This is a masterclass in how NOT to run a course, and I am saying this as someone who more or less breezed through with a high A. The review 2Yb9pTqZf8v0/X/Q1rELfg== pretty much matches my experience, but I wanted to add a couple details:

• Assignment 1 had three sources of truth for what needed to be done: instructions, a rubric, and the actual assignment / Jupyter notebook itself. This drove me crazy as staff also would be inconsistent in terms of which to treat as the ground truth. I actually ended up losing points for basing my answer off one thing and the rubric saying another. Speaking of the rubric, it was accidentally made public beforehand, and also out-of-date. Then it was taken away with staff saying it wasn't meant to be public, adding to the confusion as folks had already started relying on it. The submission process was extremely weird too - they wanted us to zip some files but submit another separately too (so uploading a zip file + another file)...defeating the point of a zip file.
• Making the final exam open-note, closed-book, unlimited attempts, unlimited time, closed-AI, and zero-proctoring all at the same time makes absolutely no sense. I guarantee you the majority of the class probably cheated whether they meant to or not due to how low the barrier of entry was to do so.
• There is a question on the final that was unequivocally graded/interpreted incorrectly, and I raised this concern in the middle of March (basically right after the final exam grades were released). They never got around to my Ed post and then claimed at the end of the semester that they no longer had the resources/time to address final exam grading concerns (I'm not the only one - there were several concerns that piled up and were left unaddressed). Here's an idea: maybe address student concerns as they arise instead of waiting around for there to no longer be time to address them!
• When asked why AI was used to generate one of the exam questions (the text was completely garbled) when we weren't allowed to use AI to take the exam, a TA played it off as them trying to assess our ability to detect AI, rather than owning up to their mistake / the illegible text (which was actually relevant to the question). At that point I decided staff was actively hostile towards our education and decided to more or less stop engaging with them.
• No one could wrap their head around whether deadlines were enforced or not, because various members of course staff would keep hinting at it being one way or another. The professor at one point said "Not sure where the additional confusion stems from." That phrase became a massive meme due to how ridiculous of an attitude that was.
• The professor simply said "sorry, no" when asked to release lecture slides. Because who needs accessibility anyway? I ended up spending $20 on a Chrome extension for Kaltura video downloading and spending several hours vibe-coding a script to extract the slides from the lecture and compile them into PDFs, so that my classmates would have them as they took the exam.

Overall, course staff needs to be held accountable for this disastrous offering. I experienced severe whiplash from how well CS 6750 was ran last semester.

I was dreading taking this class to fulfill the HCI requirement, and for good reason. There are a lot of discrepancies between assignment rubrics, assignment instructions, and Jupyter notebook templates that didn’t get resolved until days before the assignment was due! Crazy.

The lectures are actually pretty interesting, though not very necessary. I just referred to them when I needed to for the assignments (which have infinite attempts btw).

I didn’t do any of the readings unless there was a question that referred to one, at which point I would skim the reading in question.

The first individual assignment is a mess. I’m not sure why they haven’t fixed this assignment since every single semester seems to complain about it ad nauseam. You have a rubric (which they took down midway through the assignment), Python files (which you don’t need to modify, though they’re not very clear about that), a Jupyter notebook, assignment instructions, and a deliverable template, all of which seem to contradict each other. You’ll be drowning in Ed Discussion posts asking for clarifications. My advice: 1. Walk in a straight line for the first part of the assignment, since walking in circles creates variables that are hard to account for, and 2. Ask for permission to use the stairs data they have on Canvas for Task 4. It’s a clean dataset and probably a lot easier to analyze than what you’ll get if you try to create your own at home.

The second individual assignment is actually pretty fun. I enjoy working with Arduinos. I’m not sure how much I got out of it, but I enjoyed it.

The final exam had unlimited attempts and no timer. We had a week to do it, and it was made up of the same kinds of questions the exercises had. I spent a lot of time on it (about 15 hours) to make sure I got a good grade, but it wasn’t particularly difficult since it was open book, open notes, and open Canvas. Most of my time was spent trying to find the specific papers or lessons that the questions were referencing. AI is not allowed, but even if it were, you wouldn’t want to trust its answers over the course material. I will say, though, that the ranking questions seem subjective and therefore unfair, but they didn’t make up much of the test.

The project was annoying. My group just wanted something easy to do, which I was immensely thankful for since I was burnt out from stressing over previous projects in the program.

Overall, the course was annoying but not particularly difficult. Most of the stress came from its disorganization, lack of guidance on the project, and the inevitable group dynamics you need to deal with. I’m left wondering if I would have hated GA less, which is ultimately the reason I chose the HCI route.

The one redeeming quality of this course is that it’s graded very leniently, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t needlessly stressful.

It was fine. The workload is light and the content overlaps a lot with HCI.

I liked that the class is split into two halves: lectures followed by a test, then final project. That meant the workload was manageable and the focus was clear each week.

There were definitely some head scratchers like having only 2 weeks in between the project proposal and the final project demo. Instructions could be unclear. And lectures could really use PDFs.

But the material was in-line with HCI, the test was open-book, and the project was very open-ended. If you're willing to suffer vague instructions it's a very doable course.

First half of the class is basically a breeze. You're supposed to go through 13 modules, watch the included lectures, and then sometimes complete mini-quizzes. During the first half there are also two assignments mixed-in which include some coding in Python and Arduino. Instructions are unclear but shouldn't be difficult to get an A on if you start on time. The first half ends with an exam on Canvas that wasn't too difficult, but it was long and included tricky wording. Second half consists solely of a Group Project which comes with all of the familiar downsides. Guidance is limited but getting paired with a solid TA helped. The project work really isn't that extensive assuming your proposal doesn't go above and beyond. I did not think it really made a ton of sense that the Final Demo was due like 3 weeks before the final report, but it helped my team stay on track and finish early-ish.

Pros:

The content is interesting

The lectures are really valid from a content perspective

TAs are supportive most of the time

Teachers are supportive and welcoming during office hours

The quizzes are "ok". Some of the questions are "confusing", but I wouldn't complain too much about that.

Cons:

The course is badly organized. There's little room to plan ahead. The course will be unlocked after the first week. On Canvas you'll see everything due for December 1st, however the real deadlines are different. This might cause some confusion.

There are neither notes/written versions of the lectures, nor you can download the videos; usually I wouldn't complain, however I want to mention that on Canvas the video player is awfully small. Not sure if this is an issue for most of the people, it was for me.

Individual assignments and Group Project are the worst part:

There are two individual assignments. I won't share too much detail on the assignment itself, but I want to complain about the way it's proposed.

We were given the assignment description and a template. The real issue is that the assignment description and the template differ on some points. Clearly one of the two wasn't updated but they still expected you to follow both, since the grading of the paper really depends from it. Let me give you an example without giving too much detail about the assignment itself.

Assignment description: go from A to B and print the number of seconds you took to go from A to B. Print the value on a chart. Then go from point B to point A walking backwards.

Template description: go from point A to point B. Then print the result, then print the chart. Then repeat the steps, print the value, print the chart. Compare the two charts.

Grading description (available only when the TAs evaluate your submission) will loosely match the template description, but not at 100%.

However, following both points is confusing, especially because the assignments description don't match at 100% and TAs have to give extra information, for example by saying which task has to be excluded from the submission. Why couldn't they just write an assignment that includes everything?

Unexpectedly, the second assignment is incredibly well written and the requirements are clear.

If you already took HCI, there's a lot of overlap with some core concepts and, in my opinion, most of that content is better covered by Dr. Joyner's class, at least from an organization and material standpoint.

I understand that some people might be interested in taking this course rather than HCI, but I have to consider that this is a core course for the HCI specialization, so the overlap is almost certain in case you enrolled in this specialization.

The poor course organization reflects into parts of assignments being postponed and/or canceled. Is not a bad thing, but it really gives you little room for planning ahead.

There are few mismatches between Canvas grades and what's written on the syllabus, this is not really clear, my team and I might just be wrong, but it appears so.

Up until now is the worst course I've taken. I don't know if I've been spoiled by the quality of previous classes, especially Dr. Joyner's, but is a fair course that's make awful by the lack of organization. Teachers and TAs try to make up for this by being really flexible and supportive, but wouldn't it be just simpler to reorganize the course for good?

TL;DR Version

Interesting content and solid lectures, with supportive instructors and TAs. However, the course is very poorly organized. Deadlines are unclear, materials don’t match (assignment descriptions vs templates vs grading), and planning ahead is nearly impossible. There are no written notes, the video player is tiny, and some quiz questions are confusing, not to increase the difficulty of the course, just badly written. Individual assignments and the group project suffer the most from inconsistencies and last-minute changes. Compared to other classes, the overall structure and clarity are significantly weaker. Instructors try to compensate with flexibility, but the course urgently needs a proper reorganization.

I really enjoyed this class. I came in having zero expectations with a "this is just another class to take" attitude and came out quite surprised. The material covered, while seemingly dated, was rather fascinating. The experiment assignments that we needed to conduct and manipulate data into something usable was very fun and enlightening.

The only weird con of this class was some disorganization with soft and hard deadlines. But I hear that stuff is being worked out.

Overall, I'm quite happy about this class. Thomas Ploetz was fantastic.

MUC is taught by a different professor each semester, so you may have a very different experience, depending on when you take it. This semester, the professor was Thomas Ploetz.

This was my 6th course in OMSCS. I came in with very low expectations and only took this class for the HCI spec. However, it was not as bad as people made it out to be; it is still rough around the edges but has clearly undergone some improvements. Overall, it is an easy B and somewhat insecure A. I will likely end up with an A.

Assignments:

• Sensor Data individual assignment (formerly a group assignment)
• Arduino individual assignment (formerly a group assignment)
• Weekly open-book exercises and quizzes based on lectures/readings
• Final (open-book this semester, but likely closed-book in the future)
• Open-ended group project (involving a proposal, a teaser video, a halftime report & video update, a final project demo video, a project report, two peer review sessions, and weekly check-ins with your assigned TA mentor).

Pros:

• The syllabus was released at the beginning of the semester. I know this is a low bar to clear, but this class has apparently failed to clear this bar in the past.
• Prof. Ploetz and the TAs (esp. the head TA) were responsive in the forum. The other TAs would make an appearance from time to time as well. Most questions received an answer within 24 hours.
• Grades and feedback were released at a reasonable cadence.
• All reading and lecture-based assessments were open-book. As I state above, it is possible the final will be closed-book in the future.
• The Sensor Data and Arduino assignments were changed to individual assignments.
• The Arduino assignment was pretty fun (if basic).
• The group project was open-ended. You can take one of their (also open-ended) suggestions and run with it or explore your own idea; all you have to do is connect it with MUC principles, and you are good to go. You can make a game, create a mobile app, do an Arduino project, do a replication study--it all works as long as you can justify the project idea.   The Bad:
• Assignment instructions, specs, and due dates would change mid-week, and you had to keep a close eye on the discussion board to keep track of these updates.
• In keeping with the mid-week assignment changes, the teaching team also contemplated changing the exam from an open-book exam to a closed-book exam 1 to 1.5 weeks before it was scheduled. They eventually decided to leave it as an open-book exam this semester, but I suspect it will be closed-book in the future.
• Project feedback was sometimes vague and not always actionable. This may be TA-specific though.
• You will spend way more time writing than coding during the group project. All the deliverables are videos or reports, and the TA probably won't look at a single line of your final project code even if you submit it.
• The teaching team explicitly forbade us from reusing proposal material for the final report. This means that you will be stuck wasting time rehashing a lot of your proposal for the final project but using different words. Process is agonizing and will feel like a waste of time.

Suggestions:

• Keep a very close eye on the forums for assignment updates.
• Form your group near the start of the semester but after add/drop period.
• Get 1-2 group members who are not averse to academic writing and research. As mentioned above, all the major deliverables for the project are written or video deliverables.
• Shoot for underambitious rather than overambitious for the group project. You may get docked points for lack of vision, but it's way better than having to scramble to finish your project; the TAs will assess you based on the goals you set for yourself in the original project proposal, so it is important to set clear expectations. Even if you go for an underambitious project, the instructional team ultimately just wants to see that you can finish what you said you'd finish and that you put some decent work into it. You shouldn't get under a B so long as you don't do something stupid like plagiarize.

Looks like this mod has been a shitshow for a long time looking at the reviews and it has not gotten better since.

For my semster there are two types of deadlines in Canvas ( hard deadline, soft deadline ) .

I liked that it was broken up into phases but everything just felt very poorly organized.

The deadlines kept getting changed and also each milestone for the project was locked and only released with one week to work on it. Everything was very vague and have to dig out key information in the ed forum, for example the page limit for an assignment is not mentioned anywhere in the assignment page, but only as a post in Ed.

There are also peer reviews but it was done it a very weird format. I had taken HCI and peerfeedback was excellent.

There are also many synchronous events like meetings with TA which was difficult for teams in different regions.

Workload is manageable but this lack of planning by the teaching team makes it really hard to work on projects

This is a core mod for HCI spec, so those who are forced to take it have to slug through it, but if you can i would avoid this mod like the plague, this was the worst mod i have taken in OMSCS by far

Overall the contents of the projects were good, and the final project is one where you'll get as much out of it as you put in. Lots of potential to just play around and make something cool. But the way the assignments are written and conveyed are very poor. Lots of inconsistences among various versions of the same assignment description (e.g. canvas and word doc w/ the assignment not matching up). The main purpose of the forum for this class seemed to be to clarify questions on things like this.

Additionally some deadlines and assignments were only published a few days before they were due. For example we knew some peer discussion needed to happen on the forum in the space of a 24 hour window, but the description of how that would actually work was only posted three days beforehand. It felt like the instructors were only figuring it out themselves a few days ahead of time. Lots of "we'll get back to you with an answer on this once we've convened" sorts of responses.

All in all the course wasn't bad or particularly hard, aside from these logistical annoyances that could be solved if someone just looked over everything for a single day before the class started. FWIW the instructor and TA's were very responsive on the forum and clearly care, so i just wish more of that care could be taken up front instead of feeling like the railroad tracks are constantly only being laid out 10 feet in front of the train.

This was my 6th course and it was by far and away the worst one. It may be the worst course I have taken in undergrad and grad school. It's not that hard, I got an A, but it was just a pain in the ass to deal with.

The lecture videos have some good content, as do the readings, so this course has a lot of potential! The quizzes on lecture materials are busy work with dumb questions that are difficult to answer unless you wrote everything from every video down. I would argue the answers they claimed were correct for their HCI design principle questions were completely wrong (I loved HCI and did very well in it), but let's not get petty...

They had a smaller group assignment up on Canvas for 4 weeks, which our group completed, and then decided to randomly cancel it with on clear reason? Good stuff.

Every part of the larger group project was so unclear. When are things due, what is due. They clearly took everything from the in-person class and forgot to tailor it to the online class. The group project was so open ended that I think a lot of people were confused about requirements. I like it being open ended but not if it means we're not going to be unsure if we can get an A for our project the entire semester.

They took so long to grade initial deliverables on the project that you couldn't quickly evaluate whether you were on the right path or not either. Due dates were constantly changing, feedback took so long that turnaround time on other parts of the assignment weren't appropriate. What's the difference between the deliverable in November and December? I can go on and on. If only you could see the messages on Ed Discussion (both how ridiculous the messages from staff were and how much confusion there was from fellow students). Pathetic organization for a class. Really bad.

As a OMSCS Reddit post about this class asked early on in the semester: "Is this a social experiment?"

All that said, I did get an A. I didn't spend that much time on it. You will get through it. Just expect it to suck. HCI specialization deserves better.

This course at Georgia Tech was an absolute disaster and by far the worst experience of my academic career. The TAs and professor were completely incompetent, incapable of running a class, and utterly disorganized. There was no direction, no clarity on deadlines, and no functional syllabus. It took half the course to even produce a syllabus, and when they finally did, it was a complete joke—useless and poorly put together.

The projects were meaningless and had zero relevance to anything. To make matters worse, grades were delayed by months. In our group, people who had dropped the course submitted work, and then months later, my grade was penalized because the assignments were “no longer accessible” to the TAs. No kidding! You took so long to grade the work that it’s no longer available. The complete lack of professionalism and accountability in this course is astonishing. It’s a perfect example of how not to run a class.

Worst course ever. Every other complaints here are all true. If I could give it zero rating I would. The professor announced at the very last day that the final grade on Canvas is incorrect and they need to use external sheet to calculate the correct final grade. It was only until the grade is reflected on the report that we know how we actually performed.

This was probably the worst class I have ever taken in any level of my education. It was an absolute clown show throughout. The syllabus wasn't out for several weeks after the class had started and due dates were never really finalized and changed on a whim. Answers from the TAs regarding course assignments were both slow and inconsistent. The group project was a mess, as always, with the groups being made and revised no fewer than 3 times. The starter code for our project wasn't given to us until weeks after the project started. This caused us to have to rush and spit something out in the little time we were given. Despite our project being garbage we still received a 100. All of the assignments were graded with such leniency (90+ mean on all assignments) that it makes me wonder why they even bothered giving grades.

At least it was an easy A I guess.

Copied and pasted from CIOS below. It's pretty unfortunate that it looks like nothing has changed from this course in the past year, as I was reading through other reviews from last year and kept saying "Yep, sounds about right." Unless Thad makes some major changes to how the group project is run and gets rid of all the pointless "did you pay attention in lecture" exercises, this class is really the worst class in OMSCS I have taken (I am now 7 classes in). There is a LOT of great material in the lectures, and a lot of good start to assignments in the group assignments we did with Sensor Analysis and Arduino. However, these are basically intro assignments and pretty easy. Let's get into making these a bit harder, don't be afraid to give grad students grad student level work. Get it up to 4 of them (honestly the group assignments we did should have been a single assignment and completed with real accel/gyro data using arduino), and make the assignments individual. Get rid of all the needless participation exercises in lecture, and spread the group project through the whole semester with required meetings with your TA for approval for things BEFORE you go out, write an entire proposal, and get a C on it and freak students out the rest of the semester. This is how tasks in the working world operate, not communicating through a vague list of instructions that look as though they were written for someone else. You have meetings with your manager on what you need to do, get buy in from folks, etc. Idk what else to say here, but hopefully this paints a good picture of the perception of the course from the student side of things. This could be an AWESOME course, talk to the Video Game Design staff and see how they run things. I took that class in a summer and it was so much better.

CIOS review:

It felt like the online section of this course was completely detached from the lectures and our grade is a complete toss-up. Our group assignments went fine, and the group project was ultimately okay in the end. However, it was very clear to us as students that the teaching staff was not well trained on what the expectations for our assignments would be, and the grades on several assignments reflected that. Also, there was so much of our grade that depended on our group project, and we got little to no guidance on it aside from a page of instructions. We got lots of last minute clarifications from our TA's which in all fairness, was appreciated, but where was this clarification when the assignment started? My understanding is that the staff decided to frontload individual work and backload the group work. This clearly needs some tuning, as the group work felt completely disjointed even with our group meeting regularly, completing work, trying to understand requirements, etc. My suggestion is to take a page out of Video Game Design's course structure. I completed just as many lectures and participated more actively in the Ed discussions. And at the end of the day, our group was far more successful in our semester project and we were very confident on what we had to complete and submit. Any deliverable for this class as a group for our project, we spent an hour trying to figure out what we had to even complete in the first place.

I will say, our TA did make a strong effort to answer questions on the Ed forums, and even reached out to our group personally to offer extended assistance if needed (we weren't able to take advantage of it because of timing). Lots of answers turned back to, "I need to check back with the teaching staff" so I think since you had a good active TA, the problem came from the instructor staff and not the TA staff. The head TA was also very active and often clarified instructions, though it often conflicted with what the instructors had written on Canvas. Clearly this was very disorganized, and it feels like the TA staff was ready to run the course, but the instructors/course design was just not there. Ultimately, that led to the course being unsuccessful.

Tldr; course material was very strong and interesting, group assignments were okay and I wish we had more work like it as individual work as it was very little/easy, too much lecture quiz "make sure they paid attention" nonsense which was unneeded and did not contribute to my understanding of the material, exam felt fair (I got a 79, could've tried a bit harder for a B/A) for my understanding of the material, the group project was a complete dumpster fire as we had deliverables nearly every week which made no sense and were poorly structured with little room for improvements between feedback being received from our TAs. Ultimately, we made a cool project with a strong codebase and foundation in the course material, but that doesn't mean we will get a good grade which is unfortunate because we had no idea what to submit. This alone makes me unable to recommend the course in its current state.

The professor and TAs are not that active on Ed Discussion, but the grading is very lenient. You are able to choose your own groups for the project, so that's nice. They also increased the maximum group size from 4 to 5. If you're not looking to do much work, I recommend a group of 5. It felt like barely any of us did any work but we still got full or almost full points on every assignment. If you're in the HCI specialization or doing OMSCS for the piece of paper at the end, I would recommend this class.

Really horrible course with a ton of potential. Rather than teaching or making projects/exercise that are cohesive our build, they simply took an inperson class and shoved it into an online format. Out of 10 classes I've taken, this is by far the worse in terms of content and learning. Take the class for an easy A and to check a box. Otherwise, prepared to be disappointed.

this course is not the best,

This is it. This is the worst class in the OMSCS. Yes, I have taken Software Architecture and Design. This is worse.

Only 30% of your grade in this class is based on your own work. The rest is based on group projects. The volume of work in these group projects is impossible to complete alone or with 1 other person unless you're unemployed and not taking any other classes. So if you get stuck on a bad team, you are completely screwed. Your grade in this class is purely a matter of luck. You'd better pray that you have the good fortune to get at least 2 team members that actually do some work. Good luck with that.

If your teammates don't do any work, you're completely screwed. The instructor will not allow you to change teams or request additional team members. You will not be given extra time, even if you can prove that your teammates are not responsive. I literally showed Ploetz screenshots of my team members explaining why they would not be contributing to the project. He did nothing.

Let me state this again: YOUR ACADEMIC COMPETENCE AND WORK ETHIC WILL NOT SIGNIFICANTLY IMPACT YOUR GRADE IN THIS CLASS. The work that you actually do barely matters. Your team determines your grade.

Overall, I would not recommend this class. If you are in the HCI specialization, then prepare for a below average experience.

The course content is comprised of 4 professors teaching the subject. The course material is relatively straight-forward and the content/reading checks are incredibly easy. There are unlimited attempts so retaking them in encouraged. This will amount to your overall participation grade. No issues here.

The communication of the TA's/mentors running this course is where the course became pretty frustrating. A bit more on that in a moment.

The other issue is that there is a project which is worth more than 50% of your overall grade. I believe the group you are assigned will be the deciding factor in your attitude towards the class. You are able to choose the members of your group so find a good group early on. This is my most valuable advice to you. If you are put into a poor group, you will end up doing all the work unsure of your progress at all times due to inconsistent feedback from the project mentors.

It seems that Professor Starner does not give his TA's a full understanding of the project requirements (either that or there is some miscommunication) as we were at odds with our assigned TA multiple times making the project absolutely unbearable at times. Literal weeks were wasted going back and forth trying to get an understanding of our goals and what we could and could not do.

The final exam is easy if you study as the content is not difficult. There was one assignment which required an Arduino board. That was actually very fun and my favorite part of the course. In that moment, it felt like a ubiquitous computing course learning about sensors and making actual circuits. Only caveat is that it would be great if you didn't have to buy a $45 dollar kit only to use it once and never touch it again. If I could go back in time, I would center my final project around the Arduino somehow.

Some TA's were great. Answering as much as they can and trying to organize as best as they could with what they were given.

It's not that I did not learn anything, it's that my memory of this class is tarnished due to what could have been avoidable if more care was taken into organizing the class.

Embarrassingly unprofessional, pointless, and not up to the OMSCS standard.

Full disclosure: I have already received my grade and got a high ‘A’ in this course. I learned absolutely nothing of any real importance, and I hate every moment of this course from week 1.

I was going to be diplomatic in my review here, but Thad’s only real involvement in the online portion of this course was to show up twice a semester (via email) talking about catching cheaters in a smug and gleeful manner. I wish he displayed the same level of enthusiasm for this course running smoothly as he did catching academic integrity violations. Since both Thad and his TA’s can’t bother to be professional, I won’t either. The content is mostly irrelevant and only exists to stoke the egos of the four professors running it. That’s right, four professors, this is a common property problem where (apparently) nobody thinks its their job to fix the course administration.

This course opened at 2:00 PM on Friday of add/drop week. Stuff happens, but let's not pretend a 30 second email could not have been sent out on Monday/Tuesday informing the class of what was going on. I did not enjoy refreshing canvas all week to see if it finally showed up. I even checked my registration to see if I had been accidentally dropped from the course. That gave online students 2 hours, during the workday, to look at the course before it would count as a 'W' to leave it. That is about the level of respect that you can expect from Thad throughout the course. I get the sense that the professors are used to younger undergrads, where lazy administration can be hand-waved away as a learning experience when it's really just unprofessional. They adopt a "wait and see" attitude that can work on-campus and in person but does not work for online courses.

The TAs do not seem to be getting much (if any) guidance from him, nor does anyone care to even adjust the assignment asks to make sense for OMSCS. There is an attitude from the course runners that would be appropriate to undergraduate students, but not really working professionals (lots of pretending bad directions and poorly constructed assignments are a ‘learning experience’). The full-time student TA did not seem to understand that he is dealing with adults working full-time jobs in addition to this degree, which makes sense since he is on-campus and shouldn’t even be involved in the OMSCS section. Frankly, most of us are busier than you are, and your lack of professionalism does not go unnoticed. I don't expect an early-twenties TA without real work experience to understand that, but Thad should be embarrassed by how poorly this course is run.

If you want the only learning I got out of this class without having to take it, go download “phyphox” and mess around with your phone sensors. The rest of the course content is hidden in cringe back-and-forth lectures that add nothing at best and are difficult to watch at worst. Also, don’t expect any PDF or PowerPoint lecture summaries. Most of the exercises are busy-work that seem to be there just to kill an in-person lecture period, so the instructor doesn't have to actually instruct. Lots of "turn the person next you and do this worksheet" type of work. This would be welcomed in-person but devolves to pointless busy work needing to coordinate random groups with very little notice. We had almost no time (2-3 workdays) between the first group being formed (by the instructors) and the due date on Sunday night. Insane… They spend 2 weeks of lectures on the completely failed Google Glass, like it is 2015 and it might have meant something. If this wasn't the egotistical professor’s pet project it would probably be a 15 minute note on the subject.

I do NOT recommend you take this class unless you are in the HCI specialization, and in that case, prepare for it to suck. My group and I could not wait for this to be over, it was a complete waste of time and massive stressor to deal with a poorly administered class. Georgia Tech needs to get involved and force Starner (and the other 3) to actually make a full online version and split out the sections. Let me repeat that: they cannot be bothered to separate online and in-person. Several exercises require you to get a partner from the class, this is just incredibly lazy for an online class. I do not want to have to involve friends/family because you cannot be bothered to adjust this course to being actually online. This is a “cool” exercise that would be easily completed in an in-person lab session, but it is a needlessly tedious waste of time online.

You are a second-class citizen to the on-campus people, none of the assignment instructions are even edited to acknowledge online is a thing. Be prepared to have to clarify a lot of questions about grading/assignments/dates that should have been spelled out in the syllabus on the first day. Requirements are inadvertently hidden from online students until someone asks a clarifying question. You have to ask constant clarifying questions and get TA pushback for your trouble. Hey TAs: put the details in the assignment if you don’t like answering “repeat” questions.

Don't expect the hardware assignment to have any lectures pertaining to it, they give the history of Google Glass instead, go figure it out on your own and enjoy doing so remotely without being able to even touch the same hardware as your groupmates. Presumably, they discuss this in detail in the on-campus classes since the assignment description has this in it: "We will go through the first task together during the first session. Make sure that you don't get stuck for long at any place and feel free to ask for help. The TAs will be around all the time. Happy tinkering!" First, what session? Second, don't get stuck for too long? You gave us barely a week to do a hardware project with people we can't even meet with. And it was due at the same time as the OTHER group project, because that one needed to be pushed back since they couldn’t be bothered to even start the class on time. Then they had to redo the groups, because 15% of the class had withdrawn by week 2. Somehow, this was a surprise to the professor, which indicates that they really are not aware of how poorly this course is administered online. I assume some of those withdrawals would have been simple drops (and other people could have added), but we were only given 2 hours during the workday to make that assessment due to the late start.

The obvious solution here is to have one professor do an on-campus section and have another professor do the OMSCS section for each semester. There is a high cognitive load on the student to even know what is due and when since there is no respect for the asynchronous nature of an online course.

By far, this is the laziest administrated course I've taken in both OMSCS (this is my last class). I was really hoping they would have fixed most of these problems in the previous 4-5 semesters that this course has been offered online, they have not. Stop expecting TAs to meet weekly with a half-dozen groups of online students in addition to on-campus groups. This is a complete failure of course processes if that is even necessary. Define requirements thoroughly and put it in a PDF like every other course, this is amateur hour of course administration. There's no excuse because they could have and should have involved their OMS professor peers here, there is no need to do this in a vacuum.

Please go talk to Dr. Joyner and figure out how poorly you’re doing compared to your peers. It's ridiculous how misaligned this course is, and I'm surprised it was even allowed to be offered in this current state. Thad was surprised by a lack of online office hour attendees, we all work full-time, we're as busy or busier than you and the full-time students by the very nature of this program. We don't need you to hold our hands in office hours, we need you to do your job and design projects that can be completed remotely without constant professor/TA involvement. If we're lucky the professors will receive a slap on the wrist by the College of Computing/OMSCS and be told to actually administer an online version of this course. If I was a new student and thought this class was representative of OMSCS as whole I would be assuming this degree is a joke and dropping out of the program completely.

OK. Class basics: So this class is a guaranteed B and easy A. I got an A, and based on the rubric grading, I cannot see how someone could less than a B. A lot of modules broken down into about a dozen topic areas. "Prompts" are just unlimited attempts roughly a week apart (maybe a little more sparse). Then there are one or two exercises in each topic area. The exercises take a little more time, but honestly, I do not think more than an hour (most extremely less time). There are two group exercises that do take a bit more time. You get put into a group for the first one. Then you have a group project where you can pick your team. This is the bulk of the grade. Again, I got a really great group. I did socialize early though. Yes you have to put time into this, but again nothing really that big. I said I put in 6 hrs/wk (at least half of the course though was much less). I think that is accurate. That time was really due to the group project more than anything else. This semester you had to write a couple pages for research instead of a midterm. This was the only thing I got worried about due to work life balance. But I knocked it out in somewhere between 3-4 hrs. Again, the grading is abouth the rubric and the grading is generous (although I may have disagreed on some points, who cares in the end if the grade is still an A ). Now for the course itself. This is basically just a survey course of the material that is out there. I didn't learn a whole lot that could actually "be used". And I am not referring to learning coding algorithms, just having anything coming from the class to use. Just a couple peices of useful information every now and then (and that wasn't much). This might be appealing to people though. The instructor always has his Google Glass glasses on because he worked on them. It gets really obnoxious. Also the product is always being brought up as if it is the pinning achievment of technology. It just got annoying to me after a while. After taking the class I try to think what I learned, and I really can't say I learned anything. So easy A, but fairly useless class.

The content is fun and there was one exercise to be done with a Arduino board (with some sensors and actuators) - this was fun, but would have been great if there were multiple iterations of this exercise (as we spend around $45 for the board). There were 'prompts' from the lectures that were due every week. Some of them were multi choice questions, but also included few questions that required 150 word answers (dont think this was graded by anyone and we received full grade for the essay answers). The Ed board was a mess (compared to other subjects at least) - from day one there were over-enthusiastic individuals looking for team members and inquiring about third or fourth assignments. There were no official team selection criteria - Most of the teams were random. The project topic could be anything that is useful in the real world and uses sensors. It was fun to work on (actually made use of the Arduino board here). The project required updates in the form of videos, short trailers, and a final presentation which had very limited time to be recorded. Another problem that I faced for this course is the submission day cadence - some assignments were due end of Sunday, some on Saturday and the project submissions were always mid-week which was confusing.

I took this class over the summer. Overall, it was one the best courses that I’ve taken here. Some random points: • We had to buy a $45 Arduino kit. There was only one homework assignment where we had to build some circuits. After that we had no use for it. In my opinion, they should drop the Arduino module altogether. • Final project was required to be a mobile project. Apparently in previous terms they had feedback that it was hard for team members to coordinate hardware projects. They did make exceptions though because I did see some micro-controller projects in the final video presentations. • The TA’s were very helpful. They were generous in grading and receptive to regrading if you explained why you answered incorrectly. • The videos are well done. Most videos had dialogues between top professors in the industry, Dr. Zeagler, Dr. Starner, Dr. Abowd, and Dr. Ploetz. I believe they rotate in teaching this course. For my semester, Dr. Zeagler taught. I’m glad he did, he seems genuinely interested in student’s success. If you’re in no hurry to take the course, wait until Dr. Zeagler teaches it. • Shout out to the head TA Cynthia for running the course smoothly and listening to all our concerns.

Overall: Terrible class. This is one of, if not the most pointlessly tedious courses in the program. Artificially made more difficult and tedious by handcuffing students. Not hard in a technical sense, but in a VERY tedious.

Individual Work: Senseless and silly little quizzes/exercises on topics the professors thought was "cool". What really makes it suck is they do not provide power point slides for the lectures, just to make it that much more annoying so you get to spend hours taking notes. As a result, you spend most of your time combing through the videos to find the answers to the quizzes/exercises. Its a very tedious and poor way to design a course. I don't feel like I learned anything by doing this.

Group Work: Arduino. What more can I say. There is one group exercise that requires your to use the damn thing. Which makes no sense as we are a fully online and remote group. This was a nightmare. All 4 of us had to get the exact configuration the others had to run the Arduino code. It was easily one of the most frustrating time sinks I ever had in this program. The worst part is, I will NEVER in my life use a damn Arduino again, so all this time was wasted. This Arduino project is purely done because one of the professors thought it would be "fun". It's not. Its frustrating, annoying, and adds no real world value. Luckily, you can return the damn thing after this silly little group exercise.

If you are smart you will NOT do the main group project using an Arduino. Just do a mobile app, which was encouraged by the TA's as well. This mobile app heavily depends on the group you get. I will not comment on this much as you all should know by now how the roulette of GaTech students goes. Getting a group early tends to give better results as the students who actually stay on top of their work tend to get a group earlier.

This was my 8th class in the program and first ever review on here. I never had the desire to make reviews but this class was so shit I had to warn the rest of you. Unfortunately, if you are in the HCI Specialization you have to take this course. If you are not in the HCI Specialization do yourself a favor and pick an elective that will actually be somewhat fun/interesting.

It is more interesting than it looks, but a bit more basic as well... Still, sounds easy, and it is easy, but not that easy to obtain an A...

Hours are wrong, and nobody remembers about the mandatory required CITI courses:

• Responsible Conduct of Research (1 — Basic Course)
• Human Research (Group 2 Social / Behavioral Investigators and Key Personnel — 1 Basic Course) These take a large number of hours, and you have to do them in a couple of weeks... I printed some chapter that was like 60 pages on PDF, the first weeks I had to put like 30 hours on this, although later I was sometimes putting in 7 or 8, each course on lectures or videos are dozens of hours. I printed the course,

The videos edition seems not finished.

Uh, weird course. Subject matter is incredibly interesting and the lectures are very engaging. But everything else is at best immature as an online course and at worst plain awful. There are some major problems with this course:

1. It's both online and in-person, and Canvas is shared between the two. This creates a lot of confusion about what information is relevant to which group of students (online or in-person). TAs sometimes forget there are online students, and a lot of exercises require in-person collaboration. When asked how to complete those, TAs give conflicting replies that are basically along the lines of "dunno, we didn't think about that".
2. There is a major disregard for the syllabus and rubrics when it comes to grading. The staff keep changing rules, sometimes after assignment deadlines have passed. Grading is also inconsistent and seemingly random, or at the very least poorly communicated.
3. The group project suuuuucks online. I'm sure it's better in-person, but most of the projects are hardware-based, which creates difficulties by itself. On top of that, the TAs make the requirements for the projects seem relatively open and permissive, yet then grade submissions very harshly (again, based on some made-up rules that are explained after-the-fact). I think they should just have smaller individual projects for online students instead.
4. The auto-graded Canvas assignments are very simple in theory, but incredibly time-consuming and frustrating in practice. They're mostly multiple choice "pick the most correct answer" sort of deal, with all of the answers being right in some aspect and wrong in some aspect. At least they offer multiple atttempts. So instead of using knowledge to answer them, it's a game of trial-and-error until you find the "correct" choices.

The course has its bright moments, and as previously stated, the actual content is very unique and incredibly interesting, and the multiple lecturers do a very good job at covering a very broad topic from different perspectives and sub-areas. But in hindsight, I slightly regret taking this course simply due to the "frustration factor" that comes with it. I'm still finishing up the take-home final exam, so I'm not sure what the final grade is going to be, but so far it's looking like it's going to be my worst in the program (and this is my 10th course). Not because I couldn't understand the subject matter - it's actually incredibly approachable - but simply due to the weird grading and general awfulness of the assignments.

I took this course in Fall 2022 entirely online with Professor Starner. After taking several courses in this program, this class was my least favorite and by far the most unorganized.

The other reviews before me describe the assignments and projects well, so I won’t go over them again here.

The content is high level and not challenging but did become time-consuming as you must progress on the semester-long GROUP project and complete the labs and assignments given at the last minute.

This course was poorly managed by the teaching staff, feedback was lacking, and grading was unfair and not in line with the rubric. Some of the TA responses and feedback were just wrong, and it took them a long time to post them. For example, we received late, generic, unhelpful feedback on our half-time report for our semester-long project. We had to ask for clarification several times until the professor got involved (after about a week of back-and-forth emails). The professor finally gave us proper feedback, although that feedback even had issues. The professor said he wanted to teach us the “right” way to write a report, but we were unaware we were writing it the “wrong” way since we had never previously received that feedback and the template posted for us to follow had the “wrong” way. This is just one example of the disorganization of the teaching staff and the inexperience of the TAs; most of the TAs had undergrad tags in their emails.

In summary, I’m glad this course is over. It’s disappointing that this course was allowed to be taught this way. One thing this course did do right was assigning a mentor for us to meet once a week. Our mentor was a professor, and he was not part of the teaching staff.

tl;dr Fall'22 offering was very disorganized that affects both your grade and your learning. Don't take this course unless wearable computing is part of your career.

I got an A in this course, but I am very pissed about this course. I will try to keep my opinions in the end.

Description of Content: The course tries to give you an overview of the challenges of ubicomp. There are modules like the rest of the courses, but they don't dive deep into anything (which was annoying for me). This includes everything from sensors to design principles. There are assignments that mostly don't take a lot of time to complete, but require doing some activity (ex: moving around a place and doing something on your phone). There are required readings that won't affect your grade much. The main load lies in the group project. You choose from 12 ideas that mainly give you room for novelty. You get assigned a mentor that you do weekly meetings with.

Facts:

1. The course load wasn't smoothed out across the semester as the first 1.5 months didn't have anything to be done, and then everything got compressed for the rest of the semester
2. Assignments can be posted suddenly with a due date of 4 days.
3. Grading is done very late
4. Grading isn't descriptive and might seem illogical
5. The TA that will grade your assignment and group project might be an undergrad
6. Some assignments get graded without proper feedback

Opinion: My problem with this course is how disorganized it was. It was already hard to work as an online team on the group project, but the TAs and the professor, Thad Starner, made it even harder. Grading of the early submissions of the group project was very clearly done incorrectly. It was clear because we got feedback 1 at the beginning. When we requested clarification, we got a totally different feedback 2. When we asked for a regrade, we got a different feedback 3. When we insisted, we got a different feedback 4. All of the reasons why we lost grades have been downright wrong and don't exist in our group project nor even the rubric. This was extremely infuriating if you have done a lot of effort and then find out that (with all my respect) an undergrad TA will not give enough time to read your report and still deducts a lot of grades from it. What is even more infuriating is that when you elevate this to the Head TAs and the professor, they don't react properly and still continue giving vague reasons for losing grades that are 100% refutable. This hasn't been rectified till now after the semester was complete, and the grades we lost for most project deliverables don't have proper feedback on why we lost them. It was very unprofessional from the teaching staff and doesn't suit GaTech by any means. To give a picture of how disrespectful this felt, If I hadn't got an A, I would have probably elevated this to the GaTech office to investigate this.

The only good thing about this course is that I interacted more with the GaTech community than other courses. You get to be in a team which was hard but new, and you get a weekly meeting with a professor for 30mins which was nice.

It's an awesome course, though it's offered first time Online in Spring-22 so there will be some improvements along the way.

NOTE: The course needs a Hardware Kit "ELEGOO UNO Project Super Starter Kit with Tutorial and UNO R3 Compatible with Arduino IDE" order ahead of time.

-> Grading Scheme: Project: 50% Exames: 20% (10% each) Individual Assignment: 10% Group Exercises (two): 10% (5% each) Class Participation (exercises): 8% Class Participation: (quizes): 2%

-> Project: It's the most weighted and important part of the course. You make teams of 3-4 members and use hardware to create a Ubicomp device. Different projects are suggested by the instructor and student skills are matched to make teams. There 2 checkpoints in the project; In the first checkpoint 2 project teams are engaged in a discussion, to present the project and give feedback on each other team's project.

At the end of the project, a final report and/or project code and demo are submitted. Students also create 2 videos one after submitting the proposal and one to demonstrate the final project. All project reports are graded so project grade doesn't only depend on the final report. Teams must work very efficiently on the project and its demands.

-> Individual Assignment: It's an essay that shall be of the same quality as a research paper. The topic is usually available in the 2nd or 3rd week of class. Do start working early on it because one needs to explore some research papers to write it. It must be done individually.

-> Group Exercises: 1st group exercise will need some data processing tasks, knowledge of Jupiter notebook and sci-kit learn, matplotlib etc can help. However, the main task needs to process signal data. It's the most challenging part of the course given that it is the first assignment in the course and needs a lot of effort. Start it as early as possible.

2nd group assignment is based on the hardware kit, having some electronics and Arduino knowledge may help but is not needed. This one can be done on time easily. I suggest do start early.

Class Participation Quizzes and Exercises: The quizzes are unlimited attempts with unlimited time so a brute-force can be done though it seems to change in the future. Usually, the material from lectures is covered in these.

-> Exams: Exams are open books and need you to provide a solution for a ubicomp use case. At least a week is provided to solve it. I lack some scores in Exam-1 and didn't submit a regrade which I should have done.

-> Professor and TA: Professor Thomas Plotez is very cooperating and mentors projects. He, himself schedules meeting with student groups and is available if you are stuck. Also, if you find yourself interested in doing research in Ubicomp, you must attend this class.

All TAs are very cooperative and ample attention is given to students. In fact, you feel like an On-Campus student. Though I may not get an A in this course, however, I liked the course.

Wanted to get this out there before the end of the semester in case people are thinking about taking it. First off I want to state that the TA's and the prof were fantastic for this course, by far some of the most engaged individuals I've had the pleasure to learn from after 6 other courses. With that this class is really high level with very little hands on work. There are two "physically" hands on assignments, one of which is a group assignment so unless you just do it on your own you're getting nothing from it. There is, so far, only individual assignments that touch on how to actually do some of this stuff in the real world. In it you are using RSSI signal strength to triangulate where your phone is (the script given is super shoddy so you'll probably have to debug it). The vast majority of the class is undergraduate level lectures, which are fairly interesting if you want high level information, and a giant semester spanning group project. And that's where this falls apart. To me it feels like a semester of weekly meetings and busy work, which if you already do that for your job gets a bit old. With that, I'm actually frustrated that I wasted a semester just reenacting my day job instead of learning something new. Was really hoping to walk out having done some practical hands on work. Probably great as an on campus course but doesn't work super great online.