RFC: Provide Organized Instruction In Professional Presentation Skills

[bradleygrant]

Problem: In its current form, OSSU may inadequately prepare its students for effective collaboration with teammates, co-workers, and open-source contributors.

Duration: 1 month from the date of posting.

Background: One potential issue with self-led learning through programs like OSSU is that students can complete the program with a minimum of social interaction with other students, and without ever interfacing with teachers, managers, college deans, or other figures of authority. This leaves some students without an adequate understanding of how to navigate the social proprieties of change management. Successfully developing leadership potential requires practice; however, OSSU is not currently in a position to provide much of this practice.

It has been noted that some OSSU students and collaborators could benefit from a guide to effective leadership, and especially of effective presentation of proposals. Such skills include development of tact, diplomacy, and the ability to read a room and understand whether their position is likely to prevail. The ability to contribute on a cross-functional team is highly dependent on these skills; they are of high demand in the workplace.

In my opinion, OSSU does not currently do enough to assist with the development of these skills -- this is a potential deficit when compared to in-person organized learning in a university program like OSSU attempts to emulate.

Proposal: I recommend the following addition to the curriculum: Speaking and Presenting with Tact from the Personal Development series, published by the University of Michigan and hosted on Coursera.

Provided course description:

To be an effective speaker you don’t need to overwhelm people with your intellect. You don’t need to dazzle them from start to finish. You simply need to give them the sense that what they are receiving was especially prepared with their interests and needs in mind. This course will help you develop the judgment and dexterity needed to craft a perfectly tailored message.

Including this course adds approximately nine contact hours to the OSSU requirements and implements a technical communications elective.

Alternatives:

• Maintain the curriculum as-is and empower the OSSU community to demonstrate tactful presentation approaches, allowing OSSU students to learn effective communication from example. This may effectively (or perhaps ineffectively) be done by encouraging the practice of effective collaboration skills when submitting RFCs, commenting on RFCs, or proposing changes in the Discord community.
• Maintain the status quo and simply allow these skills to be developed elsewhere by others.

[dafydddev]

I was thinking about this when reviewing the "Core applications" section.

It states that the section covers "Agile methodology". However, the relevant course, Software Engineering: Introduction, really does not cover "Agile methodologies to any satisfactory degree.

In my experience, CS programs often have modules that teach students about the professional skills necessary to be effective working professionals. For example:

• How to do CS research
• How to contribute to OSS
• How to work in a team

I do think that it is important that people learn some of the skills requires to apply their CS knowledge in a professional environment. For that reason, I have been electively taking Software Development Processes and Methodologies.

So while I cannot comment on the specific course you mentioned, I do think that some professional skills modules would be good for the OSSU. For example, "CS Tools" could be "CS Tools and Methodologies".

However, we do need to be careful about bloat. Ideally, there would be a Software Engineering module that covered soft skills, while otherwise talking about the methodologies more generally associated of building software.

EDIT:

This might also be worthwhile investigating, IBM - Soft Skills courses.

[pulkitkrishna00]

@dafydddev As I recently posted on Discord, the original Software Engineering course was recently replaced by a course of the same name (because the original course is no longer available on Edx), without checking the contents of the new course. The new course is very different from the old one in terms of materials it covers, and is not an appropriate course for the position it currently holds in OSSU. There have been many suggestions for replacement on Discord (including the materials of the original course posted on YouTube and GitHub). It would be best if you open a separate RFC so that this can be discussed.

[pulkitkrishna00]

I think this course, and the "Learning How to learn" (which is recommended very often, on Discord) can be added under a heading "Motivation & Preparation", just like the bioinformatics curriculum.