My performance in lecturing students

This is a long pending task I just managed to finish & put on the blog! Sorry, this entry is not about climate change but my performance in communicating the message of climate change to the graduate and post-graduate students at Nagoya University!

I have been a visiting lecturer at Nagoya University at the Nagoya University Global Environmental Leaders Program for the last two years. I was asked to teach graduate and post-graduate students on the topic of climate change and developing countries. The class consisted of mixed nationalities with most of them are from Asian and European countries. The total strength of the class was 35.

As I do with most other things I do, I requested the students to evaluate my lecture using 20 indicators (See Table below) consisting of 4 on students, 8 on the content and 8 on content delivery on 1-5 scale where 1  means bad and 5 means excellent. This evaluation was not the standard part of my TOR to the course but was done on my initiative.

Some quick observations from the evaluation:

I couldn't analyze the responses for long time. Just got some time to do it and I am surprised to see that most  students have rated my lecture on level 4 or 5 on most indicators. Below is the figure showing the results. The ones rated 3 are mostly for indicators related to the students self evaluation of their English understanding skills and prior knowledge on the subject.

• Most indicators stayed the same in both years. However, there was an improvement in indicators of audibility and organization of the lecture delivery from the first year to the second year.
• Most students have rated 4 or 5 on various indicators related to the lecture content and delivery.
• Most students rated 3 or 4 for their English skills and their prior knowledge on the subject.
• Most commented that I talk too fast and don't give time to imbibe concepts (one expression that particularly caught my attention was 'WOW he is too fast').
• Few complained that I used too many slides with figures and I explain figures too fast.
• The students who said the topic was new to them rated my lecture as difficult to understand.
• The students who rated their prior knowledge on the subject as good have rated my lecture as good to excellent.
• Very few students with excellent English skills have rated my lecture as average. Most of these students thought I should have spent more time in explaining concepts.
• On overall, most students thought they learning was either good or excellent from the lecture. 

Figure: Rating distribution of students on various indicators of the lecture.

Table: Indicator list used for evaluation of the lecture.