Backwards lesson design

It happens far too often: someone creates a lesson, but they think about what is interesting to them, not what is important for the learners. In fact, an earlier version of this instructor training had this very issue.

It is critical to backwards design almost any piece of communication, especially something as widespread as teaching.

The approach

  • You don’t think about how to do something and try to explain it.

  • Avoid the typical approach “I want to show a number of things which I think are cool about tool X - how do I press these into 90 minutes?”

  • Instead, you start defining your target audience by answering to questions such What is the expected educational level of my audience?, Have they been already exposed to the technologies I am planning to teach?, What tools do they already use?, What are the main issues they are currently experiencing?. It is important to discuss these points with a group of colleagues, preferably from diverse backgrounds and institutions to reduce biases. Once you clarified your target audience, it is useful to create learner personas; that will help you during the development process by providing concrete examples of potential learners showing up at your workshops. For each learner personas, try to think of what is useful to them: “What do they need to remember/understand/apply/analyze/evaluate/create?”. Asking and answering to these questions will allow you to define the background knowledge (starting points) and goals (end points) of your learners. Then, you create a sequence of exercises which test incrementally progressing tasks and acquisition of the new skills (from starting to end points).

  • Then, you write the minimum amount of material to teach the gap between exercises.

The process

As described in “A lesson design process” in the book Teaching Tech Together:

  1. Understand your learners

  2. Brainstorm rough ideas

  3. Create an summative assessment to know your overall goal

    • CodeRefinery translation: think of the things your learners will be able to do at the end of the lesson. Think simple! The simpler the better. Think of three main points they will remember, of which maybe one or two are a concrete skill.

  4. Create formative assessments to go from the starting point to this.

    • CodeRefinery translation: think of some engaging and active exercises.

  5. Order the formative assessments (exercises) into a reasonable order.

  6. Write just enough material to get from one assessment (exercise) to another.

  7. Describe the course so the learners know if it is relevant to them.

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to know your end state and keep it simple.

Example: designing an HPC Carpentry lesson

Let’s take as an example the HPC Carpentry lesson

Target audience

  • What is the expected educational level of my audience?

    • A PhD student, postdoc or young researcher.

  • Have they been already exposed to the technologies I am planning to teach?

    • The word HPC is not new to them and they may have already used an HPC but are still not capable of giving a proper definition of HPC. In addition, we do not expect them to know much about parallelism and they cannot make any distinction between various available parallelism paradigms.

  • What tools do they already use?

    • serial codes, multi-threaded codes, data parallelism; usually out-of-the-box tools.

    • they may have tried to “scale” their code (multiprocessing, threading, GPUs) with more or less success.

  • What are the main issues they are currently experiencing?

    • they cannot solve their problems either because they would like to run the same code but with many different datasets or because their problem is larger (more computations/memory).

    • most of the time they know their codes can run on HPC (from the documentation) but never really had the opportunity to try it out.

    • Very few will have their own codes where they may have tried different things to speed it up (threading, task parallelism) but have no clear strategy.

Learner persona

  • Sonya is a 1st year PhD student: she recently moved to Oslo and joined the Computational and Systems Neuroscience group. She will be using the NEST, a simulator for spiking neural network model. She used NEST during her master thesis but on her small cluster: she never used an HPC resource and is really excited about it.

  • Robert is a field ecologist who obtained his PhD 6 months ago. He is now working on a new project with Climate scientists and as a consequence will need to run global climate models. He is not very familiar with command line even though he attended a Software Carpentry workshop and the idea to use HPC is a bit terrifying. He knows that he will get support from his team who has extensive experience with HPC but would like to become more independent and be able to run his own simulations (rather than copying existing cases).

  • Jessica is a postdoc working on a project that investigates numerically the complex dynamics arising at the tip of a fluid-driven rupture. Fluid dynamics will be computed by a finite element method solving the compressible Navier-Stokes equations on a moving mesh. She uses a code she has developed during her PhD and that is based on existing libraries. She has mostly ran it on a local desktop; her work during her PhD was very limited due to the lack of computing resources and she is now very keen is moving to HPC; she knows that it will requires some work, in particular to parallelize her code. This HPC training will be her first experience with HPC.

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the difference between HPCs and other local/remote machines

  • Understand the notion of core, nodes, cluster, shared/distributed memory, etc.

  • Understand the notion of login nodes.

  • Understand the need for a scheduler and how to use it appropriately

  • Understand why optimising I/O is important on HPC and how to best use HPC filesystems

  • Understand the need to parallelize (or use existing parallel) codes and in which cases HPCs is a must (when communications is required)

  • Understand how to get your code ready to use on HPC (access to libraries, installation of your own libraries/software, etc.)

  • Understand that an HPC is an operational machine and is not meant for developing codes.

Exercises

  • Get basic information such the number of CPUs, memory from your laptop and try to do the same on a HPC. Discuss outcomes.

  • Try to create files on the different filesystems on your HPC resource and access them.

  • Create different types of job scripts, submit and check outputs.

  • Make a concrete example to run a specific software on your HPC (something like GROMACS).

Exercises

Backwards-design a lesson/topic

Choose a simple lesson topic and apply backwards lesson design. You won’t get all the way through, but come up with a logical progression of exercises.

The section you pick should require screen sharing and be of some follow-along task (preferably using a shell).

Some suggestions:

  • Regular expressions

  • Making papers in LaTeX

  • Making figures in your favorite programming language

  • Linux shell basics

  • Something non-technical, such as painting a room

  • An instructor training for CodeRefinery

  • Some aspect from an already existing lesson

  • Introduction to high-performance computing (or an episode therein)

  • Unix shell in a HPC context (or an episode therein)

  • A lesson you always wanted to teach