This week has been particularly challenging for reasons out of the scope of this class. It can be frustrating to be limited in the time I can spend on this project due too other class and personal responsibilities. I am taking a 499 course, so I understand there is an experimental element to the class, but some professors do not put in as much effort as others. There is a clear difference between the teaching materials prepared by a more dedicated teacher and the teaching materials prepared by a research professor. The class I am taking, which I will be refraining from mentioning specific names, is clearly just copy and pasted from the resources of another college from several years ago. The lectures tend to be rambling and constantly go over time. Apparently this course was designed for a semester system, and so we are more pressed for time than the course was literally designed for.
Besides my misgivings about the general teaching materials, the real issue came to a head this week. We were given a homework assignment that required us to install a particular software. This software is, as has become apparent, extremely difficult to setup on a home system, and very particular about it’s settings. Too add to this, the information and tutorial we were directed to for setup was 8 years old. That’s 2 full builds of the software behind where it is now. Everything was a mess and the instructions were just outright incorrect. I brought this up to the teacher and was informed that normally they would give us a VM with the software on it, but because of Covid he decided not to do this incase someone’s computer couldn’t run the VM. In addition, he told me that he had not actually looked at the tutorial, only seen that one existed and linked it to us. This has been an extremely frustrating week.
