Online lessons blog post April 2020

After cancelling all our planned in-person workshops this spring due to the ongoing pandemic, we decided to make the best of the situation and start focusing our efforts on developing an online workshop training programme. We decided to start small while learning the mechanics of online teaching, so we began by offering an online workshop covering only the Git-intro lesson to a group of around 25 participants on April 7-8. Neither teaching nor attending online workshops is quite the same as attending in-person events, but we were pleasantly surprised about how well the workshop went and it definitely boosted our ambitions to move more of our traditional workshops online! We believe this online format provides a great learning opportunity for participants, but it also provides a means for us to scale up and reach a larger audience than possible with in-person workshops.

Many important lessons were learned in this first experiment and we tried to summarize them all in a previous article. We hope that some of these experiences can be of help to others who are going online with some of their teaching.

New notify-me form

We expect to be delivering many more online workshops also after Covid-19 restrictions are lifted and life starts returning to normal. We realized that this means that our old notify-me form has become obsolete - it is no longer relevant to only indicate in which city you want to attend a workshop. So we created a new more fine-grained notify-me form where people can sign up for updates about upcoming online and/or in-person workshops and also indicate which lessons they are most interested in. If you want to be informed of upcoming workshops, please sign up. For people who have already particated in one or more workshops, there is now also an option to indicate that you are interested in participating as a helper or instructor.

Plans for immediate future

We plan to arrange two full online CodeRefinery workshops covering all our material before the summer. The format will be to split the workshop content over six half-days spread over two weeks.

In May we will do our first full CodeRefinery workshop, starting on a Tuesday, and ending on a Thursday the week after. Drawing on the experience from this first full workshop, the plan is to deliver a second online workshop in June.

Join an online workshops as a helper

Instructors always need help and this is even more relevant for our online workshops. Helpers assist learners in overcoming technical problems and work through challenges or questions they may have. Ideally, we need at least one helpers per breakout room (4-5 learners). Helpers don't have to be familiar with all the lesson material, experience with even just one lesson/tool/approach is sufficient. We therefore want to invite everyone who is interested in giving back to the CodeRefinery project, and in helping to spread better software development practices to the world, to register as Helper for upcoming online or in-person workshops in our new notify-me form. Remember also that there is no better way to consolidate new knowledge than teaching it to others!

Bring your own breakout room/helper

With online courses over video we could in principle aim at reaching a larger scale than in-person workshops which are limited by room-size and being visible and audible, but also by the number of helpers. In online workshops the presence of helpers is no less important to make sure that each breakout room has a helper to answer questions during exercise sessions. We are considering to offer participants the possibility to "bring their own breakout room" to the workshop. This way they can collaborate on exercises with colleagues they already know, if they prefer so. More importantly, they can assign one person who is more experienced in the toolset presented to take the role as helper. Participating as helper not only means "giving" but is also a great learning experience: both in the tools and in solving problems and supporting and teaching other learners.