Lesson philosophy

This page describes the overall spirit of how our lessons are made - basically, what to think about when designing or improving a lesson. Other pages go into details about how this is implemented.

Terminology:

Lesson One repository containing a package of teaching material, for example git-intro. For courses with all material in one repository, “lesson” could also mean one episode there.

Episode One page within a lesson.

Workshop or course One instance of giving one or several lessons.

Summary

CodeRefinery lessons are designed to be widely applicable lessons for the beginner to intermediate level, designed to get people started on a path so that they can continue learning themselves. They are designed to have a few practical things and exercises that can be actually be done, but almost everyone will need to continue their learning after the lesson is done to put things into practice.

Lessons focus on both the overall motivation and “quick wins” at the beginning, and the later parts usually have a demonstration of more advanced follow-up ideas that need self-study.

Lessons are designed to be practical for learners who need to computing, but aren’t “computing people”. This means we make plenty of compromises for simplicity that are not what instructors would do themselves on a daily basis.

The target audience

CodeRefinery is mainly focused on people who are already doing some sort of scientific or research (or other real-world) work, but haven’t been introduced to the best computational practices. Thus, we are in an interesting place:

  • Our audience isn’t pure beginners, since people are in practice working already. Many may be beginners to the actual topic, but many will have seen bits and pieces through their work.

  • Our audience probably is not advanced in the topics we teach, since we focus on introducing learners to new topics.

Our audience is also very diverse - not just demographically, but what they study and how they will actually need to use computing in the future. Taken together, this means that lessons and instructors need to do a lot of work explaining what is relevant to which parts of the audience.

Learning pathways

In general, we tend to teach widely applicable basics, with the expectation that our learners are smart and will be able to follow up and continue learning the details they need later on (which will be different for each person).

Modern learning is much different than before. Decades ago, courses and information were harder to find, so people would attend courses for long-term knowledge. These days, information is at our fingertips and we expect to find what we need, just when we need it. And there is so much to possibly know (and it’s hard to know just what is relevant at any time). Thus, long courses are a hard sell.

Self-study materials and AI is able to answer many questions without having done long study - but still, some background is needed to be able to find the right material and ask the right questions, since there are just so many possible ways to do any given task.

This leads to the overall philosophy of: broad introduction to a topic with various follow-ups suggested both within the lesson (advanced material not covered in the main flow) and what to learn next.

Design choices

The above leads to various philosophical design choices:

  • The main lesson flow is designed around beginners in the topic but people already in “research life”. This means that learners want to get to some point and many won’t want to study the material excessively just for its sake. On the other hand, learners have experience doing new things so if you give them the right foundation, they can figure stuff out.

  • There is a significant focus on practical exercises, not just theory.

  • There is often advanced and optional material within lessons which isn’t taught.

  • There is not one fixed flow. Instructors may teach different episodes in different courses without changing the actual material, though the first few episodes are often fixed. Learners may attend different lessons.

  • They are designed to balance the needs of in-person teaching, online teaching, and self-study.

  • They are not pedantic and realize that beginners have different needs than experts than teachers (while trying to give the idea of these better ways of working).

But not just this

CodeRefinery is growing into not just one single workshop program with some lessons, but a network of people teaching different courses. There’s nothing wrong with adapting this philosophy to fit your use case, whether the course is more advanced or for a more focused audience. If you do that, the ideas on this page may help you explain the target audience of your particular lesson and how it compares to others.