WOW three minutes is next to impossible. Takes me that long to introduce myself…
Just a note on capturing the screencast. I couldn’t use camtasia (privilege limitations at work), so had to find another alternative. I ended up using Screencast-o-matic. It worked really well for me on my Win 7 machine.
Demotivational Experience:
Somewhat recently I took a Data Mining course. I was excited about the course and was looking forward to learning some new analytical approaches. One of the good things about it was that it was meant to be a “tools” based course to teach how to correctly implement and interpret these tools. It was not intended to be a statistical underpinnings course; however, it quickly devolved into that. The instructor spent nearly ALL of lecture on discussing the theory behind each method with very little discussion on the implementation. To top it off the course was taught with R and the instructor expected the students to learn the implementation on their own. I was fortunate to have had a strong background in R, but I worked with a few others that didn’t and they struggled mightily in the course. This experience resulted in me doing the bare minimum to get through the class.
Through this experience I learned that expectations matter. If students are coming into a situation with a set of expectations it is important for the instructors to understand those. Expectations may come from many places. If they are not from the instructor, they are still important to understand so that you can address that up front, But expectations set by the instructor through course materials, websites etc. absolutely MUST be met. In short, when you say what you are going to teach, make sure you teach what you say.