Summary of Student Feedback

Mahesh Iyer
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Winner 2005 Graduate Associate Teaching Award
The Ohio State University

“Mahesh is organized, well prepared and has an excellent teaching style – he explains with enthusiasm, in a stepwise manner and at a level that makes even difficult concepts understandable” – Student quote from ChBE 630 evaluation (summer 2004).

All the courses I have taught are undergraduate level courses for juniors or seniors majoring in Chemical Engineering. The graduate students at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) hold positions as “Graduate Research Associates” but are required to serve as a “Teaching Associate” for the departmental courses for one quarter every academic year. The ChBE department uses its own departmental feedback forms to evaluate teaching associates. Based on this feedback, the department presents the competitive “Outstanding Teaching Associate Award” every quarter. The classroom courses which I have taught so far are:

• ChBE 760 (Autumn 2004) Chemical Engineering Economy and Strategy
• ChBE 630 (Summer 2004) Chemical Engineering Unit Operations Laboratory
• ChBE 630 (Summer 2003) Chemical Engineering Unit Operations Laboratory

Of these I have been conferred with the departmental teaching award for both the courses:

• ChBE 760 (Autumn 2004)
• ChBE 630 (Summer 2003)

The summary of the feedback forms is tabulated below:

In addition to the quantitative feedback, the students offer descriptive end-of-quarter feedback, which forms a very valuable tool that provides useful suggestions for improving my teaching skills. Furthermore, my extrovert nature made me “the approachable TA”, as one of my students commented: “(Mahesh) was very relaxed, fun to work with and created a comfortable atmosphere to learn”. This helped me obtain verbal feedback from a majority of my students on a daily basis. This was extremely useful in improving my teaching as the course progressed. The results were very obvious from the unique nature of the ChBE 630 laboratory course evaluations. These course evaluations are conducted, after a student group has completed each all the lab session requirements (experiments to reports) formalities with a particular teaching associate and move on to the next experiment. I could see my evaluation scores progress as the 5 week summer (term I) progressed and I moved from the 1st to the 16th student group (for both Su-2003 and Su-2004). The data tabulated earlier are the average scores from all the students.

The important feedbacks from all the courses are summarized below. In addition, a majority of these feedback points are also reiterated in the numerous GATA nomination letters I received from many students, two faculty members and a TA coordinator.

Knowledge, Engineering Fundamentals and Good Course Material
The courses I taught required comprehensive chemical engineering knowledge and basic fundamentals at all levels. This requires a thorough pre-quarter preparation and constant weekly updates to stay in tune with the requirements of the class. I feel that the best way to learn is to teach and only by having a superior command over a subject one can effectively communicate the subject matter to the students. As most of my students say:

• "Mahesh was very knowledgeable and has a superior command over the fundamentals"
• "Focuses on real life problems….effectively related the link between theory and practice..."
• "Confident …has good course materials"
• "Analyzes problems from all angles"
• "Successful in relating difficult course material in a comprehensible fashion"
• "Effectively related concepts from textbook to any dynamic project situation"

Intellectually Stimulating and Encouraged Thinking
I feel that the students should be made to think and reason. This augments their problem solving and their analytical reasoning skills. My students realized this quite early and were forced to participate in classroom discussions. If I did not get any response I tried to give vital hints and lead them to the answer. I learned this with experience as some of the students were nervous and shy initially but improved as the course progressed. The confidence they had gained from this exercise was revealed when they tackled the “question and answers” after their group presentations for every course! The students quote:

• "Encouraged students to think themselves so that they understood the concepts and not just get the lab work done"
• "Encourages dynamic and creative thinking"
• "Required us to really learn the material"
• "He is demanding, pushes and stimulates us to figure it out ourselves"
• "Enhanced our problem solving skills to apply our concepts to industry and work"
• "Knows about the pitfalls and gives useful hints"

Dedication and Interest for Teaching
Dedication and passion for teaching is what I had observed in my favorite faculty outside OSU and at OSU (have won the MacQuigg Teaching award). The enthusiasm of a motivated teacher, who is passionate about his/her work, will rub off on the students who turn put in more effort. I have realized that the time commitment is the key and I have tried my best to manage the time and feel that I have improved in that aspect. The students say:

• "Kind of hard to find and wish he was available more but it is understandable as he has more labs than other TAs"
• "Very enthusiastic, available and willing to help students"
• "The effort Mahesh displayed as a teacher was above and beyond"
• "He was always available to answer questions and stayed late nights upto 2 am"
• "Was available on weekends"
• "..showed clear passion for……in almost 5 years at Ohio State I find rare among…."
• "Love for teaching and interest for his students"
• "He was very concerned and is obvious that he is genuinely interested in chemical engineering and spreading his knowledge to others"
• "Best I have ever had. Dedicated and never ceases to provide help!"

Approachable, organized and comfortable learning atmosphere
The best in a person comes out in a non-stressful relaxed setting where the students have no inhibitions to approach me and hold discussion ranging from specific subject matter, future career options or some personal (life) problems. My motto was “Please help me help you” and it seemed to work very well. Students who have graduated and moved on to industry do stay in touch and drop by in my office when they are on this campus. They say:

• "It was a pleasure working with you"
• "Great sense of humor"
• "Was relaxed, fun to work with and created a comfortable atmosphere to learn"
• "He was very organized that everything from the beginning to the end flowed wonderfully"
• "Great TA, this is the way all TAs should be"
• "He seemed to enjoy working with students throughout the entire class"
• "Mahesh is organized, well prepared and has an excellent teaching style…"

SCOPE FOR IMPROVEMENT

ChBE H783 Undergraduate Honors Research (Autumn 2004, Winter, Spring 2005): In addition to classroom (760) and laboratory (630) teaching, I have had a unique experience to serve as a research advisor (mentor) to a Senior ChBE student performing undergraduate level research related to my dissertation topic. This gave me the experience to guide a research student, which is a role most faculties in chemical engineering have to fulfill. I feel this exposure has taught me a lot, but there is a great room for improvement. Project planning; scheduling regular weekly meetings; “being demanding”; and focusing towards the overall research goal need some improvement. While conducting research, unlike classes, specific planning well ahead of time is not exactly feasible leading to ambiguity in the nature of “research work”. My primary focus is to adapting to this ambiguity while working with the students and communicating this effectively. In addition, I also aim to incessantly motivate my students especially while dealing with occasional failures (common in research).

ChBE 760, 630: Figure 1 summarizes the average scores for my evaluations from the feedback table for classroom courses presented earlier. It is interesting to note that my scores illustrate a progressive increase in many aspects, from summer 2003 to autumn 2004. In the ChBE 760 course (Autumn 2004) I was glad to receive a perfect score “5” for many categories. The area that needed a lot of improvement was severity in grading as the students used to think that I was “very demanding”, and “a tough grader”. The suggestions were “Needs to be lenient in grading”. After some modifications to my grading styles by being very specific and improving my clarity of communication for report/assignment requirements, the students seemed to be satisfied and my Autumn 2004 evaluation scores for “accuracy in grading” reflect the improvement. I was lucky to have almost the same group of students for ChBE 630 (summer 2004) and subsequently for ChBE 760 (Autumn 2004). The students wished I was “more available” during the summer 2004 course even though I had to put in efforts totaling to 60 hours per week for 5 weeks. (I did enjoy the work). The primary reason for my “hectic schedule” was that I was overloaded with a total of 16 lab sessions (as opposed to an average of 6-8) as a student says ”It was kind of hard to get you at times…but that was understandable as you were doing multiple experiments”. I was able to improve that category by being “always available” in Autumn 2004, for which I had to postpone my “Candidacy Examination” to Winter 2005.

Figure 1. Trends in average evaluation scores for different categories
(1=poor and 5=excellent)

Finally I would like to conclude by quoting some of my students’ words from my nomination:

“His guidance and strong presence over the last few years has made chemical engineering a stronger program”

“(Mahesh) would push me to try and figure it out myself first……this was very important because it taught me valuable skills that I will need to utilize once I leave Ohio State and pursue my Chemical Engineering career. In fact I believe that it was this skill of problem solving that helped me get the job at …..(a premier multinational company). They told me that they were very impressed with the ways I analyzed the problems presented to me. I simply followed the methods that Mahesh had taught me in the class.”

“Overall he was very committed to his job and not only became a valuable resource for the class, but also became a friend to the students”