My mission for this class is to help the audiology students become the sort of audiologists I’d want to have myself as a deaf geek. I have three ideas that I’d like folks to give the “crazy test” to (as in, feedback: is this cool or is this crazy?) and I'm super-open to suggestions. I'm co-teaching with a (hearing) friend of mine who's also a PhD student in engineering education and specializes in teaching DSP and researching how to teach it better, so we're really prepared to tackle just about anything in this technical realm (the trick will be translating it for audiology students -- who, by and large, aren't electrical engineers or programmers.)
In short, what I'm thinking is:
- Have the class write the course textbook — open-licensed resourcesfor an audience of geeky hearing aid users and their companions. (Hi. Interested in being a test audience?)
- Flip the classroom, Oxford style - we only have 8 students, so use class time as "project time" (for us to all work on the book together). Since we won't be lecturing, students will have readings/videos to self-pace-learn through materials, then meet with one of us for 30-45 minutes each week to go over questions in a far more individualized manner.
- Use Python, not MATLAB. Waaaaaaaay less painful for people who have never coded before. And makes it possible for any code samples we come up with for the "textbook" to be run by people without a fancy software budget.
The full writeup is at http://blog.melchua.com/2012/10/11/how-would-you-teach-signal-processing-to-audiology-graduate-students-im-doing-it-spring-term-and-here-are-my-ideas/ and I'd really really love to hear thoughts.
I want to take book section inspirations, assessments/homework/etc, from questions in this forum and on the Big Tent forum for musicians with hearing loss -- real people, real users, asking actual questions about their hearing devices and their lives. (I want to have audiologists who can answer our questions about this stuff, but we've got to show them the questions first.) I want to do all sorts of things, and... I don't want to kill myself with overwork next term. So! Ideas, thoughts, resources, help, please!
