Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
57 lines (47 loc) · 2.99 KB

instructor_lessons_learned.md

File metadata and controls

57 lines (47 loc) · 2.99 KB
Raw

Instructor thoughts and lessons learned

This work-in-progress list contains a short list of thoughts and tips on various platforms and other aspects of the course

Slack

  • Essential
  • No more email, organized discussions, students can post direct or group messages
  • Create new channel for each module/lab
  • Create a private #admin channel for instructors/TAs/IT
  • Create a public #it_help channel
  • Remind them that discussing on Slack is not cheating!
  • They will often answer each other's questions
  • Can review Slack posts at end of quarter for class participation grade (some students don't speak up in class, but are more active on Slack)
  • Set boundaries for yourself (use status)

Github

  • Always a major challenge for new users
  • Keep it simple - just focus on single-user workflow (clone, add, commit, push)

Github classroom

  • Simplifies assignment distribution
  • Handles forking behind the scenes, enables simple single-user git/github workflow

Jupyterhub

  • Centralized, indentical environment
    • Don't support individual student environment, OS, hardware!
  • Admin control panel is useful for monitoring recent usage, restarting student servers if they cannot do so themselves
  • Memory limits may be a problem

Jupyterlab

  • Filesystem with icons is good stepping stone to navigating via terminal
  • Right-click and download is simple and effective
  • Right-click on markdown file, then Open With -> Markdown Preview
  • Set up two panes side-by-side (e.g., notebook and rendered markdown file)

Jupyter notebooks

Using notebooks for problem sets

  • Provide a good introduction
  • Sample code is good, but make them think or interpret resulting output
  • Don't just tell them what to do!
    • Can walk them through steps, provide links to documentation, recommend methods
    • Undergrads may be used to more "plug and chug" problems, while grad students can

Large datasets

  • Try to fetch data dynamically

General

  • Students benefited from ~15-30 minutes at the beginning of lab to discuss code, answers, issues and questions. Useful before diving into new material. Lots of discussion when I wasn't present, often hard to get them to stop when the time came :). It was critical that they had already attempted to work through the exercises independently (or with recent Slack discussions).
  • Throughout the quarter revisit imposter syndrome, emphasize we are all coming in with different backgrounds/experience, learning together
  • The grading workflow worked with 15 students, but won't necessarily scale. Can use nbgrader or similar for automated grading support
  • The transition to remote/online instruction in weeks 8-10 was relatively smooth
    • The students had already established relationships, and the general informal atmosphere of the class was already established. Breakout rooms encouraged discussion.