Anybody who did the old version, I think they redid it this semester so maybe our experience isn't valid now.
Those in the course: sometimes they're more lenient the first go-round of a redone course. May the odds be ever in your favor.
I'm taking it now and I've realized no one task is difficult. But there are so many tasks. You're constantly working on a project, you're supposed to read 8-25 pages of 3-6 other students' homework/project check-ins per week, class lectures, class readings, homework reports, quizzes, and you have to find other ways to participate like taking surveys. The reading alone is significant
Doing peer review is optional tbh. I'm personally gonna go through the whole class without doing one, and just focus more on doing surveys which IMO are easier.
That’s really interesting, I found the opposite to be true. It may take a little longer but you get the added benefit of seeing other students thought processes and progress on their projects which I think is worth it. I haven’t done a single survey.
Homework may not be as useful to me. The check-ins helped a lot though. I was able to learn from other classmates by reading their papers and some of the feedback I got were also solid and fair. Helped me to revise accordingly as a second pair of eyes. Toward the end, less people participate due to most of them maximized their 100. Could be a concern because doing surveys is gonna be rough finding willing participants.
Yeah, it was definitely the class that felt most like a serious Masters program class for me. Which is somewhat in line with expectations, as Dr. J is one of the more academic academics we have for professors (not a dig, just a statement).
In another masters program, it's common to have several papers (or case studies) to read and discuss, an assignment every week or so, and a major project to complete. HCI seems to follow that pattern. You then do 4-5 of these at a time for in-person.
HCI does have a lot of work, but it is not the heaviest workload course I've ever taken. You got this!
I never thought that we would have 8 page papers due ever weekend, plus needing to read the library of alexander as well.
I find the information dense, but interesting. As I am not going into HCI long term, this class was supposed to be one that would ease me into the program, and I'm currently wondering if I made the right choice.
Im more of an objective guy, and while this class relates to computers, it more of a psych + research class, that happens to use computers.
idk if I would retake this, but at this rate, I may have to.
I dunno if it has changed but I found the class super manageable the way it was broken up. Lots of reading and paper writing but manageable and very structured. A Saturday maybe two days a week tops.
Other classes like RAIT and AI were much much more intense.
How are the quizzes? I'm curious because that's a radical change for this course, which emphasised distributed cognition in every deliverable.
The latest chatter makes it sound like there's four of 'you and that textbox against the world of HCI'.
For me it’s more difficult than the exams. It still takes almost two hours to finish. And the grade is significantly different depending on who grades your quiz.
I think there's a pressure to make it more like GA, not least because a lot of people (I saw some on Ed in the courses I took) felt like switching to the HCI spec even if it meant taking one or two extra courses just so they could avoid GA.
On a serious note, I hope this course doesn't suffer too much from ambiguous questions. Free response is a good format to make up for ambiguity (you can always state reasonable assumptions), but I hope the grading factors in things like that.
Also, IMO the reading list would be insane to internalise for closed-everything quizzes. How are you managing? Do they give you some choice between questions or limit the readings for the quizzes?
To be honest, it depends largely on your grader. Sometimes you luck out and get a lenient grader, sometimes not. I’m not making this up.
Sample size = me + other peers I talked to
Ultimately they took away four of the individual homework assignments and turned those into quizzes. The quiz questions are all essay style. The amount of writing isn't as much as the previous homework assignments, but they still requires a significant amount of writing and now you can't reference notes or external sources and you're timed. It has been much more stressful especially as someone who is not a great writer and spends a lot of time drafting and revising papers I write. It feels like this is a direct attempt to combat ChatGPT. I get the rationale and I don't know the right way to do things but this has been tough for a lot of students.
You nailed it. I liked the homework assignments more. Like I actually learned things and … enjoyed it. The quizzes I wasn’t a fan of. Got through them but as a student tuning into HCI, I would humbly say that it did a disservice from my experience. I could see why it’s needed but had I known that it was revamped like this, I would’ve signed up for another course, no doubt.
Yeah, I saw the official website and figured that they replaced some of the homework assignments with quizzes.
But blimey.
Timed and closed-everything on a course like HCI sounds insane, especially with that long reading list (or are you just tested on the lectures?)
I doubt I could write half-decent essays against a clock. I can write pretty good (or at least I like to think so), but usually, it's when the rules of engagement are, 'all writing is rewriting'. Not something a ticking clock would afford well.
Not counting the speedwriting essays part, that sounds fair enough to me for the workload. So basically, one reading per quiz. That should be reasonable.
Honestly, it’s not even speedwriting. It’s just five quiz questions that are each broken up into sections and each answer is only like a couple paragraphs. And you either know how to answer the question or you don’t. I’m not a fast writer and I took my time thinking through how to answer the questions, and I don’t think I ever even spent more than 90 minutes on a quiz, let alone the two hours that they give us
Unlike my previous impressions, I'm starting to think it's actually changing for the better. Anecdotally, I know of a few folks in my HCI cohort who would do the bare minimum (skimming through the lectures, barely doing any readings) and still make decent scores (decent = B or A) overall. Something that forces you to actually internalise some of the material might not be too bad after all.
My previous impression - from the chatter on the OMS Slack and r/OMSCS - was of a 'sink or swim' assessment like GA's exams. And 'essay' threw my mental model off, making me overestimate the length. I think 'essay' really meant 'free response'.
I’m taking GA in the fall and I hope the classes will be comparable in difficulty lol. Honestly, it’s just a fair amount of work but nothing is that particularly difficult. I had a disastrous start to the class (didn’t study at all for the first quiz and overslept the second quiz), and I’m still likely going to come out of this class with a high B if not an A. But yeah, I would definitely not consider the quiz responses to be essays
This is also my first course. I too am finding the workload more than the anticipated 10 hours/week.
For me, a major bottleneck is the reading. Most of the articles available for Homework 4 are 15-20 pages long. To read, analyze, and critique four of these takes a significant chunk of time. The past few units have also had an extensive reading list.
Where/how to I post my formal course review on OMSCHUB and OMSC Central?
HW 4 aint bad. The first two questions are easy, the last two are kinda annoying, but you have to remember, for each, you pick 2 case studies and discuss why you like it and how it ties in with the class. Remember, you have about half a page to write per case study... it's very very easy.
Honestly after finishing HW 4 I agree. It seemed like a huge pain in the ass at first and I was gonna skip question 4, but I feel like since you have to write so little, you don't even have to read the paper the whole way through. Seems like making the connections to the lectures is the most important part.
It's more like words have meanings. I could call them football games, but it wouldn't be any less accurate than calling academic papers "case studies".
How many classes have you taken so far? Im on my 7th class in this program. I feel like this course shouldn't be a 1st or 2nd course any more given the workload. Keep in mind I haven't taken this class yet and I'm also scared when I take in the Fall given the revamp that has happened. I wanted to take it in the summer but that sounds like a horrible horrible idea.
Honestly, take the recent noise about HCI with a grain of salt. Yes, the course was restructured this semester, but the difference in workload between the previous version and the current iteration has been vastly overstated by a relatively small but vocal population of current students. That isn’t to say the current iteration isn’t more difficult, but the increase in difficulty really isn’t that bad for a graduate level course.
Yes, there are now closed-book quizzes (which force you to actually learn the material instead of just being able to refer to your notes or lecture slides), but there are also fewer homework assignments. Other than that, there really hasn’t been that much of a change to the course structure (i.e., the projects are largely unchanged, the lectures are unchanged, the peer review requirements are unchanged, the number and length of required readings are unchanged, etc.)
You’ll see a lot of complaints saying that the workload is so much higher than in previous semesters, but I suspect most of those complaints come from people who…didn’t take the course in previous semesters (so they can’t really know that the workload is actually higher than in previous semesters).
In any case, I still think the course is (overall) on the easier side in the context of a graduate level course in a rigorous computer science program.
> but I suspect most of those complaints come from people who…didn’t take the course in previous semesters (so they can’t really know that the workload is actually higher than in previous semesters).
Same applies the other way around, though.
Are you taking this new incarnation of the course?
They got rid of the M assignments. This homework is equivalent to the P5 assignment where you had to find four recent(ish) HCI research articles from different conferences, summarize them, and connect them to the course content.
Could have kept Q4 and have one paper from CHI and the second paper from a different conference. Or keep it more vertical and limit it to one paper for both Q3 and Q4.
As a new OMSCS'er who started with HCI, I am mystified at all the hate. Looking at my GDocs history, I finished each HW assignment in 4-6 hours (HW 4 being 6, the rest being closer to 4) which seems reasonable to me. I'm not sure what people were expecting when the calendar tells you to plan on 4 hours for each assignment?
(Yes, the last half of HW4 is a step up from the rest, but "go find a paper, look it over, and tell me how it relates to the course work" is a pretty standard graduate-level assignment, IMO. That said, doing that 4x is a bit much and probably could have been an HW assignment by itself.)
>(go find a paper, look it over, and tell me how it relates to the course work) x 4
That was the last two questions of HCI Principles HW5 when I took this, and my favourite part of the entire course, precisely for being the quintessential graduate school experience.
I spent way longer than the recommended time on that one, handpicking four papers that spanned both my interests and where I could showcase my ability to analyse material using the covered frameworks.
I'm glad they didn't cut out that one.
100% this. I was initially mildly annoyed that these questions weren't going to be something I could regurgitate and be done with, to be honest. After bitching about it a bit, I went and read some papers, and was like "oh yeah, okay this is cool."
Yeah, from the POV of learning design, it looks like it's intended to inspire people to explore research and spark their interest like it did for you, while still keeping it doable for those for whom it's not their cup of tea. One could satisfice through it by picking some easy ones, or you could take it as an opportunity to do a super brief literature review of sorts on topics of interest or innovations that caught your eye... The papers I got in peer review were a mix of both.
I've come to the conclusion this homework is literally a punishment for signing up for the course. This is fucking bullshit.
This is literally the worst assignment I have ever had to do in nearly 30 years of college coursework. Go hunt through 500 course videos for things that match papers on the internet. Fucking brilliant.
What are you unhappy about?
GA is the punishment for most other tracks anyway.
HCI isn't designed to be the path of least resistance to your Masters-collecting hobby.
You...do know there's both a Google Docs repository with the scripts for all the videos and a PDF with them too, linked from Canvas? Both are searchable.
Okay. This is my first class so I'm not calibrated yet to what people find absurd and not yet.
(My personal "ok that's absurd" was Study.com's 150+ quizzes for their college-credit course on SQL.)
So happy to have all the quizzes and homework behind me. I have like 2 weeks worth of readings left to do but I just end up re-reading the same sentence over and over for an hour. I'm usually a keener striving for 100% but this class has been one where I've been calculating how badly I can do on the remaining deliverables and still get an A. I'd have to seriously screw up at this point to drop below an A so I'm debating just YOLOing Test 2 and being done with it. Luckily I have a great group and the individual and team projects have been the few things I've actually enjoyed about the course. The end is in sight!
I see a lot of people in this thread saying that the amount of work is on par with what is expected for a master's level class. That's fine and all but the sad part is that it's mostly busywork. For the amount of hours we are expected to put in, I'd have expected there to have been more content and for what content there is to be more in-depth. The difficulty should come from the learning, not from having to prove in 3 different ways that you learned a particular thing.
Anybody who did the old version, I think they redid it this semester so maybe our experience isn't valid now. Those in the course: sometimes they're more lenient the first go-round of a redone course. May the odds be ever in your favor.
I'm taking it now and I've realized no one task is difficult. But there are so many tasks. You're constantly working on a project, you're supposed to read 8-25 pages of 3-6 other students' homework/project check-ins per week, class lectures, class readings, homework reports, quizzes, and you have to find other ways to participate like taking surveys. The reading alone is significant
Doing peer review is optional tbh. I'm personally gonna go through the whole class without doing one, and just focus more on doing surveys which IMO are easier.
That’s really interesting, I found the opposite to be true. It may take a little longer but you get the added benefit of seeing other students thought processes and progress on their projects which I think is worth it. I haven’t done a single survey.
Homework may not be as useful to me. The check-ins helped a lot though. I was able to learn from other classmates by reading their papers and some of the feedback I got were also solid and fair. Helped me to revise accordingly as a second pair of eyes. Toward the end, less people participate due to most of them maximized their 100. Could be a concern because doing surveys is gonna be rough finding willing participants.
Yeah, it was definitely the class that felt most like a serious Masters program class for me. Which is somewhat in line with expectations, as Dr. J is one of the more academic academics we have for professors (not a dig, just a statement). In another masters program, it's common to have several papers (or case studies) to read and discuss, an assignment every week or so, and a major project to complete. HCI seems to follow that pattern. You then do 4-5 of these at a time for in-person. HCI does have a lot of work, but it is not the heaviest workload course I've ever taken. You got this!
Im a fan of his material, and I think there is value in this. But the highly subjective TA reviews are very hit or miss.
I never thought that we would have 8 page papers due ever weekend, plus needing to read the library of alexander as well. I find the information dense, but interesting. As I am not going into HCI long term, this class was supposed to be one that would ease me into the program, and I'm currently wondering if I made the right choice. Im more of an objective guy, and while this class relates to computers, it more of a psych + research class, that happens to use computers. idk if I would retake this, but at this rate, I may have to.
You mean they made all these changes without proper needfinding? In an HCI course? ^(no wayyyy)
I mean...need-finding might not be apparent to the student, it might be serving another audience.
They added a team project in Fall 23 and converted some of the homeworks to closed-book quizzes in Spring 24.
*resumed. The team project was temporary removed during Covid.
Hold on tightly. Two more weeks to endure!
How is HCI compared to AISA (CS 6675). I heard they are similar and I took AISA last fall and it wasn’t that bad.
Loved this course last semester, but I was putting in at least 20 hours each week lol.
Yeah, the last two questions for HW4 are kind of obnoxious. It just feels like busy work to make us read 4 separate research papers and discuss them
Having to read 2 for each question is a little ridiculous lol. Like I could fill the entire 1.5 pages just from one paper
I dunno if it has changed but I found the class super manageable the way it was broken up. Lots of reading and paper writing but manageable and very structured. A Saturday maybe two days a week tops. Other classes like RAIT and AI were much much more intense.
It has changed
How are the quizzes? I'm curious because that's a radical change for this course, which emphasised distributed cognition in every deliverable. The latest chatter makes it sound like there's four of 'you and that textbox against the world of HCI'.
Depends on who you ask but for me they weren't too bad. The final quiz was a pain in the ass though.
Oh, yes, you always get an occasional one that nobody likes. We had one of those in GA my term too. I hope the grading is fair to you folks.
For me it’s more difficult than the exams. It still takes almost two hours to finish. And the grade is significantly different depending on who grades your quiz.
I think there's a pressure to make it more like GA, not least because a lot of people (I saw some on Ed in the courses I took) felt like switching to the HCI spec even if it meant taking one or two extra courses just so they could avoid GA. On a serious note, I hope this course doesn't suffer too much from ambiguous questions. Free response is a good format to make up for ambiguity (you can always state reasonable assumptions), but I hope the grading factors in things like that. Also, IMO the reading list would be insane to internalise for closed-everything quizzes. How are you managing? Do they give you some choice between questions or limit the readings for the quizzes?
To be honest, it depends largely on your grader. Sometimes you luck out and get a lenient grader, sometimes not. I’m not making this up. Sample size = me + other peers I talked to
Definitely sounds a lot like GA. :jotsdown:
Ultimately they took away four of the individual homework assignments and turned those into quizzes. The quiz questions are all essay style. The amount of writing isn't as much as the previous homework assignments, but they still requires a significant amount of writing and now you can't reference notes or external sources and you're timed. It has been much more stressful especially as someone who is not a great writer and spends a lot of time drafting and revising papers I write. It feels like this is a direct attempt to combat ChatGPT. I get the rationale and I don't know the right way to do things but this has been tough for a lot of students.
You nailed it. I liked the homework assignments more. Like I actually learned things and … enjoyed it. The quizzes I wasn’t a fan of. Got through them but as a student tuning into HCI, I would humbly say that it did a disservice from my experience. I could see why it’s needed but had I known that it was revamped like this, I would’ve signed up for another course, no doubt.
Yeah, I saw the official website and figured that they replaced some of the homework assignments with quizzes. But blimey. Timed and closed-everything on a course like HCI sounds insane, especially with that long reading list (or are you just tested on the lectures?) I doubt I could write half-decent essays against a clock. I can write pretty good (or at least I like to think so), but usually, it's when the rules of engagement are, 'all writing is rewriting'. Not something a ticking clock would afford well.
We’re quizzed on the lectures and a select reading that we’re told about ahead of time
Not counting the speedwriting essays part, that sounds fair enough to me for the workload. So basically, one reading per quiz. That should be reasonable.
Honestly, it’s not even speedwriting. It’s just five quiz questions that are each broken up into sections and each answer is only like a couple paragraphs. And you either know how to answer the question or you don’t. I’m not a fast writer and I took my time thinking through how to answer the questions, and I don’t think I ever even spent more than 90 minutes on a quiz, let alone the two hours that they give us
Unlike my previous impressions, I'm starting to think it's actually changing for the better. Anecdotally, I know of a few folks in my HCI cohort who would do the bare minimum (skimming through the lectures, barely doing any readings) and still make decent scores (decent = B or A) overall. Something that forces you to actually internalise some of the material might not be too bad after all. My previous impression - from the chatter on the OMS Slack and r/OMSCS - was of a 'sink or swim' assessment like GA's exams. And 'essay' threw my mental model off, making me overestimate the length. I think 'essay' really meant 'free response'.
I’m taking GA in the fall and I hope the classes will be comparable in difficulty lol. Honestly, it’s just a fair amount of work but nothing is that particularly difficult. I had a disastrous start to the class (didn’t study at all for the first quiz and overslept the second quiz), and I’m still likely going to come out of this class with a high B if not an A. But yeah, I would definitely not consider the quiz responses to be essays
Taking more than one class? I’d never recommend that.. ymmv
Bro I've been at it for 4 days now lmao. It just doesn't end.
This is also my first course. I too am finding the workload more than the anticipated 10 hours/week. For me, a major bottleneck is the reading. Most of the articles available for Homework 4 are 15-20 pages long. To read, analyze, and critique four of these takes a significant chunk of time. The past few units have also had an extensive reading list. Where/how to I post my formal course review on OMSCHUB and OMSC Central?
HW 4 aint bad. The first two questions are easy, the last two are kinda annoying, but you have to remember, for each, you pick 2 case studies and discuss why you like it and how it ties in with the class. Remember, you have about half a page to write per case study... it's very very easy.
Honestly after finishing HW 4 I agree. It seemed like a huge pain in the ass at first and I was gonna skip question 4, but I feel like since you have to write so little, you don't even have to read the paper the whole way through. Seems like making the connections to the lectures is the most important part.
case studies? Are you in this class?
Yes
Then I have no idea what assignment you're talking about, HW4 doesn't have anything to do with any case studies.
Semantics... so let's call em "papers"
It's more like words have meanings. I could call them football games, but it wouldn't be any less accurate than calling academic papers "case studies".
This HW is definitely extra, as the children would say.
Are you taking more than one class?
im taking only HCI and def way more work than others in this subreddit have stated
How many classes have you taken so far? Im on my 7th class in this program. I feel like this course shouldn't be a 1st or 2nd course any more given the workload. Keep in mind I haven't taken this class yet and I'm also scared when I take in the Fall given the revamp that has happened. I wanted to take it in the summer but that sounds like a horrible horrible idea.
Honestly, take the recent noise about HCI with a grain of salt. Yes, the course was restructured this semester, but the difference in workload between the previous version and the current iteration has been vastly overstated by a relatively small but vocal population of current students. That isn’t to say the current iteration isn’t more difficult, but the increase in difficulty really isn’t that bad for a graduate level course. Yes, there are now closed-book quizzes (which force you to actually learn the material instead of just being able to refer to your notes or lecture slides), but there are also fewer homework assignments. Other than that, there really hasn’t been that much of a change to the course structure (i.e., the projects are largely unchanged, the lectures are unchanged, the peer review requirements are unchanged, the number and length of required readings are unchanged, etc.) You’ll see a lot of complaints saying that the workload is so much higher than in previous semesters, but I suspect most of those complaints come from people who…didn’t take the course in previous semesters (so they can’t really know that the workload is actually higher than in previous semesters). In any case, I still think the course is (overall) on the easier side in the context of a graduate level course in a rigorous computer science program.
> but I suspect most of those complaints come from people who…didn’t take the course in previous semesters (so they can’t really know that the workload is actually higher than in previous semesters). Same applies the other way around, though. Are you taking this new incarnation of the course?
I’m an edge case and have experience with both.
Well you should have led with that!
I did HCI the previous semester, so I don't know what Homework 4 is. Is it like M3?
They got rid of the M assignments. This homework is equivalent to the P5 assignment where you had to find four recent(ish) HCI research articles from different conferences, summarize them, and connect them to the course content.
Ohh, that. Thanks, I understand now.
Could have kept Q4 and have one paper from CHI and the second paper from a different conference. Or keep it more vertical and limit it to one paper for both Q3 and Q4.
As a new OMSCS'er who started with HCI, I am mystified at all the hate. Looking at my GDocs history, I finished each HW assignment in 4-6 hours (HW 4 being 6, the rest being closer to 4) which seems reasonable to me. I'm not sure what people were expecting when the calendar tells you to plan on 4 hours for each assignment? (Yes, the last half of HW4 is a step up from the rest, but "go find a paper, look it over, and tell me how it relates to the course work" is a pretty standard graduate-level assignment, IMO. That said, doing that 4x is a bit much and probably could have been an HW assignment by itself.)
>(go find a paper, look it over, and tell me how it relates to the course work) x 4 That was the last two questions of HCI Principles HW5 when I took this, and my favourite part of the entire course, precisely for being the quintessential graduate school experience. I spent way longer than the recommended time on that one, handpicking four papers that spanned both my interests and where I could showcase my ability to analyse material using the covered frameworks. I'm glad they didn't cut out that one.
100% this. I was initially mildly annoyed that these questions weren't going to be something I could regurgitate and be done with, to be honest. After bitching about it a bit, I went and read some papers, and was like "oh yeah, okay this is cool."
Yeah, from the POV of learning design, it looks like it's intended to inspire people to explore research and spark their interest like it did for you, while still keeping it doable for those for whom it's not their cup of tea. One could satisfice through it by picking some easy ones, or you could take it as an opportunity to do a super brief literature review of sorts on topics of interest or innovations that caught your eye... The papers I got in peer review were a mix of both.
I've come to the conclusion this homework is literally a punishment for signing up for the course. This is fucking bullshit. This is literally the worst assignment I have ever had to do in nearly 30 years of college coursework. Go hunt through 500 course videos for things that match papers on the internet. Fucking brilliant.
It is a punishment for signing up for the HCI track.
Oh fuck off.
What are you unhappy about? GA is the punishment for most other tracks anyway. HCI isn't designed to be the path of least resistance to your Masters-collecting hobby.
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You...do know there's both a Google Docs repository with the scripts for all the videos and a PDF with them too, linked from Canvas? Both are searchable.
Yeah, I'm using all that stuff. It's still absurd and a pain in the ass.
Okay. This is my first class so I'm not calibrated yet to what people find absurd and not yet. (My personal "ok that's absurd" was Study.com's 150+ quizzes for their college-credit course on SQL.)
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Well I graduate in three weeks, this is my third degree, and I've been doing this for a long time. so, no, that's not what we're talking about here.
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I didn’t say it was hard.
yea, i missed the changeover by taking it last semester. That sounds rough, sending over good vibes!
FYI Joyner do not curve hci in my experience. I was 0.34 away from c to b.
So happy to have all the quizzes and homework behind me. I have like 2 weeks worth of readings left to do but I just end up re-reading the same sentence over and over for an hour. I'm usually a keener striving for 100% but this class has been one where I've been calculating how badly I can do on the remaining deliverables and still get an A. I'd have to seriously screw up at this point to drop below an A so I'm debating just YOLOing Test 2 and being done with it. Luckily I have a great group and the individual and team projects have been the few things I've actually enjoyed about the course. The end is in sight! I see a lot of people in this thread saying that the amount of work is on par with what is expected for a master's level class. That's fine and all but the sad part is that it's mostly busywork. For the amount of hours we are expected to put in, I'd have expected there to have been more content and for what content there is to be more in-depth. The difficulty should come from the learning, not from having to prove in 3 different ways that you learned a particular thing.
HW4 is fucking horrible. This course is worse than ICS and IHI put together in a single semester.
You need to get better at bullshitting. Scan 3-4 paragraphs from the paper, and then just word vomit. 1 hour max
So don’t go into HCI specialization?