Student Led Courses at Olin

If you have landed at this web page we see four possible reasons why you might have arrived here and we want to share with you some information that will hopefully help guide you through this guide (a very overloaded word on this website which refers to many fantastic things). We are guessing you either want to learn more about student led courses (SLCs) at Olin College, are interested in potentially teaching a student led course yourself, want to know how Vicky and Prava spent their time for AHS Capstone, or have a good eye for particularly unusual URLs. If the latter applies to you, we ask that you kindly sign off and find something better to do with your time. If you are just interested in learning more about Student Led Courses at Olin we recommend you check out the story and the archive. If you are planning to teach a student led course yourself, you should first familiarize yourself with the official rules and guidelines for doing so on the Olin College website: http://www.olin.edu/academic-life/student-affairs-resources/registrar/student-led-courses/ (I know, I thought we were official too). But assuming you have done that, we hope you will check out the guide and find that useful. And finally, if you just want to know what we have been doing everytime we say we are working on AHS Capstone this semester, you should probably check out all three.

 

Section 1: the story

• The story we have written is a fun (and hopefully entertaining) window into the life of an instructor for a student led course. It gives you a brief glimpse into the world of SLCs from the perspective of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, three characters that we hope you love (or at least tolerate) as much as we do. Whether you are someone who is interested in teaching an SLC yourself, or someone who just wants to learn more about SLCs and what goes into them, we hope you will find the story useful (or at least entertaining)!

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Section 2: the guide

• The guide we have written is a more informational (but equally as fun!) picture of the important components of working as an instructor for a student led course. We have gathered and collected our tips and ideas based mainly off our interview with Linda and our two experiences teaching SLCs for Data Structures and Algorithms and Advanced Algorithms (yes, they were both algorithms classes, but there were more differences than you may think).

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Section 3: the archive

• You may be disappointed by a lack of our fantastic writing work in this section, but we decided an archive of SLCs was much needed when we realized how spread out and distributed all the current information on past Olin SLCs has become. This is a collection that we hope will become a dynamic list of SLCs that have been done in the past and links to their publicly available course materials and information.