Survey on Use of the Videolink between CS267 at Berkeley and 18.337 at MIT

Alan Edelman of MIT and I held several lectures jointly between MIT and Berkeley this semester:
  1. W. Kahan on floating point arithmetic
  2. S. Smith on climate modeling
  3. J. Demmel on LAPACK and ScaLAPACK
  4. A. Edelman on parallel prefix
  5. A. Edelman on geometric graph partitioning
We would like feedback on the effectiveness of this teaching mechanism, keeping in mind that we were all learning to use this technology. Please write short answers to the following questions, and mail them to me. Note that this is a course requirement!
  1. Was the sound quality adequate? (both for lecture, and for asking questions)
  2. Was it easy enough to ask questions of the lecturer? You should distinguish between local and remote lecturers.
  3. Was the visual quality adequate (number of images, size/proximity of image, resolution, delay)
  4. What are the pros and cons of the following lecture styles?
    1. write on the tablet with an overhead camera (i.e. "miniwhiteboard")
    2. prepared slides
    3. prepared web pages (which may be much more detailed than standard talk slides, and only partly used, with highlighting, like the CS267 class notes)
  5. How important was it to hand out slides or copies of webpages ahead of time?
  6. Even if you feel having a local lecturer is always better than a remote one, do you think a good remote lecturer can provide a good learning experience?
  7. When the lecturer was local, did using the equipment detract from the quality of local presentation?
  8. Do you have any suggestions to make this work better in the future?