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Reflection

Earlier reflection

This was the result from an earlier reflection, which I did not do before this course iteration:

  • [ ] Take into account that the to-do 'Discuss either moving SSH login to the Intermediate course, or request 45 minutes more time' failed

Reflection during teaching

I had a good time. The group was fun to work with. The group members helped each other well. I sent some people away, in mutual agreement:

  • 1x no account -> will try next Bianca course again
  • 3x already know login -> come back at 13:00 for file transfer

Also, before lunch, I sent around 6x learners on an early lunch. I am happy with the amount of air in the schedule: it will usually work for most.

  • [ ] Show copy-paste of script to nano on Bianca live, to make sure learners can do so in the Slurm session

Reflection after teaching

In the last session before the summary and evaluation, I sent learners to evaluate and leave earlier too. I did not know the teacher of that session wanted to do a wrap-up in the end. I accepted that the summary would be missed by those learners and although it would impede their learning, I felt I should not let them wait. I told the other teacher during teacher, but he thought these were the learners that announced to leave earlier. During the informal evaluation with the teachers, I told this again. We seemed to agree that what I did was good enough.

I am unsure about the quality of my teaching: I have not checked that the learners can search the UPPMAX documentation for what they need. I have not checked if they can copy-paste scripts to Bianca.

  • [ ] Ask a learner for a demo of searching the UPPMAX docs during teaching
  • [ ] Consider asking a learner to show how to copy-paste text into a Bianca script

Reflection on evaluation results

The evaluation was only positive: there was nothing reported to improve upon. It seems the learners have had a good time and lost the ability to be critical.

There is one comment with multiple suggestions:

Perhaps provide the respective Bianca workshop links before the course (unless you have already done so and I missed it...), so one can get a bit more familiar with some terms?

I think we should not do this. Instead, we should teach in such a way that it requires no initial familiarity with the terms. I wish that this learners would have had specified in which sessions this was the case.

Every teacher did a good job, so no individual feedback here. It was rather the topics that were challenging at different levels, depending on the existing (or non-existing) background knowledge that made it easier or difficult to follow (hence, perhaps "force" the course participants to complete some reading-up before the course, or make them watch certain videos, etc., that you feel are important for understanding everything). Could be done in the Canvas platform for example where you can also see if someone has not done the respective task.

I like the pragmatics suggestion to use Canvas and make sure the videos are watched :-) . Yet, I still think we should not; we should assume no existing knowledge instead. And even if we would force learners to watch videos, we cannot check if they just played those or actually studied these. I like the suggestion, yet I think we should not go this way with our course.

Me Learning outcome Mean confidence
Yes I can log in to the Bianca remote desktop using the website 4.875
Yes I can manage my files and folders using a graphical file manager 4.875
Yes I can navigate to the wharf folder using a graphical file manager 4.875
No I can transfer files to/from Bianca using a graphical tool 4.625
Yes I can create a minimal executable bash script 4.5
Yes (optional) I can log in to the Bianca console environment using SSH 4.5
Yes (optional) I can navigate to the wharf folder using a terminal 4.5
Yes (optional) I can manage my files and folders using a terminal 4.375
Yes I can use modules 4.125
No I can start an interactive session 4.125
No I can submit jobs to the scheduler 3.875
No I can start an IDE 3.75

So, the modules section was the weakest one.

  • [ ] Consider adding a demo about modules

Taking a look at the pre-post statistics, these are the sessions that did not increase the mean confidence significantly:

question mean_pre mean_post p_value different
I can log in to the Bianca console environment using SSH 3.500 4.500 0.6854435 FALSE
I can create a minimal executable bash script 2.250 4.500 0.0907979 FALSE
I can use modules 2.375 4.125 0.1369613 FALSE

Also these point in the direction that the third hour should be improved.

I enjoyed working together as a team. And I think we worked together well as a team.

Reflection conclusion

The courses has gone so well, that the learners lost their ability to be critical. Luckily, the confidence scores help in pointing out weaker sections.

My teaching still felt sloppy, with Feedback being the weakest. Consider adding:

  • Quizzes
  • Live demo
  • Learner demo

I would grade my teaching a 7.5 out of 10, due to the sloppy teaching.

Feedback

From a colleague:

I was looking at our post result mean scores and saw that the person who scored 0 is skewing the results since there were only 8 learners. It is capable of dropping the score by 12.5% for which it scored 0. I am unsure if this learner scored 0 because they did left early or because they actually got more confused. A prescore vs postscore for that user might have revealed that, but since it is anonymous, it cannot be confirmed. If its a missing data, because this person did not attend, maybe we can impute this data with mean/mode of all the learners for that question.

He's right! Let's redo the analysis with the zero removed...

I think you caught an important gap of us not teaching how to copy paste text into bianca, either through the clipboard or otherwise.

Here the glory goes to someone else, maybe Björn Claremar, that started teaching this. I've taken it from there and made it very explicit.

Using nano or vim would be secondary to copy pasting text into gedit or to Bianca's user friendly editor

Interesting though, to take it even further and put nano even more in the background. Maybe it should be moved to the SSH sessions only indeed ...

  • [ ] Consider moving nano from remote desktop environment and only teach it in the console environment session

As per your teaching feedback: As usual, I feel you did well in learner's engagement, exercises, material and group activities.

The only critique I can recall is your choice of wording while describing yourself as a 'ruthless' teacher. It came out as a joke in the beginning but you might have overused the word during your full course of teaching in the workshop :P .

I agree here, sometimes I have a word that echoes around in a workshop. I experience it as annoying and useless. No idea how to fix this though...

As a teacher, I felt that you are comparing our teaching style with yours time and again, which I felt was unnecessary.

I agree here that this is unnecessary. Internally (but maybe that should be more visible?) I compare my teaching style to some stereotypical old-fashioned profession that thinks having a monologue lecture is A Good Thing. Some of my colleagues are indeed like that (although, not in this group).

Maybe a softer wording like 'I believe in teaching through active engagement' or 'I can be tough coach when it comes to online participation' etc might still feel funny but strict and still do the job of conveying your teaching methodology? Idk, just thinking out loud.

This sounds like a good idea. If people/colleagues/learners think I really do ... on the other hand: I do not, or do not intend to. And I know (i.e. not believe) what is good teaching (although my ideas will adapt with more academic literature). I feel it would be weird to use weasel words, when I know I use weasel words: I feel it would be insulting to the learners.

It is hard to think of these things while one is teaching ofcourse and I generally, stay away from using extreme words in everyday life.

Yep, that is a fine personality trait :-) . I am happy and lucky to have people like that in my team.

  • [ ] Pay more attention to this next time and/or ask an observer to do so