Course development

Canvas improvements: Following a student suggestion, we plan to put all of the course Media into one ‘gallery’ page on Canvas (to consolidate all videos and powerpoints etc for study and review purposes). Case study improvements: • This year it was great to have support from TAs to give feedback on the Case studies. We plan to continue this whenever resources allow. Lab-specific improvements: • Propose combining the lab reports to be a group assignment (students were already encourage to work in groups and submitted very similar lab reports within a group). To help control the participation, the lab report will include a mandatory contribution statement outlining the role of each member. • A step by step manual for the noise dosimeter, like the ones for the vibration meter, should be produced • Pre-lab equipment preparations: o check that the instruments displays correspond with the information in the measurement manuals (i.e. that the correct display windows are shown before starting the measurements) o deletion of all existing files from measurement equipment before the lab starts, o setting the correct date and time o ensure that dosimeters enable only LpAeq, LpAFmax and LPCpeak to be read from the display after the measurements (to avoid confusion) • Students could get more out of the lab with some instruction on the top 10 typical functions for graph options, windowing data, selecting metrics, etc. We can start the lab at 9 instead of 10 and use the hour to have a software workshop, as another course does with statistics software. • The free software does not work on Macs, so we will request it to be added to the campus computer labs, and remote desktop. We will also create lab groups based on who has a PC, to make sure that each group has at least one PC laptop.

Although it would be pedagogically beneficial to have more individual feedback, the current resources for the course are a limitation. Instead, we propose combining the lab reports to be a group assignment (students already worked in groups and submitted very similar lab reports within a group) and hiring a course assistant to provide feedback on case reports based on a rubric provided by the teachers.