I have a fairly long experience of both teaching and grading, even though I stopped a couple of years ago. After a couple of years of trial-and-error, I think I found the "right" way:
* Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited.
* Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.
These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.
I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.
I was thinking that one of the great ironies of artificial intelligence is that it will make good teaching even more labour intensive. Those kids that can afford the one to one tuition required to push past our natural inclination to be lazy will learn things, while everyone else will succumb to outsourcing all their thinking.
There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.
> Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot.
2 hours is a lot! In my universities, classes were either 50 minutes, or 70 minutes. I could handle 50 minute ones just fine, but would often have trouble with challenging courses that had 70 minutes. Particularly for stuff like math, I hadn't properly digested the material in the first half, and now he's already proving theorems with that material in the 2nd half. I can follow the logic, but the ideal is when you can digest the prior material before being exposed to theorems relying on them.
Even when alternating theory/application like you say, the amount of attention I'd give to the application in the 70 minute class was less than the 50 minute one. I could follow, but I wouldn't think critically.
The oral exams scale better than one might expect, at least if you're not just doing multiple choice exams and you have to actually grade the exam. The time spent on grading the exam could have also been spent on an oral exam... For bachelor level it's usually 15-20min (usually quicker for the well prepared students), and for master courses it is 30min.
Usually you know after a few minutes if it's going to be a fail, and then otherwise you only need to figure out where on the passing scale the student ends up.
That's the point. As a professor you're allowed to outsource the grading of written exams to you assistants (ongoing PhD teaching stuff). But you must do an oral exam personally.
> usually quicker for the well prepared students
That's true. More time is needed only in case the answer is missing and you have to check whether you hit accidentally the only poorly understood material piece or there are more troubles.
The country of Argentina, despite its crippling debt, is able to provide free university education where the majority of classes for most majors are graded with an oral exam.
They've shown that it is entirely possible to scale a system like that, as long as the society sincerely values the role of an educator.
Oral exams don't scale at the beginning with hundreds of students per course, agreed. So make them in-person written exams, German universities managed that just fine a few decades ago. Oral exams were reserved to advance from Grundstudium (basic) to Hauptstudium (main).
In my very limited experience (I have German major degrees in Informatik and Philosophy, I was a TA for Logic in Philosophy) the more advanced the topic the thinner the attendance anyway.
That's also what mostly happened in this case. 59 tonnes was sold in the US and bought back in London, 27 tonnes was physically transferred from the US to The Netherlands, and 27 tonnes was physically transferred from The Netherlands to London.
Unfortunately, I share the sentiment. Although I have been blogging weekly for more than 15 years, I have less and less incentives to share my learnings.
I don't know about other European countries (well, I know, but I'm polite), but in France, restaurants will always have salt/pepper and frequently oil/vinegar on each table.
For ketchup, I'm afraid you'll need to stay in the US.
>I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
Home Assistant is well beyond the skills of the vast majority of people to install, set up, and maintain. And they don't want to have to maintain something like that. They want an appliance that they plug in and just works.
Sure. Most people don't have much beneath-the-skin technical inclination at all. We see this right now in 3D printing: Bambu Labs printers are popular because they're simple to use: A person can unbox it, plug it in, load some filament, and start printing widgets from their pocket supercomputer basically immediately.
But it is available as a plug-in appliance, and they're getting better and better at the Just Works aspects all the time.
And in a world where everything is relative, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started with Home Assistant than it is to get started with something like KNX or Crestron.
It doesn't have to be universal or even vaguely popular in order to be successful.
I have all kinds of widgets around me at home that are the products of successful companies of various sizes, and that are so niche that 95% of people would probably never seek to own such widgets themselves. Most probably aren't even aware that widgets like this exist in their universe. But the remaining 5%? They know about the widget, and they want one (maybe more than one).
There's ~149 million households in the US alone. 5% household penetration would require ~7.5 million widgets.
It sure is easy to imagine ways that a person and/or a company can sell just 7.5 million widgets and ultimately be financially unsuccessful, but it's also easy to imagine ways in which that would work out just fine.
But that's just meandering digression. :)
The Open Home Foundation had revenue of CHF 8,836,394 and expenses of of CHF 7,352,798 in FY 2025[1].
Is that small potatoes in a world with trillion-dollar companies? Yeah, it's certainly not ginormous. Is that successful? I personally think that it is.
I have the skills to run HA, and I despise the fact I must use it for any reasonable multi-vendor ecosystem.
I'd much rather have an open version of Apple Home or whatnot, even if I paid for it. I really don't want to spend a bunch of time dicking around with home automation - I want it to simply do what I want it to do.
* Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited. * Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.
These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.
I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.
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