Virtual hackweek tutorials

In an article providing tips for moving courses online, mathematician Leonardo Rolla says “The hardest part is that it takes a lot of time...at least three times as much work as a traditional lecture, and that’s once you’re familiar with the tools.” The added time investment should be a key consideration when scoping what is possible with offering virtual hackweek tutorials.

The University of Washington offers excellent guidelines on teaching remotely. Here is a summary of the main points as they apply to hackweeks:

• priortize learning over technology: When designing remote content, begin with the learning objectives, as well as the approaches you will use to gain feedback on what is working and not working. Then ask, "what technologies will most enable us to meet these objectives?".

• be authentic: If you are new to remote teaching, it is appropriate to share your uncertainties with participants, and to let them know that you are still figuring things out. This creates a sense that we are all navigating this new territory together.

• communicate clearly and repeatedly: virtual work introduces barriers to communication and feedback that are often taken for granted in a physical classroom. Therefore it is important to communicate in more than one channel, and to repeat important instructions and concepts several times.

• set clear expectations: Include in your communications a clear statement of everyone's expected roles and responsibilities. For example, after sharing the location of course content, you may tell participants that it is now their responsibility to complete the exercises by a specified date.

• offer many resources: Given that people have multitude of different learning styles, it helps to have a variety of resources to enhance learning and communication. Provide links to both static content for people who like to work through content alone, as well as opportuntities for group work for people who learn best when connected with other learners.

• establish equitable norms and practices

Technology

The ideas listed here assume that hackweek tutorials will be delivered on Zoom and that participants will be working in a JupyterHub environment. These are some considerations and recommended best practices based on our polling of various communities so far:

• avoid screencasts: Unless you are a seasoned educator who has flipped your classroom content before, screencasts require a significant commitment of time and learning to do well, so in general these should be avoided in a hackweek.

• use breakout rooms: A meeting organizer can put people into smaller Zoom breakout rooms for designated periods of time. These can be excellent ways to increase participant engagement and encourage group problem solving. For example, breakout groups could be given a small coding assignment that can be worked on collectively, and then results can be reported out back to the full team.

• include a virutal TA: Remote teaching requires monitoring of chat windows, watching for who might have their hand up, navigating connection challenges and putting people into breakout rooms. We recommend having at least one extra person who is a designated virtual teaching assistant to help with these tasks. This especially important for larger groups.

• Make space for Questions and Answers: Zoom has excellent Question and Answer features that enable participants to virtually raise their hands to ask questions about content being presented.

• Use Chat: A virtual chat provides opportunities to type in questions or comments while a tutorial is in progress, and can be a useful way for getting feedback from participants. The Zoom chat may be used. Etherpad is another good option for live chat.

• Use Jupyter Notebooks to enhance learning: There are numerous ways to enhance teaching and learning with Jupyter. Examples include providing coding challenges with the answer hidden in a separate cell.

• Host virtual office hours: Give people lots of opportunities to seek additional help through designated office hours with experts on specific topics.