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datacarpentry / semester-biology

Forkable teaching materials for course on working with data in R
http://datacarpentry.org/semester-biology
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Address background / prerequisites in 'Audience' #595

Open cboettig opened 8 years ago

cboettig commented 8 years ago

You have a nice Audience page already, but it does not seem to say anything about the expected background of the students. While I imagine this course could be taught at either a graduate or undergraduate level, it would be great to know to what audience you had originally designed the course for and have had success in teaching the course. What diversity of backgrounds in computing experience, statistical knowledge, or numeracy, are assumed? (Even if this is a very brief mention, as in the R 4 data science book).

In a similar vein, it would be great to have some sense of the enrollment size; which might be particularly relevant constraint for the description of the flipped classroom; e.g. if / how many TAs would be needed to pull this off effectively.

If it has been offered at different levels and sizes, some words of wisdom as to how the course might be adjusted in these cases would be great.

A related concrete detail might be the number of hours a week the course has been taught. Again I realize that the goal isn't to be overly prescriptive as instructors can obviously adjust the curriculum to their own needs, but at a starting point it might be good to know if that the sample weekly syllabus reflects, say, a class meeting in 3 1 hr sessions and a 2 hr lab vs a 1 hr per wk seminar.

I'd also be curious to read more about the general logistics of how assignments are distributed, submitted, graded. e.g. Jenny's description of how these logistics work in her classroom via GitHub from day 1 are super instructive: http://happygitwithr.com/classroom-overview.html ; though given that version control is introduced only much later here I imagine you do something different?

cboettig commented 8 years ago

whoops, I see several of these are listed on http://www.datacarpentry.org/semester-biology/syllabus/, which I somehow missed (just looking at schedule page instead). Would still be interested to know about some of hte other issues, like logistics of submitting assignments, course size, level etc.

brymz commented 8 years ago

Seems like we can get by with just responding to your questions, here. Or, do you still recommend making changes to the 'Audience' or 'Syllabus' pages?

I have assigned @ethanwhite to this issue so he is cued to respond.

ethanwhite commented 7 years ago

Thanks for suggesting this @cboettig. They are all great points and something I'll definitely try to get to work on soon.