Data Science and AI Educators' Programme: Cohort Call Two notes
===

###### tags: `cohort-call-2` `DS-AI-Educators'-Programme`

:::info
- **Call time and day**: Tuesday 31 May 2022, 10:00-11:30 (GMT+1)
- **Meeting host**: Ayesha
- **Meeting facilitator**: Mishka
- **Call joining link**: https://turing-uk.zoom.us/j/98061763510?pwd=UUVVZEVEU0NPNDJITVJMVXUvWkNkQT09
- **Github repo**: [DS and AI Educators' Programme GtHub](https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/ds-ai-educators-programme)

:::
## CC2: Launching, hosting and maintaining your project
### Agenda

| Agenda | Speaker | Time |
| ------------------------ | ------------------------------- | ----------------- |
| Intro and overview | Ayesha | 10:00 - 10:10 | Complete
| Collaborative exercise | [Matt Forshaw](https://twitter.com/MattForshaw) | 10:10 - 10:20 | Complete
| Jupyter and Binder | [Sarah Gibson](https://sgibson91.github.io/) | 10:20 - 10:40 | Complete
| _**Break**_ | | _**10:40 - 10:45**_ |
| Developing open-source, interactive courses atop Binder | Matt Forshaw | 10:45 - 10:55 |
| Reflections, discussions and Q&A | Matt Forshaw and Sarah Gibson | 10:55 - 11:05 |
| FAIR training principles: designing and sharing training materials | [Esther Plomp](https://estherplomp.github.io/) | 11:05 - 11:25 | Complete |
| Wrap-up | Ayesha | 11:25 - 11:30 | Complete |

### Collaborative exercise

*10 minutes in breakout groups of 3-4 people*

#### Group 1
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- Enter your responses here.
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- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Enter your responses here.
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#### Group 1
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?

- Postdoc multicultural environment: laptop language settings related problems. Keyboad layouts problems.
- Gobernment department: may not have an open source solution for the setup, and some IT departments may be restrictive in what you can install in the computers. We all agree with this issue.
- Software Carpentry: diversity of operating systemas may be a problem.

- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Different platforms (R, Python, etc) for differente pursposes, how to balance them.
- Lack of basic programming knowledge from the learners and adjust to different starting levels

#### Group 2
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- Hardware and software differences
- Getting familar with the environment
- Setting up e.g. libraries and tools not always straightforward (especially for technically less experienced students), and varies with operating system
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- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Enter your responses here.
- Third party providers of environments
- Getting access for everyone to niche environments/ setting them up / even just explaining what you need can be a challenge sometimes
- Access to specific datasets can be hard to arrange
- Can't always replicate what the students are facing for troubleshooting
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#### Group 3
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- Room 3 - My learners often have issues with the IDEs (notebook, turtle), installing packages and libraries, slow clouds, different OS systems, cannot connect to network to access databases)
- Students have difficulty with different ides if being used interchangably
- they do not like to make choices about the programming language they want to use to do something like plotting or databases

- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Room 3- (some challenges with some programs blocked, some students have issues downloading, firewalls to databases)

- Often I don't know how to troubleshoot a very specific OS or package issue as I'm not an expert at setup.

#### Group 4
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- Different OS
- They can do it
- Different syntax of software
- Mismatch of terms, students don't know what file explorer is but know where files are stored
- Git for Humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxxfttcMts

- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Dealing with the variety of issues across OS and students
- Keeping pace with developments and reflecting in teaching material
- University IT systems, shared computer clusters
- Resistance to change
- Really important for students to be able to install and use the tools on their own machines / elsewhere

#### Group 5
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- Old versions of Mac or Windows which limit ability to download R/Python
- Being overwhelmed by the software
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- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Installation
- Binder is great and all, but you still have to download/save your work later...which means you have to install the software later anyway
- Having students with lots of different preferences on IDE
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#### Group 6
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- Ensuring that learners have correctly set up their own devices with the required software.
- Toubleshooting technical issues.
- Digital poverty / access to technology which can support these tools. - could be mitigated with google colab. - but has an age limit.
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- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Getting a consistent environment for different students.
- Timtabling for updating software in institutions
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#### Group 7
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- We supervise postgrad projects so we assume Computing postgrsads alreadyknow environments. BUT students without computing first degree do need advice.
- Setting up environments in different OSs
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- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- Teaching clinical students -- different levels of understanding
- convincing the students that they can do it - teaching confidnece rather than carpentry skills
- Teaching people with different backgrounds
- NHS computers do not allow Python - basic problems using AI software!
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#### Group 8
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- setting up an environment (Anacodna, RStudio, etc)
- sometimes students use inappropriate computing devices, such as using Ipads and other tablets for computing
- understanding and navigating the environment (e.g. where is console, where output is shown, etc.)
- issues with running the environment (computers not powerful enough, slow network, crashing, etc)
- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- not having funds to buy the devices needed (e.g. to pay the licensing fees)
- problems that are not under our control (e.g. power cut, network issues)
- Privacy issues in shared computing environments

#### Group 9
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- What challenges do your learners face with their computing environments?
- The background and ability of the learners means they face challenges even installing software in some cases
- the HD platforms are different and the feedback provided does not always cover all the different configurations
- Having potential blockers from organisations in terms of not being able to download and install specific programs
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- What challenges do you face, as an educator, providing computing environments to your learners?
- When we have lab sessions in cluster rooms the interaction has to be one by one and it is harder as it needs many demonstrators.
- (open) software thats avaialbale within the orgnisation is not always up to date and learners may not have administrative rights to install the latest software
- Special needs students would require a different teaching approach but the educators do not always have the skilss and tools to manage this kind of special circumstances
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### Teaching Computational Skills with Binder

- Link to Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ar_qFkjdyEBpZwxt38zZjISfJZ7QsdsotbSWVRDexww/edit?usp=sharing

### Developing open-source, interactive courses atop Binder

> Mirror Your Learner’s Environment
>
> [Carpentries Tips for Instructors](https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/hosts_instructors/instructor_tips.html)

> **Software installation headaches.**
>People’s first contact with programming or with new programming tools is often demoralizing, and believing that something is hard to learn is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It isn’t just the time it takes to get set up or the feeling that it’s unfair to have to debug something that depends on precisely the knowledge they don’t yet have. The real problem is that every such failure reinforces their belief that they would have a better chance of making next Thursday’s deadline if they kept doing things the way they always have.
>
> Wilson, Greg. *Teaching Tech Together: How to Make your lessons work and build a teaching community around them.* CRC Press, 2019. [Read Online](https://teachtogether.tech/en/index.html#s:motivation-demotivation)

- Course Starter by [Ines Montani](https://github.com/ines)
- [🇷 Course Starter for R](https://github.com/ines/course-starter-r)
- [:snake: Course Starter for Python](https://github.com/ines/course-starter-python)
- How to deploy
- Once you have created your training materials, and uploaded those to Github, you can deploy your application using Netlify at a link similar to the one below, replacing `[user]` with your Github username, and `[reponame]` with the name of your repository.
- `https://app.netlify.com/start/deploy?repository=https://github.com/[user]/[reponame]`
- Examples of Course Starter used in practice
- [Generalized Additive Models in R](https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/) by Noam Ross
- [Advanced NLP with spaCy](https://course.spacy.io/en) by Ines Montani

### Reflections and Q&A

If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel very free to contribute these below:

- If students use a cloud environment for teaching, eg SketchEngine or Kaggle or COLAB, then they do not need Binder etc to set up envoronment on eahc student laptop?
- Binder doesn't setup the environment on a local machine, it is another cloud-based service like COLAB, but is open-source. repo2docker is the tool that would mimic Binder setup locally. And having it setup locally is only important if that's the purpose of your specific lesson.
- So far we have air-fried sausages, burgers, fish fingers, evne a full chicken, with no fuss ad no problems.
- To counter that the session is lost when closing, info can be added on how to download notebook to local machine
- Do you think it is possible for us to learn this and use it in a quick time? Do the students need to install our tools or just use the output (sorry if I missed this)? Is there any quick tutorial for us to try some examples?
- Needs to be some balance here, i have used Ines' template and it takes a lot of time to set up - correct answer, wrong answer prompts and hints. Once it is set up you can reuse it but intial time investment is significant and something similar can be done with a quiz that takes 10-15 mins to create.
- Would love if you might like to come in and share your experiences. Feel very free to raise your Zoom hand if you'd like to say a few words. No pressure, though :) (Matt)
- How easily can this training material be published in a printed textbook?
- Everything is written in markdown, so easily "convertible"
- See [Jupyter Book](https://jupyterbook.org) for creating interactive, publication-ready textbooks that can be output to PDFs

- Links:
- [FAIR principles: designing and sharing training materials, Zonodo](https://zenodo.org/record/6588437#.YpXqdijMIYp)
- [Ten simple rules for making training materials FAIR](https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007854)
- [FAIR principles: The Turing Way](https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/reproducible-research/rdm/rdm-fair.html)
- [TU Delft Software Carpentry Workshop Helper Information Sheet](https://zenodo.org/record/4730727#.YpXqt-7MKUk)
- [Search for software licenses](https://tldrlegal.com/)
- [Creative Commons Licenses](https://creativecommons.org/choose/?lang=en)
- [About Creative Commons Licenses](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/)
- [Paper: Taking the TU Delft Carpentries Workshops Online](https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol11/iss1/7/)
- [Open Education: making your GitHub repositories citable](https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/communication/open/education.html#why-open-educationhttps://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/referencing-and-citing-content)