Early Interviews (Week 1)

I remember that when I was filling out team matching survey, I said that I am interested in education and civic rights. Later when I found out that the teammates I am assigned to are also interested in those topics, I was quite surprised and excited. We had many ideas and eventually narrowed our topics down to education and copyright.

Firstly, for the topic of education, we think the problem is students often can’t choose the courses that they are really interested in due to their major restrictions and can’t learn in the way that fit their own learning styles. We interviewed two CCA professors and two students. I was able to take notes for a interview with the chair of CCA interior design program and with my professor from Interaction design program. What I found interesting was that they had similar perspectives on several issues. Firstly, when we asked them whether they took consideration on student’s interests and talents, they both said that their teaching goal wasn’t let students stick on their interests but rather encouraged them to find out new interests and worked with something that wasn’t familiar and comfortable for them. Secondly, they thought feedback was the key point of education. Students provided feedback to teachers for them to educate themselves and approach same material in variety of ways; students gave feedback to their peers to come up a better ideas collaboratively. Moreover, they thought the current issues on course evaluation — the survey that students fill out at the end of the semester, was problematic because it was not immediate and the questions were universal regardless the courses topics and themes.