At the Turn of the Tide – Teaching Python in Real-Time at Scale
| Session Type | Live |
|---|---|
| Start time | 13:30 |
| End time | 14:00 |
| Countdown link | Open timer |
Teaching a programming language can be challenging, even more so when your classroom is suddenly virtual and you have to teach 1200 students. With some clever thinking our multidisciplinary teaching team turned this crisis to our advantage and achieved an all time high level of student satisfaction. We are now able to reach any student, no matter their location, timezone or computing device with a real-time collaborative coding environment.
This talk will cover what we consider “must-haves” for teaching in these extreme circumstances and how we have been able to maintain student engagement. We will demonstrate our solution to hosting tutorials online and share the lessons we learnt along the way.
We teach Python as part of an introductory Data Science unit for post-graduate students. This unit has dramatically grown in popularity due to the demand for data science education.
In Semester 1 of 2020, we experienced a significant crisis situation where over 80% of our 800 students were unable to travel to Australia due to COVID. We quickly discovered that our prior teaching practice was inadequate when teaching over Zoom. The situation for Semester 2 was dire, with an expected 1200 students. So we outlined our requirements and searched for a solution.
With some clever thinking our multidisciplinary teaching team turned this crisis to our advantage and achieved an all time high level of student satisfaction. We are now able to reach any student, no matter their location, timezone or computing device with a real-time collaborative coding environment.
This talk will cover what we consider “must-haves” for teaching in these extreme circumstances and how we have been able to maintain student engagement. We will demonstrate our solution to hosting tutorials online and share the lessons we learnt along the way.
Stephen is a lecturer at the University of Sydney in the fields of Statistics, Data Science and Machine Learning.
Alison is an astrophysics PhD student at the University of Sydney and tutors programming, data science and computational modelling units.