---
# System prepended metadata

title: CodeRefinery Autumn 2025 - instructor debrief
tags: [archive]

---

# CodeRefinery Autumn 2025 - instructor debrief

:::info
- Invited: All autumn workshop instructors, organizers + CodeRefinery team
- Zoom connection details: https://cscfi.zoom.us/j/66165768646 
- Your host: Richard Darst
:::

## Questions to spark discussion

- How was your experience?
    - Covered below under "what went well" and "what didn't go well"
- Feedback?
    - ...
- Notes and virtual support room experience?
    - Michele would do it again!
    - First week we had people.  Later weeks sometimes no people.
    - The teachers should (could?) more often mention the support room and that people can go there.
    - Should the support room people follow the stream?  Not during exercises?
    - [name=Michele] Bottom line: it went well, it did not require more manpower than following the notes (at least )
- Improvement suggestions (workshop organization, curriculum, lessons)
    - More specific use cases for lessons
    - [name=Michele] I have some for the Documentation lesson, I'll open issues there
    - Overview picture of time allocations
    - Some content could be done as seminars and some as walk-throughs.  Or could be shortened - one hour guest lecture kind of thing?
    - Prep checklist should expliciely say to do all the exercises before teaching (obvious, but if it's in the checklist it will remind people to save time, even if you have taught before)
    - Talk about "when should you do what you see" for example when pairing a command-line only person with an IDE person.  
- Instructor training topics needs/wishes?
    - Perhaps when we teach we might care more about:
       - casual listeners: the fact that some listeners might not be able to stick 100% of the time to the stream, especially if the workshop takes a long time (the pad can help). Demoing tabbed material causes, in a sense, listeners to have a "casual" attitude from the attention point of view
    - Pace: too slow -> potentially easier to follow, but potentially more boring, too fast -> potentially saving time (for the learners) and have a higher information density, but of course potentially harder to follow
    - Instructor onboarding seemed good
    - Checklists overwhelming
    - ..
- One thing that worked well
    - Streaming and practicalities were easy
    - Production-level and being industrialized
    - [name=Michele] At least in the first days we had some people in the support room and it looked like it was useful
    - [name=Michele] Oviously, we taught a lot of very important RSE stuff. Does that count as positive?
    - [name=Michele] Having the workshop split over several week did not break the flow of all the other things that I had to do
    - [name=Michele] This time we did quite some rehearsing and preparation of the lesson
    - Fluid conversations
    - Preparation went well (clear expectations and material)
    - Onboarding worked well (learning how stuff worked practically)
    - Lesson delivery has matured a lot
    - Getting into it, getting started.
- One thing that did not work well
    - [name=Michele] On my side: we did quite some rehearsing and planning, but I did not consider the time taken to review comments in the pad, and I ended up using much more time than expected and then Yu did not have much time
    - [name=Michele] It was a little harder than desirable to find the links to all the necessary rooms/pads. Were these links in the reminder email?
    - As organiser (EG) workshop fatigue for many weeks doing tasks
    - EG I felt some mismatch between number of registration and number of participants
    - Low participant numbers.
    - Figure showing licenses not intuitive (social coding)
    - OBS control panel sounds not fully clear
    - Re-inserting exercises into reproducible researc wasn't so good. (it's so dependent on how people work)
    - Some weeks didn't feel like it was part of one course, but disconnected lectures on special topics.  Could this be why attendance is low?
    - Timing (testing)
    - We are trying to reach everyone, which diversifies the audience and makes it harder to tune things right for the audience.  When multiple audiences are in the same place, it's hard to speak directly to any.  (e.g. those who have been to carpentries before, or those that haven't.)
    - Example where skills of audience matter:
        -  For the Git lesson we[ introduce an exercise](https://coderefinery.github.io/git-intro/commits/) introduce an exercise, that require creacting a merge and making commit. But before that we do not show  how to do this, just way around the github browser. If the expected audience are the once we reach in the lecture, this is too much for them to learn by doing, something they do not know nothing about. But for a little advanced user we can talk less and let them learn from the exercises 
    - day 2: smoothly switching between command line and IDE didn't work so well.


## FYI 
- Spring 2026 workshop
    - 17.-19. and 24.-26. of March 2026
    -> compact format 2x3x half days
    - Exercises where they make sense (+30 min compared to spring 2025 workshop)
    - Jupyter will be removed from the workshop schedule and a new session on "responsible coding with AI tools" will be added. (EG coordinates the group)

