Feedback from Instructors on pilot workshops

[ErinBecker]

This issue is meant to collect feedback from Instructors (and helpers, etc) running pilot workshops. Leave open through January 2019.

Instructors, please add any comments you have about how your pilot workshop went. In particular:

• What type of an audience did you have? What was their background and skill level?
• How long did it take to teach each lesson? Were there any parts you had to leave out? Please be specific about what you left out.
• If you left out material, how did it seem to affect your learners? Was it ok to remove that material? Did you have to come back to it later? Was it confusing to skip certain concepts?
• What problems did your learners have with the installation? What solutions did you find? If you are comfortable doing so, please also put this information into the Instructor Notes for the relevant lesson(s).
• Do you have any specific tips for other Instructors teaching these lessons? If you are comfortable doing so, please also put this information into the Instructor Notes for the relevant lesson(s).

You don't need to answer all of the questions above! Please share any and all information that you think will be helpful for future Instructors of these lessons. I will be reading through this issue before the next Curriculum Advisory Committee meeting and will raise issues to that committee for discussion. Please also feel free to leave specific issues on the individual lessons. The Maintainers and Curriculum Advisors really appreciate your feedback!

[BinxiePeterson]

Hi @ErinBecker, here is feedback from my side regarding co-teaching the OpenRefine lesson for the Social Science Data Carpentry Workshop:

• Workshop website: https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/2018-09-03-CarpentryConnect-JHB-Social-Sciences/
• Participants: total of 18 participants from 11 institutions; 14 of the participants participated in instructor training following the workshop; departments: Psychology, Computer Science, IT, Arts, Library, Engineering, Academic and Research Support; career stages: undergraduates, graduates, post-doctoral researchers, librarians/archivists, support staff, research staff, faculty.
• Lesson duration: total teaching time of 150 minutes, which was enough for the OpenRefine lesson. However, I misjudged the time need for the first part of the lesson (from Introduction to Examining Numbers in OpenRefine) - it took ~105 minutes for me to cover this part (estimated teaching time according to lesson website = 85 minutes). The rest of the lesson (from Using Scripts to Other Resources in OpenRefine) was covered in 45 minutes, although I feel that an extra 10-15 minutes was needed. This was my fault for using some of my co-instructor's teaching time, but since participants were asking a lot of questions regarding the first part of the lesson, we decided to address all their questions first. Nonetheless, all material was covered.
• Installation: Installation went fairly quickly - we encouraged everyone to finish installations at the end of day 1 (OpenRefine was taught on day 2). However, some participants were using laptops from their work which had some program that "resets" the list of installed software when the laptop is shut down. Those few participants therefore had to reinstall OpenRefine on the morning of Day 2.
• Suggestion: The data used in the Social Sciences OpenRefine lesson has a LOT of columns, of which only a few are actually used. The meant that everyone had to scroll from left to right multiple times. This might sound silly, but it actually wasted a lot of time. Especially for me, since I zoom in to enlarge the font size on screen and can then only see ~3 columns at a time. I would suggest reducing this data set (with regards to the number of columns), since the data set is covered in more detail in the Excel lesson prior to the OpenRefine lesson.
• Overall feedback: Participants really enjoyed and appreciated this lesson, since they could immediately apply it to their own data. The group was very interactive and enthusiastically participated in discussions and also asked a lot of questions - this was great!

Bianca

[ErinBecker]

Thank you for the fantastic feedback @BinxiePeterson! I just realized that the Maintainers for the individual lessons probably aren't subscribed to updates from this repo so I'll ping them here to take a look at these comments and see how they can be incorporated into the individual lessons. @gtlaflair @juanfung @chris-prener

[ErinBecker]

Also @PeterSmyth12 @brownsarahm

[gtlaflair]

Thanks for the heads up @ErinBecker (and thanks for the feedback @BinxiePeterson). @BinxiePeterson is the second person (at least) to mention that there are too many columns in the dataset for this lesson. This was brought up in another issue on the openrefine repo. @ErinBecker, should we meet or have a discussion about which columns to eliminate?

Do we have any other feedback about lesson duration? I'm happy to make those changes as well especially if the differences in expected duration and actual duration are a trend.

[ErinBecker]

It would be great to move forward on the feedback on number of columns from @brownsarahm and @BinxiePeterson. I think it would be more efficient to do this asynchronously rather than setting up a meeting to discuss (there are a lot of time zones involved!) Maybe @gtlaflair could start a document or spreadsheet listing all of the columns that are currently included and indicate whether each column is currently used in the exercises. @brownsarahm, @BinxiePeterson, and other recent Instructors could provide comments and any corrections about whether the columns are needed. Does that sounds like a reasonable plan?

[gtlaflair]

That sounds like a good plan to me @ErinBecker.

[gtlaflair]

Hi @ErinBecker, @BinxiePeterson, and @brownsarahm, I've started an editable spreedsheet here. Feel free to look this over and provide any feedback.

[juanfung]

This is great, @gtlaflair ! Thank you for setting this up. I will look over r-social-sci and update the spreadsheet.

[brownsarahm]

Do we want to only remove columns not used in ANY lesson or is it ok to make the openrefine lesson use a smaller number of columns? We could tell learners we're using a subset for this lesson to make it easier with teaching/ scrolling just for that lesson.

Also, do we want to denote what's used in the tutorial part vs the exercises?

[brownsarahm]

i'm teaching this lesson tomorrow any other updates on which columns? Otherwise, I'm happy to test (I'll have learners download 2 versions of the file so we can revert to the wider one if necessary// and probably move scripts early if I do that so that we can save where we are, re-open then apply the script to get back to what had been done).

Update: i taught from this file and it worked great! MUCH less scrolling. We also did download the full set of columns and apply the script at the end which worked as well.