This approach to teaching is very new to me too. How would you suggest I improve time spent in class?
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I would say the worksheets are a very good idea, its just 50 minutes is not enough for a lot of the worksheets. If the course structure was changed to one 2h tutorial and a longer worksheet instead of two 50 min classes it would be better in my opinion. 
the worksheet is effective. But the content is too much in several sections.
Keep doing this, I think it's great
The in-class assignments were very useful for myself and helped me as a review tool for the midterm and exam. I don't think this needs to be changed very much. However, there were certain classes where I did feel a little rushed with the content. I prefer to learn at my own pace which is why I like assignments but this provided a good alternative and I was able to learn at my usual pace for the most part. I also think that the third lecture period should be incorporated as a time where a more traditional style of teaching is given to reinforce the concepts from the videos. 
I suggest that hands-on activities can be a great way of improving the class, since knowledge about any material is known to be best conveyed through hands-on experiences.
The best part of this approach is that we will never miss a lecture as they are online. However, as   graduate students we just take few courses and our performance will be judged according to their grades ( for example for finding a  job) and people have high level of expectation from graduate students. Therefore, we have very small room to make  mistakes. I think the grading method should be different for grad students. Rather than pushing them to answer a lot of questions in a limited time I will recommend to face them with more challenging problems or projects but in a longer time.
Finally, I have to say the content of this course was super useful for me.
Utilize all three class time slots in one week.

First class for old style teaching of relatively difficult concepts (theory based).

Second class for an in-class activity, which is heavily reliant upon watching supplementary videos that contain the important examples/application of theory. (Have a simple quiz before this class that everyone does at home)

Third class have an online quiz (more challenging) in the first half of the class, which can be done in 2 or 3 people. Then take it up directly afterwards in the second half. The instant feedback might be better for learning? 

Work sheets work fine, the scratchcards you had work well too.

The worksheets were extremely effective for learning the material. One thing you may want to look at is possibly taking some time each week to address questions that were done poorly by the class as a whole on previous quizzes. There may be something that wasn't covered well in the video or textbook that could use further clarification. 
I think the class activities were good and interactive. I think difficulty could be increased but that may cause time to complete them to increase. 
When covering more difficult topics or when learning something new, you could do practice lead practice questions with the entire class.  This was done a few times during the class and I found it very helpful. 
I would suggest not making every class an activity, but a combination of learning and activity. I realize this is not easy to do in a 50 minute lecture though. I would hate to bring back something as silly as the iClicker, but a short in-class quiz always seemed to help me. This is because I make a choice of what I think is the right answer, and immediately find out if I was wrong or right (which I feel builds on my learning). As opposed to completing an activity, and then looking up what I did right and wrong, and trying to remember my own though process behind it.
I think the worksheets were great for class time. It discouraged people from skipping class as their friends were counting on them to show up. The worksheets also served to refresh and solidify the concepts learnt in the videos and quizzes the night before.
Maybe a lecture once a week or every few weeks could be run to summarize concepts and take up any questions. Since the material is covered extensively in class, these lectures could be interactive, consisting primarily of solving problems as a class, similar to how you taught 4g. I enjoyed the worksheets and I believe that they did a goof job of summarizing the concepts. I do believe however that 3 may have been too many per group as sometimes it felt like one person was excluded or just not participating, and that the work could be sufficiently completed in pairs. 
Worksheets were really helpful and I thought that your approach to the class worked really well for me.  I had strong group members though, and I can see scenarios where they might be a little frustrating.  The class activities that involved the competitions were REALLY fun and unique, it would be amazing if more classes incorporated this approach but I imagine not everybody feels the same way I do about it. 
I think duration of class was less than it should be. May be if there were 10-15 mins. more, then it would help to learn more. Otherwise you also have to rush through things.
I think case studies/tutorial type problem are also effective in addition to worksheet. For example a problem or two can be given in the beginning of the class, students get to work on the problem for 20-30 minutes. Then the questions are taken up at the end.

I thought time spent in class was fairly effective.
I would have preferred more regular lectures in class. It would have been good to have a lecture for half the class and a short quiz to be completed in groups for the other half. I also believe it would have been better to have a maximum of two people per group rather than 3. There were times where questions were being split between 3 people, this defeats the purpose of learning together. 
- work sheets are a good idea, but maybe make them shorter as there was many times where my group and I felt pressured for time to have it finished.
Have typical lecturing style and then weekly videos for extra application problems or theory that contains tricky material.
I think the number of questions in the class activities should be reduced.Maybe by having that other day of the week we did not have to come to class this term.Because having so many questions made the class activities so rushed and so hard to discuss with the other and learn better.
Since the videos are intended to take the place of in-class lecturing, the worksheets and group work is about the best use of class time that there is. However, in my experience, the course material delivered in class (several of the classes, or parts of them) was far and away the most useful classes of the term as far as in-class experience goes. 

The worksheets (generally) were fairly fundamental reviews of the course material that was covered in the quizzes, and didn't do much to extend the concepts (some exceptions, such as using the matrix form to solve least squares). 

While it may perhaps seem redundant, a brief (5-10 minute recap) of the videos from the instructor at the start of class time may be useful to get a (slightly) different & more traditional take on the course material. In my experience, in each lecture there was more than ample time to complete the handouts regardless. 
I think that in general the time spent in class was well done, although I think I would have benefited a bit more by having more in-class lectures rather than always having to do the worksheets. At the same time, I think that the worksheets are very effective, and there is a good amount of pressure on the students to complete the work in the allotted time. 

I would encourage the continuity of the in-class activities. I would also strongly suggest if we could access the videos before time so the time spent in class time would be more beneficial. 
In my opinion, I prefer the typical style of lecturing. The online videos were very helpful, but I feel like I concentrate more when I am in class rather than watching a video. Instead, maybe do class activities once a week and have more assignments; do class lectures twice a week.
Worksheets (like Lecture 04A) were good for introducing new topics. I enjoyed doing the response surface model optimization activities, but they felt a bit rushed. 
-25 mins of lecture and 25 mins of class activities
-class activities should be held in the last 25 mins so if people are late they can still do the class activities in group
I liked the class activities, but would have liked a little more problem solving directed by the instructor.
The in-class activities were sort of redundant as they were quite similar to the pre-class quizzes. A better utilization of the class time would be covering common problematic topics and ending with short quizzes, with interactive lecturing on practical use of the statistics knowledge. The videos were reasonably practical, but a similar theme in the lectures would increase the level of understanding.
I like the idea of the worksheets but felt rushed doing them a lot of the time. Maybe more time spent going through the worksheet as a class. 
worksheets were useful, I would continue using them in class time.
The worksheets were very useful and definitely motivated me to come to every single class. I think that occasional in-class quizzes may have been useful, because I found myself sometimes rushing through or not putting much effort into the on-line quizzes because they were worth so few marks. In-class quizzes with higher weighting would have motivated me to study harder than the on-line quizzes did. 
I think a two hour class would be better. Then you could give a mini-lesson (like you did in some classes), but less rushed. The activity could still be aimed to be completed in 50 minutes, but this way students have more time to work on it if they are struggling (and not just rush to complete it). Students would also have more time to debate answers with each other, and more time to ask questions from the instructor.

I think a combination of lecturing and worksheets would have been best. If a few less worksheets were given and one or more assignments given that would be okay. I think topics like design of experiments, factorials, etc. could have been taught as a lecture style. But it was okay that most of the other material was provided through videos.
15 min reviewing important concepts, then allowing for the worksheets would be more useful. 
I thought the worksheets were great. The competitions were incredibly fun. It might be worthwhile to have a Q&A every once in a while to make sure everyone understands the important concepts.
I thought the worksheets were effective. However, a potentially useful idea is that after x amount of worksheets were completed, if there was a way to see which questions/topics were done poorly by the class on average, and then a class was spent taking up those questions, or specific topics.
I think it is a good way to have in class activities and worksheets, but I do feel pressured working on it in class and make sure I have answered all the questions with in 50 mins of class time. Sometimes, I am a little bit too rush and did not read the question properly and because in class activities is 15% of the grade as well, I want to do well and get good marks on it, lead to sometimes I do not ask question that often. 

I sometimes do prefer typical lecture style, so I can hear what other students questions because it might apply to me as well, but the worksheet just make me focus on getting it done rather than asking questions all the time to make sure I am clear with my confusions.

I know we work as a group, but sometimes your  group member starting to slack off or do not care anymore, it is hard to finish the worksheet by yourself and with high quality of answer. Or sometimes it is hard, if I am not clear with the some content from the video and I do not have a chance the post or ask someone before the class, then it will be challenging working through the worksheet.

Maybe, we can have a bit of recap time before class, just to clear out any questions that students are confuse maybe 10-15 mins and then start the worksheet then maybe it can be better, and make the work sheet a little bit shorter so we won't feel pressured on getting it done instead of understand it throughly. 

Maybe, set the marks of 5 per worksheet instead of 3, because the difference is a little bit to big 66% vs. 100%. and perhaps making a peer evaluation so that to ensure the group members are not slacking off and because we are sharing the same mark. I feel sometimes it is not fair in a way, because my group member sometimes barely do anything and sharing the marks I am getting. 

I suggest 10% overall on class activity worksheets, + 5% of individual small/short exercise done individual, maybe once every 2 weeks pop quiz to ensure that we are on track of the content.


Rather than having lecture time + class activity time, it would be a lot better to have one full lecture class to point out the really important stuff. I felt rushed and could not concentrate fully when lecture was given in between activities (in one class).
I would recommend to have more assignments instead of in-class tutorials as they have been more effective for me.

For in-class tutorials you could have each individual (or group) perform a more practical case study and apply the principles he/she learned in previous videos, by having a continuous 2 hour session. 

I liked the worksheets. However, I really liked the one lecture (using confidence intervals to assess if improvements have been made) where we filled out the worksheets as you lectured, and in the end there was an activity where we had to work in our groups and decide if the system with impellers was better than the system with a different set of impellers based on the confidence intervals. I think it speaks to the effectiveness of that lecture that I still remember most of the content without having reviewed it since the midterm. 
With this style of teaching, I really feel you need to make sure that the students are actually watching the videos and learning the material. 

Try to approach students randomly or systematically during our class time to see they are up to speed and that one person in the group isn't doing all the work. 
I would improve time spent in class by eliminating any in class lessons. Ideally, every lesson would be in video format. The entire class could be dedicated to the in-class activities. The in-class activities could be shorted for classes which announcements need to be made. These important announcements could at the end of class. 
The worksheets were effective but I think it would be better to have it once a week, while the other day can be used to go over the materials again. 

So we get the watch the videos during weekend, first class of the week you touch on some topics that some students couldn't understand from the videos and we do worksheets in the second class of the week. 
I think the best way to improve the time spent would be to briefly go over concepts taught in the videos or quiz questions.
I also think worksheets are one the best ways to learn, as long as the group is willing to put in the effort to finish the worksheet. This is primarily because of the group aspect, which involves important discussions and clarifications. Other group activities can be incorporated as well.
I think the assignment weightings should be moved to the in-class workshop content. 

The in-class content was fine, but the low-weighting on everything provided little incentive to achieve excellence. 

I loved the worksheets. My favourite classes, hands down, were the optimization challenges. Super fun and a great way to learn!
The work sheets were very helpful to understand the material. It would be nice to have a quick 5 minute review of the material covered, so that we know the most important concepts to study, having more mini challenges or competitions would be interesting. 
Would prefer to learn the material in class then practice it. I can practice on my own time.
I feel like the time spent in class was good. It would be nice to have a lecture every 1-2 weeks to just clarify all the concepts. Maybe every 2 weeks have that extra 3rd lecture to just go over concepts-maybe it could be optional. 
I believe two hour class (rather 1 hour class in two separate days) is required to complete the worksheet and still have time to clarify few concept that we may have after completing. I felt like I always wanted to take up the worksheet at the end of the class to make sure we understood the concept. I suggest having 2 hour class in one day, we can complete the worksheet without rush and allow each group to mark each others worksheet while taking up the solutions. Not only the worksheets gets completed but also marked and useful go over it during class time The problem is that I never looked into the solutions after class until studying for midterm 
In general, I really enjoyed  this technique, and I think it can keep us on focus during all the class time. It is really effective. Some minor adjustment in the length of questions.
Split the class time into half lecture and the rest worksheet which are done in class. This way you can go over they key concepts that are taught before and then the students will apply them afterwards. Some of the concepts are hard to grasp in the videos and it would be good if taught in class first so that if any student has problem can ask it during lecture time. This way every one is on the same page before filling out the worksheets. 
The worksheets can be given to us to work on at home in lower frequency and treated like assignments. Your lectures are always interesting and a lot of students I know and myself would prefer if you lectured concepts in class rather than having us come in and do activities.

The few classes you went over concepts were useful and if you did this every time this would be extremely helpful.


Shorten the work on the worksheets and give a small (maybe 10-15 minutes) lecture and example on the current topic. (Some of the classes were like this, and I liked those ones)

Don't have worksheets every class. I found some of them to be very tedious to complete. I think having some classes worksheets and others lectures would be very helpful. Halfway through the semester when we were really busy with other classes, we couldn't watch videos and thus couldn't complete worksheets. We would fall behind and it would be quite stressful. I think a good solution is to have lectures a few classes instead of having videos on those days.
I didn't mind the class activities. Most of the time the activities helped me understand the mistakes that I made on the online quiz.
I think worksheets are effective, but if they were too long and we didn't end up finishing them I would seldom go back at a later time and finish the exercises, so I think making each worksheet fit the 50 min time period better would be beneficial 
From what I experienced, it was a little difficult to have everyone involved at the same time on a worksheet as a lot of work is done on one computer or written by one scribe. I think I would prefer working in pairs instead so I can be much more involved in exactly what is going on and get more out of the exercise. Having three people to a group actually compromised communication despite having an extra mind. This perhaps may also be of an issue with the room set up as it was quite crowded.
I prefer typical style of teaching, where the prof lectures on the chalk board with examples. 
Having a review class once a week/every other week instead of worksheets where the concepts covered were reviewed and allowed for input from the class may have helped.
I think highlighting key points from the course videos related to that class at the beginning of each class would be a little helpful. 
It would be better if half of the classes were just for teaching while the other half of the classes were for exercises
I would focus more on the topics later in the course, i.e. given them more classes, than the topics in the beginning as they are easier.
Maybe make the class assignments a little shorter so the class is not rushed to just get the answer and submit it






I wished somedays were lecture and no class activities. I was getting exhausted doing the class activities. Lectures would have helped me understand the material better. I believe there should be a balance between lecture and class activities in the future.

1) Post videos and quizzes few days before class rather than the night before class.
2) More examples are needed to practice and instead of cancelling one of the lectures keep that open as a tutorial.  
I am more of a traditional student. I would prefer the material to be taught in class. However, if uploading videos are the way to go, I would recommend more practice problems in class. This way I would learn the material better. The downside of the workshops is that I almost never went back to check the solutions. I would recommend more practice problems in class with current workshop questions being lumped into assignments. These assignments can be short and weekly, and individual.  
I would prefer if you taught the tricky math stuff in class. In the DOE part neither the videos nor the textbook do a good job in that part.
This is going to be VERY long, so I apologize in advance.
First of all, it is worth mentioning that this is also new to the students. Taking that into account, we have to realize that there is a good chance that students are not ready for this approach, meaning that the lecturer might not be at fault. Furthermore, I know for a fact that the government of Ontario is pushing for more classes to be structured like this, as mentioned in their education framework. So, it is essential for us to be more proactive. McMaster is late at doing so.
With all of that being said, I think the method used to teach this class was not effective. It was poor. I share this sentiment with ALL of the students I have talked to. I think it really comes down to the fact that this is just too new for us. However, somethings could be done in a much better way by the lecturer, especially the classes. I believe they are really not effective for many students. Having group activities in class does not expose the students more to the professors experience and knowledge. Using the only two hours they have with the lecturer on doing exercises that could easily be done at home costs them a lot.
I strongly believe that the class time should be discussion/lecture based. I understand why some students thought that they liked it since it provided them with the opportunity to solve questions which eventually means they will get higher marks as their time in class is utilized towards practising the method by which they will tested (i.e. solving questions). The reality is that many students value the mark more than the knowledge, therefore, many will argue for keeping the structure as it stands since their objective is maximized. However, for those who are after the knowledge and learning experience that objective is not maximized during lecture hours. Many students want the question solving to be done at home for assignments, quiz, etc. And lecture time for discussion, explanation and expansion on knowledge. The question that needs to be asked is what is the objective of this course? is it to give the students high grades or to provide them with tools that sharpen their understanding of the material.
I understand why some would argue that solving problems would enhance understanding. That statement is definitely true. However, solving problems could be done at home or anywhere, zero supervision is needed for that. However, explaining the material and providing real life experience and knowledge could only be done through discussion, that could be virtual or real. However, human-human discussion provides much more value than virtual, and human-human discussion provides more value to overall course objective than solving problems.