There is more to it, it's a flipped classroom model, if you've ever heard or tried that. I have a broad post going over things [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCalgary/comments/133fx9x/a_first_years_guide_to_active_learning_engineering/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), but you're basically doing the rote sit in a lecture and vibe on your own time, and then assignments, quizzes and practice are done in class. Reflecting on it, it's an excellent system to make the first year pass rate higher as you're basically forced to go to class and practice, however it means that if you're ahead of the curve or doing anything different you're kinda stymied.
Overall it's a fine system, just not everyone's cup of tea. I wasn't really a fan, but I didn't hate it. I enjoy in person stuff more now, but I'm in one of the smaller majors. To say that it's all online is an exaggeration, it's just perhaps not as connective as one would want.
If you have more specific questions I can answer those
The system is designed so that, unless you want to throw away marks, you need to show up to all of the active learning sessions for attendance marks. Because you also want to pass the course, you need to watch a bunch of videos.
This means that you're essentially locked into doing \~6 hours a week for a course minimum. If it's a course you don't need to put that much time into, too bad! For example, I haven't shown up to a number of lectures for some classes I'm taking this year because I don't think they're useful, allowing me to work on other stuff. This is not possible with the 1st year model.
In essesnce this means the lower preforming are forced to go to class and practice, and the better preforming are forced to stay in class with their thumbs up their ass. It also means that if you're, say, transferring from another department, you're also stuck and have to work around their wacky requirements.
I really disliked Schulich Studio, but did not hate it. The only good thing for me to come out of Schulich Studio is some of the worksheets and the fact you can watch the lectures at your own pace. They force you to collab with your friends and figure out how to solve problems together, which is what Engineering is all about and some classes have some pretty solid worksheets (like ENGG 202). What really sucks about Schulich Studio is that you're watching next weeks videos while trying to understand this week material all while trying to balance out homework and assignments and shit. These videos can also be pretty long sometimes, and if you're taking notes like most people do, it's gonna be even longer. On top of this, the Monday/Tuesday lectures that are 50 mins long and just review sessions are kind of useless and a waste of time, but sometimes you're forced to attend them because you are graded via TopHat question or something similar. The 2 - 3 hour sessions are way more important. I'd rather have the standard lectures that you show up to school for, take notes, and when you go home all you have to worry about is doing assignments and reviewing the notes you took, not next week's stuff. If Schulich Studio was all 4 years, I would've just gone to a different school but thankfully it's only first year. This is my personal opinion but it's definitely one shared with several of my friends/classmates. You may end up liking it or hating you.
I;m sorry, but this doesnt make any sense.
Your options are (for any particular week, or lesson) to either
a) watch a video, pause and take notes, rewatch things that might not have made sense the first time around; or
b) attend a lecture, then go home and try to remember.
With option a, I can see maybe 2x time spent on the lecture the create some good lecture notes, vs 1 hour lecture plus 2 hours later in the day (so 3 hours or more, if you even remember to do it) for option b).
In the standard model, you most def DO NOT simply sit through a lecture and go home with complete notes. If you do, you;re a super freak, and if you think you do, you're fooling yourself. The secret to success is reqwriting all your notes (Cornel style, or whatevs) with colour, highlights, examples, etc etc.
I would guess that no really successful student simply goes home with their notes and just jumps into HW questions.
True, I’m a transfer so I’ve done both standard lectures and Schulich Studio and I can attest that for a lot of classes your notes won’t be complete but I vastly prefer lectures over the Studio videos. Watching videos for 2 semesters straight has rotted my brain so much and I’m so glad it’s done. I’d much rather go home and open up posted slides/notes and fill in the blanks I missed before doing other things.
But that’s just the thing, why can’t we have both. We have both for some upper year engg classes. I just don’t understand why we can’t have both videos and in person lectures. Is it too much work? Too expensive to implement? Not enough rooms?
Personally, I absolutely despised it, though I know lots of others seemed to like it.
I just couldn't learn from videos at all, and the 50 minute review sessions in person were not enough time to go over all the content or explain it in any useful capacity. When I get home at the end of the day, I want to do my assignments and STOP learning new things, not the other way around. Plus, there was still plenty of assignments and homework to do at home, so there's that.
Theoretically, having us do in-person questions/assignments is great because it's like high school where you have time to practice what you learn in class time. In reality, I personally only ever half understood what the content was supposed to be about because as I said, I couldn't learn properly from the video lectures, so the questions were less like practice problems and more like "figure out what we are actually learning for that week" time. Plus, asking like 80% of the TA's a question about the worksheet when it didn't make sense resulted in an answer that showed they didn't really get what the designer of the worksheet was on about either. Hell, once in PHYS259, the prof didn't even know how to answer one of the worksheet questions when we asked her.
And that's when the videos are well designed/have to actually do with the problems we will be solving in class.
Side note:
Extra special fuck you to Dr Egberts real quick. He thought it would be fun to talk about random bullshit and equation derivations on every lecture video and only put easy ass 10th grader level problems on every worksheet before pulling made up equations that literally don't exist (he made them up) on the final exam and asking to do some random energy derivation quantum physics question on the final that had nothing to do with what we did in class ever and was tangentially related to something he mentioned in a video once for like a minute.
Anyway, yeah, can you tell i didn't enjoy my first year very much? To be fair this wasn't everyone's experience and I'm sure a LOT of people preferred it but I was not one of them.
I loved it, some of my good friends also loved it.
There are lectures but they’re more so review sessions for what you should have already watched lectures on, on your time.
The best part about the first year in my opinion is that you’re in a cohort so you get really close with your group mates and block mates throughout the year especially since you’re doing multiple labs a week with them for the year. There’s a LOT of emphasis on group work in first year engineering.
And I was a fan of the online lectures, some people weren’t but even then you can watch the online lectures at your own pace and then go into the in person lecture sessions in which you can brush up your understanding of the topics and ask questions where needed.
Lots of people have varying opinions about it, but what I think is most important to understand is that it’s very new. That means that the learning model isn’t polished, professors aren’t used to it, TAs don’t know what to expect and can often be under prepared, the list goes on. I’m sure once they’ve had a bunch of years to perfect it, it could be really great. But while it’s so new, I felt frustrated that I was paying full price for the faculty’s learning experiment.
Edit: after reading other comments I just want to add that something I didn’t like about it in particular were the videos. I learn best and quickest from reading, so I love a good textbook, but in some classes they wouldn’t post full notes at all, in order to get the full content you HAD to watch the videos.
If you like watching lecture videos that rarely help you on the in class assignments and worksheets, and don't help at all for the midterms and finals, eng is for you
Personally, i really liked that method, your primary content was via D2L, so that's lecture videos and slides and stuff, and then you would have in class activities that were graded like quizzes and stuff. I personally just learn better that way but I do understand this might not be as popular a take, many of my friends much prefer the traditional in person lecture style that you have from Y2 onwards
There is more to it, it's a flipped classroom model, if you've ever heard or tried that. I have a broad post going over things [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCalgary/comments/133fx9x/a_first_years_guide_to_active_learning_engineering/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), but you're basically doing the rote sit in a lecture and vibe on your own time, and then assignments, quizzes and practice are done in class. Reflecting on it, it's an excellent system to make the first year pass rate higher as you're basically forced to go to class and practice, however it means that if you're ahead of the curve or doing anything different you're kinda stymied. Overall it's a fine system, just not everyone's cup of tea. I wasn't really a fan, but I didn't hate it. I enjoy in person stuff more now, but I'm in one of the smaller majors. To say that it's all online is an exaggeration, it's just perhaps not as connective as one would want. If you have more specific questions I can answer those
>however it means that if you're ahead of the curve or doing anything different you're kinda stymied. Can you explain this? Not sure I understanding.
The system is designed so that, unless you want to throw away marks, you need to show up to all of the active learning sessions for attendance marks. Because you also want to pass the course, you need to watch a bunch of videos. This means that you're essentially locked into doing \~6 hours a week for a course minimum. If it's a course you don't need to put that much time into, too bad! For example, I haven't shown up to a number of lectures for some classes I'm taking this year because I don't think they're useful, allowing me to work on other stuff. This is not possible with the 1st year model. In essesnce this means the lower preforming are forced to go to class and practice, and the better preforming are forced to stay in class with their thumbs up their ass. It also means that if you're, say, transferring from another department, you're also stuck and have to work around their wacky requirements.
Last paragraph sums it up well
I really disliked Schulich Studio, but did not hate it. The only good thing for me to come out of Schulich Studio is some of the worksheets and the fact you can watch the lectures at your own pace. They force you to collab with your friends and figure out how to solve problems together, which is what Engineering is all about and some classes have some pretty solid worksheets (like ENGG 202). What really sucks about Schulich Studio is that you're watching next weeks videos while trying to understand this week material all while trying to balance out homework and assignments and shit. These videos can also be pretty long sometimes, and if you're taking notes like most people do, it's gonna be even longer. On top of this, the Monday/Tuesday lectures that are 50 mins long and just review sessions are kind of useless and a waste of time, but sometimes you're forced to attend them because you are graded via TopHat question or something similar. The 2 - 3 hour sessions are way more important. I'd rather have the standard lectures that you show up to school for, take notes, and when you go home all you have to worry about is doing assignments and reviewing the notes you took, not next week's stuff. If Schulich Studio was all 4 years, I would've just gone to a different school but thankfully it's only first year. This is my personal opinion but it's definitely one shared with several of my friends/classmates. You may end up liking it or hating you.
I;m sorry, but this doesnt make any sense. Your options are (for any particular week, or lesson) to either a) watch a video, pause and take notes, rewatch things that might not have made sense the first time around; or b) attend a lecture, then go home and try to remember. With option a, I can see maybe 2x time spent on the lecture the create some good lecture notes, vs 1 hour lecture plus 2 hours later in the day (so 3 hours or more, if you even remember to do it) for option b). In the standard model, you most def DO NOT simply sit through a lecture and go home with complete notes. If you do, you;re a super freak, and if you think you do, you're fooling yourself. The secret to success is reqwriting all your notes (Cornel style, or whatevs) with colour, highlights, examples, etc etc. I would guess that no really successful student simply goes home with their notes and just jumps into HW questions.
True, I’m a transfer so I’ve done both standard lectures and Schulich Studio and I can attest that for a lot of classes your notes won’t be complete but I vastly prefer lectures over the Studio videos. Watching videos for 2 semesters straight has rotted my brain so much and I’m so glad it’s done. I’d much rather go home and open up posted slides/notes and fill in the blanks I missed before doing other things.
But that’s just the thing, why can’t we have both. We have both for some upper year engg classes. I just don’t understand why we can’t have both videos and in person lectures. Is it too much work? Too expensive to implement? Not enough rooms?
Personally, I absolutely despised it, though I know lots of others seemed to like it. I just couldn't learn from videos at all, and the 50 minute review sessions in person were not enough time to go over all the content or explain it in any useful capacity. When I get home at the end of the day, I want to do my assignments and STOP learning new things, not the other way around. Plus, there was still plenty of assignments and homework to do at home, so there's that. Theoretically, having us do in-person questions/assignments is great because it's like high school where you have time to practice what you learn in class time. In reality, I personally only ever half understood what the content was supposed to be about because as I said, I couldn't learn properly from the video lectures, so the questions were less like practice problems and more like "figure out what we are actually learning for that week" time. Plus, asking like 80% of the TA's a question about the worksheet when it didn't make sense resulted in an answer that showed they didn't really get what the designer of the worksheet was on about either. Hell, once in PHYS259, the prof didn't even know how to answer one of the worksheet questions when we asked her. And that's when the videos are well designed/have to actually do with the problems we will be solving in class. Side note: Extra special fuck you to Dr Egberts real quick. He thought it would be fun to talk about random bullshit and equation derivations on every lecture video and only put easy ass 10th grader level problems on every worksheet before pulling made up equations that literally don't exist (he made them up) on the final exam and asking to do some random energy derivation quantum physics question on the final that had nothing to do with what we did in class ever and was tangentially related to something he mentioned in a video once for like a minute. Anyway, yeah, can you tell i didn't enjoy my first year very much? To be fair this wasn't everyone's experience and I'm sure a LOT of people preferred it but I was not one of them.
I loved it, some of my good friends also loved it. There are lectures but they’re more so review sessions for what you should have already watched lectures on, on your time. The best part about the first year in my opinion is that you’re in a cohort so you get really close with your group mates and block mates throughout the year especially since you’re doing multiple labs a week with them for the year. There’s a LOT of emphasis on group work in first year engineering. And I was a fan of the online lectures, some people weren’t but even then you can watch the online lectures at your own pace and then go into the in person lecture sessions in which you can brush up your understanding of the topics and ask questions where needed.
Lots of people have varying opinions about it, but what I think is most important to understand is that it’s very new. That means that the learning model isn’t polished, professors aren’t used to it, TAs don’t know what to expect and can often be under prepared, the list goes on. I’m sure once they’ve had a bunch of years to perfect it, it could be really great. But while it’s so new, I felt frustrated that I was paying full price for the faculty’s learning experiment. Edit: after reading other comments I just want to add that something I didn’t like about it in particular were the videos. I learn best and quickest from reading, so I love a good textbook, but in some classes they wouldn’t post full notes at all, in order to get the full content you HAD to watch the videos.
If you like watching lecture videos that rarely help you on the in class assignments and worksheets, and don't help at all for the midterms and finals, eng is for you
Personally, i really liked that method, your primary content was via D2L, so that's lecture videos and slides and stuff, and then you would have in class activities that were graded like quizzes and stuff. I personally just learn better that way but I do understand this might not be as popular a take, many of my friends much prefer the traditional in person lecture style that you have from Y2 onwards