be forked into a public \href{https://github.com/}{GitHub} repository;  exams and solutions will remain in a private repository and will be available upon request.  This both archives the course materials and provides a platform for easy dissemination.  Based on our experience with this semester's edition, we will expand the pre-test to include problems on statistics and ``foundational'' topics in astronomy, such as the inverse square law flux. These pre-test questions are asked again on the final to provide a measurement of the student gain (eq.~\ref{eqn:gain}). This allows us to assess how well we are doing.