Sharing lesson materials with learners

[dvanic]

When do we share the lesson materials with learners in a workshop?

It seems that there are different consensus(es?) for this across trainers in our community:

The model I've seen used in Australia/in workshops I've attended, with Damien Irving, for example, and used ever since:
After the workshop with most learners, except if (1) individual learners are falling behind and a helper makes the judgement call they would be best served by having copy-paste access to be able to keep up/not get demotivated/with the class, and (2) for more advanced learners, so they can independently work on some of the more advanced challenge tasks

I don't really have a good handle on a model for Zoom-based workshops yet.

Other suggestions/discussion from the training meeting on October 1, 2020:

• During a workshop, I'm teaching: I tend to only share it at the end, and when people have it at the beginning, if it's distracting i try to gently convince them to trust in the participatory live coding. In instructor training: it usually comes up in the preparing to teach episode as a question
• I make a point of "don't show the lessons on the screen" during workshop prep with my co-instructors that we shouldn't show notes, but it's complicated by some of the Jupyter notebooks we've prepared.
• One common error in non-badged instructors is that they teach from the lesson directly. I don't think we spend enough time on how to get our badged instructors to norm-set for their co-instructors.
• During a workshop, online, I shared the lesson and had a code-log in our shared document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O3w7aVw8QGd4ZyFzvr8tP0eaTGFMlquImPenWQBhtTc/edit to allow people to catch up and recover from zoom drops, but I'd never allow something like this in person. Constraints are very different online in terms of attention and recoverability and helper-side-channeling.
• I tell them at the end of a workshop unless I need someone is very far behind and give them a rapid jump to the current content
• When I teach a workshop I don't live code with the notes up, but what I do is pull up the notes before we start to show people where we are so they can follow along. As I move though the material, I will put links into a google doc/etherpad saying where we currently are. Sometimes I will want to pull up the material to talk about a diagram. RE: teaching demos, I haven't had someone show notes yet when live coding
• I generally start a workshop by giving people a heads up that all the materials are online so they don't need to take detailed notes, then put links in the etherpad, and then remind folks at the end and send them out in the post workshop email.
• In a recent demo two out of five didi show the notes, but I let them go on as they didn't read them or copy-paste, but I we discussed this during feedback
• Sometimes people in workshops actually want to see notes side-by-side and say the feel lost or confused while watching live coding and trying to check where in the materials we are (and we spend some time justifying the live coding setup and emphasise that we will have copy of the notes on the etherepad and the materials are available for self study after the workshop)

This issue proposes that:

1. We have a discussion among this among the trainer and instructor community, to learn what people are doing and why, for:

• In-person workshops
• Online workshops

This could be done via the following series:

1. A shout-out of this issue to the trainers mailing list/slack community discussion

2. A shout-out of this issue to the instructors slack community

3. [Optional]: 2 themed community calls (scheduled ~12 hours apart) to have an "in-person" discussion and summary of the above

4. We have a new exercise in instructor training (Could be as part of teaching demo exercise or checkout discussion, although may best be in "How we operate"?) about the different models for this and the pros/cons of each one. The "model answer" can be based on the experience of existing trainers solicited as part of step 1.

[dvanic]

@brownsarahm - can you please link the above (now actually fleshed out, vs my string of consciousness pre-caffeiene) to the card ?