Ok, kind of awkward writing feedback on this, but a few observations of my own for future reference or whatever:
– more overview of where the course is headed in the first couple of weeks: introduce linguistic and cultural evol before going in depth about biology to give people some questions to think about during the more detailed analysis of evolutionary biology.
– heavier workload at the beginning rather than end, as all other courses seem to go crazy in the last month, and thus the amount of effort available towards the course dwindles towards the end. Conversely, guest lecturers become less available towards the end too, so this is still a bit of a struggle. Perhaps spread out student-led presentations a little more as opposed to doing all at the very end. MURC timing is awkward but little could be done about that.
– MURC presentations seemed to be well received — was considered good opportunity to practice speaking/presentation skills. Was said to be pulled off well as a group — that is, perhaps each person’s presentation was quite short and skimpy on the detail, but the overall panel made up for it due to group cooperation. Slightly longer talks still woudl’ve been better.
– a lot of time was spent discussing administrative issues, which is the drawback of giving more power to the students (democracies, in their very early stages (where people’s opinions still matter), also tend to have similar issues…). For future reference, perhaps coordinator should be more decisive; we were kind of brainwashed by the program’s constant reminders that the seminars are participant-led. At least sometimes, the participants actually prefer more structure, especially at the beginning.
– initially had fears about the course being too dense on content, especially in the biology section, but it didn’t seem to be too much of a problem. Seemingly, the level of content was not generally a problem. Would like some opinion on that though.
That’s all for now…