A structured and easy way for students to ask questions
Inspiring Teacher
David Wichmann
Faculty Faculty of Science
Audio Description Project
There is no audio description available for this project
Project description
Goals
- To allow students to work more flexibly on the problem sets, and get questions answered outside of the regular, often very intensive, tutorials.
- To avoid answering the same question multiple times by having the answers publicly available on Zulip.
- To help students to clearly identify and formulate the questions they have and ask them in a structured way.
- To provide comprehensive answers by the TAs that can be seen by all students.
Results
Zulip was used in two subsequent B.Sc. physics courses (Statistical Physics and Quantum Mechanics). Students picked it up slowly, but usage of Zulip increased, in particular during the study periods before exams. In the second course we had more than 500 messages sent over Zulip. Zulip also made answering questions much easier and flexible for the TAs, and we avoided answering repeatedly asked questions multiple times. The structured and simple organization of the Zulip made it easy to reference to other answers questions, and also to provide detailed explanations and examples to more fundamental questions and problems students encountered in the course.