When I'm teaching an advanced graduate class where the source material is drawn primarily from current research papers, there isn't a canonical text per se, and a typical lecture, while loosely structured, also involves discussion that might help clarify the papers.
In such a setting, asking students to scribe lectures serves a useful purpose. Students hopefully remember the material better after writing it down, and are forced to be more precise. And classroom discussion can be captured for posterity.
But I don't think I've found a way to implement this effectively. My current mechanics include:
- students are assigned as scribes between a week in advance, and on the day of the lecture
- I provide a latex style file, and also an example or two of prior scribe notes.
- students are expected to produce a first draft within a few days of the lecture (lectures are once a week), and the hope is that a good version of the notes is on the website a week after the lecture.
- these are "seminar" classes: they are 1-credit, and the only work the student needs to do to earn a grade is one or more scribes and (sometimes) one lecture.
What happens is that the initial draft is usually abysmal, and it either takes me a really long time to wrestle the document into shape with the student, or I give up and do it myself, which also takes a lot of time.
Are there useful practices that can improve this workflow ? Is my timeline unrealistic ?
p.s To avoid confusion, when I say scribe (which is common parlance in my area) I don't mean a literal recording of minutes but a synthesis of material that if well done becomes something resembling lecture notes.
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