Collaboration is the name of the game when developing a course. You also don't really know how well you understand a subject until you try and teach it. I was very fortunate to have a great mentor at Columbia to help guide the process of distilling pages and pages of ideas and notes into a cohesive list of topics that can be communicated clearly to students with many different perspectives.

Early on in the development of this course, we decided it should be a project-based course. This allows the students to address many of the same questions, and gather the same information they would need to create audio system designs in a professional situation. Projects were conceived by the class to illustrate the relevant topics and dig into the fundamentals of system design.

Teaching was a great way to see problems I have been solving for years in a new light. Students have a way of poking holes in any soft parts of your arguments. The ability to test and modify lesson plans and class structure to best fit the needs of those particular students in that specific semester allowed me the freedom to continually refine the topics and projects to best reach my students.