Quartile 2

The course is well organized, as experienced by students.

The quality of the lectures is quite good. However the teachers notice that especially on the Friday a lot of students don’t show up. This is something the teachers see as problematic and may be the reason quite some students fail this course. However the fact that video lectures are online is considered positive by students, the teachers don’t like this that much. They should be an addition to the lectures, not a replacement.
For next year the intention is to start up study groups like is done this year also for statics of structures. In this way hopefully students will practice more with the exercises. The con of this is that it then will be in the evening since there is no more space to place them inside the timeslot.

The practice materials will not be changed. The answers will be given, not the explanations and calculations will not be given. When this is done students will read it according to the teachers, and don’t learn anything. Studying=practising.

The study material is quite good, except of the reader for steel. This one is considered as too expensive and too hard to learn from. Sometime student find it hard to understand what is happening and formulas are not explained well enough. The reason for this reader is that it is also used in later courses, but this is only useful for SD students.
The amount of students that failed the course is quite high. The main reason for this is that a lot of students don’t attend the lectures. Some exam exercises were literally in the lectures and still many did them wrong. The teacher mentions she will try to find another moment than the Friday afternoon so hopefully more students will attend the lectures.

The workload is considered high for this course. However the amount of lectures is necessary for this course and cannot be lowered.

The course is seen as informative and the average grade of the course is a 7. Sometimes the planning and organization of the course was not clear. The study guide was not exactly followed and this gave some unclarity.

The reader ‘Made in Eindhoven’ has not been used by everyone and needs to be elaborated in more detail to properly function. It can be and is already a useful reader, it needs to be improved but this is already clear. The reader has been made to have a better understanding of the specific topics and will support the student during the project. When it is improved it can also be used more and better.
The study guide was most of the time not followed during the project and because of this the structure and planning of the project was not clear. The tutors were also really different from each other and project groups sometimes did completely other things. It is logical that there is a difference between the tutors, but there also needs to be a clear red line for the students. The organisation of the course needs to be improved, to give students more clarity. The subject of the course is seen as informative and useful.

Students ask for clear rubrics, to give a clearer idea of how the presentations are assessed. The feedback given by the tutors is most of the time experienced positively.

There is a high workload just before the presentations, therefore there is often a lack of time to make and prepare the presentation. The distribution of the workload will keep its difficulties, it is part of the project work.

Students most of the time lack on presentation skills. Presentations need to get more attention, most of the time students do not have time anymore to prepare their presentation.
The communication between students need to become more active. The knowledge about how projects work and points that need to get attention need to be mentioned to the next generation of students at the start of the project. This will improve the transition between the first and the second year.

There is often a lack of knowledge for the project about basic topics like analysis drawings and concept drawings. Something needs to be done about this, but this cannot be done within this project, this will also improve the transition between the first and the second year.

Time and subjectivity will still be difficult topics during evaluations of projects.

In general, the course was interesting and learning full. The location was nearby with helped a lot with adjusting new building into the current situation. The location also gave some freedom, because a lot is happening in the upcoming years around the station the student could decide to which time frame, they wanted their building to fit in the most. Because the location was nearby it was combined with a site visited to the LocHal which was a great example how to interpret and built up a library.
The same point of attention was kept of Q1, there was a lack of personal feedback in the tutor hours. This lack came from big groups around 25 persons with 2 tutors. To worse this situation not all tutors where there on the day they were expected, resulting in a week of 2 day with 1 tutor and a large group. The attention of these tutors was not equally divided between all of students.

Lectures were interesting for the workshop that followed. The workshops, however, took more time than its given. The references projects were also interesting and forced the students to look into different kind of libraries and see the deference and types. This helped to understand better how a library works and what is important.

Only a final presentation was rated, even though every two weeks there was a soft deadline. With only one graded deadline the study load at the end is really high, as expected. Whit regard to a few tutors, not all feedback given during the presentation was constructive criticism but leaned towards being rude. The feedback also did not correspond in all cases with the final result; really bad feedback was given together with good grades.

The amount of hours students spent on the course is quite high, more than on every other course or the other projects. The workshops were taking a lot of time during the tutor hours.

The course gives insight what to expect in the work field of architecture. It is difficult to buy materials in a group, especially if the group is larger than 5 persons. Overall the course is improving over the years.

The second project of Building Physics and Structural Design was well organized. The study guide was clear and contained all information that was needed to do the project. It was a bit too detailed, but this will be adjusted. The group was divided over two teachers and the quality of the tutoring was good.

The project consisted of an intermediate presentation which was about different variants and a final presentation about one elaborated variant. This project focused on the Building Physics part of the building which was designed during the first project.
The tutoring was in small groups, which made it easier to ask questions. The disadvantage of this was that sometimes you did not hear what other students were doing with their project.

The feedback was not always clear and was sometimes a bit confusing. This could be improved.

The expectations of the intermediate presentation were experienced as low in comparison to the expectations of the final presentation. We suggested two options to equalize the workload. First of all the deadline of the intermediate presentation could be shifted to a week earlier. In this way the amount of time will be more equal to the amount of work that has to be done. Another option is to increase the expectations of the intermediate presentation.

At the end of the project the students only got the grade and no further explanation. The teacher came up with the question whether we would like to have more elaborated feedback. We advised to do so.

Canvas was used clearly for the structure and layout of the course. The weekly planning made was handy to use and helps to organize the weekly elements of the course. However, a study guide would be helpful to give a clear and concise overview of the total program of the course.

The individual tutoring was helpful for the development of the program. However, the amount of tutoring hours is quite limited, especially when comparing the B-project (only 15 minutes) with the A-project (8 hours). This should be made more even between the different projects.

The setup of the final examination was sufficient to test the knowledge. Having to imply knowledge of previous course was an interesting way to develop the project.

The workload of the project would on average be more than the stated 140 hours. However, most of this work needs to be done after the midterm as than the entire report needs to be made. This makes an uneven distribution of the workload with a high peak at the end of the project.

Interesting to work with a new design tool/mechanism: Sefaira.
As the reports are all individual there is not a lot of contact between the group members. Discussing the work with more students at the same time would be helpful to understand each other’s work and struggles making group learning possible.
Different drawings had to be made for the final report. More clarity on these drawings should be given to improve the quality of these drawings as well as the final report.
During the presentations, it is preferred that the teacher of that presenting group is present to be able to give clear feedback.

The course is evaluated positively. The content is experienced as relevant. The studyguide and the studymaterials are very clear and the tutoring is seen as very useful.

The feedback that is given is seen as useful and supporting. The purpose of the feedback is also to let students think about topics themselves.
The organization of the project is experienced positively, working in groups works out really well. Besides that the students learn to think one step ahead.
When students haven’t done the previous project, students are still able to follow this course.
The presentation of the municipality by an alumni of the university has been seen as interesting and relevant to the project.
There project of the students is continuously reflected and this reflection is experienced as very useful.
During the project there was some lack of knowledge about the stakeholders involved, however the students should have some knowledge about it after BAU studio 2. Besides that it is also a matter of thinking logically. Next time, there will be more attention and a better explanation about this matter.
Students also experience a lack of knowledge about finances, however nothing has to be calculated in this course yet. The purpose is to get a feeling for dealing with finances and students do not to need to go deeper into the finances.

The examination is experienced well and clear. The deadline in week 7 is experience positively.

The course takes a bit more effort than the average. Students also sometimes like to spent more time on their project to make improvements. Besides that the planning is very clear, this makes it hard to deviate from the planning.

In quartile one the groups were actually too big caused by the late description to the course by students. This bother the good students, who subscribe on time. The teachers cannot do anything about it and want the students to subscribe for courses on time. An atmosphere has to be created where every student subscribes on time.
The project is build up in layers in different scale levels, this forces students to think about all layers. When adding another layer it will probably make the project better, but it will cost too much time.

The teacher try to change from locations every year.

Next year there will be a lot more international students. This can form a problem, because there is less information available in English about the locations in the Netherlands. Location abroad are also not an option since there are completely different rules and it is easier to go to a location in the Netherlands. When doing a project abroad it can may be, be combined with an excursion of CHEOPS.

Native and internationals don’t often mix with each other, this is an attention point.

The course Project USRE: Urban Systems B was a nice and interesting project. The course itself had a good structure and was nice to follow. However, the studyguide was a bit chaotic with a lot of information in the schedule and the actual assignment was a bit unclear what was specifically asked.
Another thing that was a surprise for some students is that this project continues on the first project of USRE, since a lot of students had switched between the projects of AUDE and USRE. It was a bit hard because some groups consisted of mostly people who did not do the first project and had therefore not the full knowledge of the last course, this took a lot of time to keep up with the others and continue the project with a proper knowledge of the background of Breda.
Furthermore, it was a bit hard to start the project with a site that we could not enter itself, it is hard to get a clear visual of the site by looking through a fence on one certain point. However it was nice that we had the opportunity to visit Breda within the scheduled time.

For most of the students it is a nice way of lecturing when first +/- an hour of lectures and after that time to work on the project. In this way the information about the assignment and the extra knowledge can be easily given to the students in a nice way. Since the lecture part does not take the whole afternoon, it gave the opportunity to the students to also have time to work on the project itself. So the proportion between lectures and project work was good. Also it was nice to have scheduled feedback times to not wait for it the whole afternoon but knowing when to have the materials that you wanted to discuss within these meetings ready. The amount of time that each group was given was also nice because each group could get answers to all the questions within the feedback session. When there were questions about what was requested sometimes there was a difference between the tutors which gave also uncertainty to the students.

The examination of this course was through a midterm and a final presentation. However, in the beginning it was with a bigger group that was split in two after the midterm presentation. Which gave a good group size, because it was better to have a smaller group at the last part of the assignment, however the groups were suddenly with three people less which therefore needed new structure within the group.
The final presentations took a lot of time since there were a lot of groups. Maybe it is better to make more timeslots with less groups so that the presentation will be more interesting.

The workload that students experienced is good, With the 15 minutes scheduled feedback it gave a lot of time to work on the project in the scheduled hours. With the choice to work on the project within the hours it gave the students some flexibility which is good, because the students learn also to work on the project and schedule for themselves the hours they want to work on it.

For this course a specific point that comes to mind is the communication and continuation of the project without the responsible lecturer. It was good communication and the students did not disadvantage when she was not able to continue lecturing, Aloys did take over alright and the project could continue without a change in schedule.