1) Lower expectations:
A number of us (instructors) over estimated how quickly we could cover
material. The sections of my own lesson
that went best were the ones where I had two final challenges and could drop
one of them if time ran short.
2) Course focus: With
SWC you are locked into a pretty limited set of topics. However, most of my teaching is outside of
SWC and for the second time feedback indicates that most of my students (grad
students with a few postdocs or undergrads mixed in) value learning and
improving plotting skills more than anything else.
3) Use the post-its better:
The instructors and helpers did a good job of responding to red flags. However, the green flags could be used much
better. For instance, at the beginning of a live coding session make sure no
post-its (red or green) are up. Then at
some point into the process you can ask everyone who is at the same point to
put the green flag up. This will catch
those students that hesitate to use the red.
Then you can get them help and they stay involved.
4) Make a schedule of which instructor will be responsible
for the etherpad during each session. We
did a fair job but we did have a couple of times when no instructor noticed
that a question popped up in the chat.
5) Have at least 2 instructors plan on staying for an extra
hour to help students that struggled on either day.
6) It is apparently impossible to get all students to
install software ahead of time. This is
a consensus from every bioinformatics and workshop I’ve attended combined.
7) Finally, mistakes aren’t the end of the world. We all hit error here and there in our live
coding. Some of these none of the
instructors could solve right away. Even
if there was a delay we eventually showed the students how to fix the errors,
and the students seemed to like this.
8) Enjoy the fun/funny parts like this crazy feedback I got:
Children book irony and should the music of Maurice ravel Eastman, process management workshops gives us online facilities we can learn and teach our children from this 3d printing because it have learning videos too.
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