Last Friday (the 10th of November) we run our first ever Julia workshop. After years of having an expert in our team – Mosè – who has been introducing the rest of the team to this wonderful language and even convinced some collaborators to use it on their projects, we’ve done the jump to teach it to the UCL community.

This first workshop was limited to a reduced number of learners (10-12). Seven of which attended (most of them physicists!), with our team of three (myself instructing, with Mosè and Tuomas helping — also all physicists 😅) made the learners’ experience very positive.

Originally, we were going to use the Carpentries Julia lesson available in the incubator. However, Mosè and I decided against it as the expected previous knowledge was higher than what we were aiming for. Therefore, we created our own lesson!

Our lesson started with the basics, different types of numbers, strings and how all them fit in the family of types in Julia. We introduced some of the quirks Julia surprises you with when you come from a different language. This was key in our lesson! We started to write a function as if it was Python — which was what we expected to be the most familiar for our cohort. From there, we were introducing new concepts and syntax to make our code more “julianic” (I’ve come up with that term, so it may not be the one used by the Julia community). We covered the basics (types, function, conditionals, loops and plotting) during the morning session. After lunch, we went to introduce how to use other libraries to solve polynomials and ordinary differential equations. We even introduced unit testing and had time to learn how to work with CSV files with DataFrames and gave a quick overview of Pluto.

During the preparation of the material and the class, I was constantly supported by Mosè, bouncing lots of ideas and suggestions. We’ve even found a bug in one of the libraries we were going to use that they fixed instantly after Mosè reported it.

The class went smoothly. We encountered some problems with the installation of Julia and some unexpected slowness when installing libraries (we reported it after the workshop, and it was also fixed straight away!). This is some of the feedback we’ve received at the end of the day:

• Great course, learned a lot.
• The course has been great. The pace is good and it allows us to ask any questions we have.
• Comparison’s to Python really helped me appreciate the advantages of Julia. Paper plane example was great.
• Very good course, covered all the right topics for a 1-day intro session.

Personally, I don’t remember a class that has gone so well! With very little difficulties, covering everything we were planning to do and answering very interesting questions from our learners. It may have been due to the small number of learners, or because of their previous programming experience, or the similar background across all of them, or maybe, it’s because Julia is easy to learn 😉. Whatever reason it is, I really want to repeat it, with a larger class and a more varied background of learners. There’s no reason for only letting the physicists have fun with Julia, right.

So, if you are interested in learning Julia, be sure that we will repeat more sessions like this one! This may be too basic for you? Don’t worry, we are also planning to run a more advanced workshop focused on Julia for HPC during Term 2’s reading week. Keep an eye out for our future announcements.

Now that we have started, we won’t stop!

RSECon23 opened with a keynote from Gael Varoquaux, introducing themes synergistic to my conference workshop “How do we design and deliver sustainable digital research education”.

The actual theme of the workshop, what role(s) does RSE have to play in Education for Sustainable Development probably wasn’t what most participants were expecting. However, there were some very good conversations and ideas for action.

The workshop opened with two questions:
1. What does Sustainable mean to you?
2. What does Education for Sustainable Development mean to you?

These set the scene for the discussion in the session.

Key definitions and the SDGs

Sustainability
“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

UN, 1987

Sustainable Development
“An aspirational ongoing process of addressing social, environmental and economic concerns to create a better world.”

Advance HE / QAA 2021

Education for Sustainable Development
“The process of creating curriculum structures and subject-relevant content to support sustainable development.”

Advance HE / QAA 2021

The workshop participants were introduced to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and asked to consider which are areas for development in RSE and which of these areas can we affect through education?

There was a general consensus that almost all are related in some way to RSE activity and impact that activity. The most notable being SDG 4: Quality Education.

Through RSE led education activity it was felt that the SDGs that could be affected were:

• Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing
• Goal 4: Quality Education
• Goal 5: Gender Equality
• Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
• Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Goal 12:Responsible Consumption and Production
• Goal 13: Climate Action

For Goals 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and 17 (Partnerships For The Goals) it was unclear as to how these would apply.

Barriers and Opportunities

The discussion then focused on barriers to having an impact on the SDGs but also what opporunities we had for making a positive difference.

Barriers

Key themes from the discussion on barriers were:

• Resources: time, people, data sets
• Funding
• Lack of training, confidence in education skills
• Lack of recognition
• Lack of support / mentorship

Opportunities

Key themes from the discussion on opportunities were:

• Ability to design our own materials and select data sets
• Work collaboratively, as a community
• Ability to raise awareness of issues
• Access to experts from across our institutions
• Access to education related CPD (if in a university setting)
• Our learners want to learn
• Our educators are passionate about their work

Although there are some well recognised barriers, there is also a lot of opportunities and connections we can leverage to make change.

The Call to Action

The workshop concluded with a design task to identify concrete steps we could take to address the barriers and leverage the opportunities.

The calls to action were:

• Never teach alone
  • Enables different ways to explain
  • Could lead to a variety of role models
  • Less pressure
  • More perspectives
  • Broader variety of disciplines
  • Different background knowledge
• Encourage those who found it difficult to return as helpers and instructors
• Humanise the educators
  • Introductions
  • Live coding
  • Coding confessiona
• Co-development of lesson materials
  • Share ideas and examples
  • Examples from different domains
• Talk to learners
  • What is needed?

Most importantly, we are community and should leverage that community to learn from and support each other.

So, let’s work together to make a positive change!

You can view the original results on Mentimeter.

View the Twitter / X thread from the workshop.

Two weeks ago (20th – 23rd June) we ran an internal workshop in our group to reflect about our teaching activities. As any good workshop, it also included a fun hack day at the end to work on pet projects or ideas that we haven’t had the time to work on it before. This is a summary of these four days and a reflection for the future.

The workshop was set with two main purposes: review all the teaching activities we are involved, and learn some techniques to become better teachers. The workshop was attended by roughly 8 people every session, this contributed to allow everyone to participate. The event was fully hybrid, with roughly a 50-50% participation of people joining physically and remotely (the trains and tube strike shifted the participation towards a 30-70% towards the end of the week).  Thanks to the big screen and the semi-separated areas we have in our collaboration space, together with how the workshop was run with smaller physical and virtual small groups, contributed to a nice flow of the workshop.

Each day of the workshop was broken into two 2-hour blocks, one in the morning from 10:00 to 12:00 and one in the afternoon form 14:00 to 16:00. This helped to disconnect a bit, catch up with other commitments or have time to enjoy lunch in the park while recharging our solar batteries.

In terms of tooling, we used MS Teams as the conferencing tool (our calendars and the big screen are linked to it) – we also explored the breakout rooms feature it provides; HackMD and Etherpad for note-taking; Google’s Jamboard for collaboratively moving cards in a digital medium; IdeaBoardz to collect feedback; and tried (with only partial success) Visual Studio Code’s Live Share to pair-program during the hack day.

Now that the logistics and tooling has been explained, let’s dive into the content of the workshop.

The workshop started with a short review of the Carpentries instructor training lessons. That workshop lasts two full days, and this session lasted only two hours. Therefore, many things were not covered (like practising the teaching), however, we covered some basics about how learning works and how to create a positive learning environment. As any Carpentries workshop, they are full of activities and discussions, and we had good and interesting discussions. The afternoon of that day, we spend it discussing a set of uncomfortable scenarios that may happen during a teaching activity. These scenarios were created by Yanina Bellini Saibene for Metadocencia and translated by J.C Szamosi. They are a very useful resource to explore before they manifest in a real situation. The scenarios were distributed between the different small groups and then shared with the bigger group our suggested actions. Of course, sharing it in the bigger group was also a source of new point of views and ideas. We highly recommend doing this exercise to everyone who takes part in any teaching activity! The day finished with a review of the Science of Learning paper. As with the previous exercise, we distributed the sections across us and discuss it first in small groups and then as a whole. This is a nice quote about the paper from Sarah in our team:

I want to print this out and stick it all over my office so I can see it whenever I teach.

The second day was focused on our teaching activities and an overview of Submitty, the autograding tool we use in a couple of master courses we teach. We started with a set of lightning talks (aiming for 1 minute each, but all of us overran a bit) for each teaching activity we are involved in. Each talk has to describe the teaching activity with its topics, the audience to whom it is aimed to, the format, what is going well and what can be improved, and finish it with the challenges presented for next year – all that in one minute! We had 13 talks, some of these talks are from courses or workshops we run once a year, others are about courses that happen multiple times. Two of them were from the UKRI Data Science Training in Health and Bioscience (DaSH) projects we are involved with: IDEAS and Learn to Discover. The last one was a short summary of the teaching activities from our friends at Digital Education. The afternoon was focused on Submitty. First with an overview of how the system looks from the different point of views (student and instructor) and then how to set up the exercises. We completed the day with an exercise about thinking how to plan the autograding of two questions from past assignments. The main conclusion of this exercise was that for autograding to work, we need to be more specific on what we ask the students. This, however, may have its disadvantages as it limits the freedom of how the students may approach a problem.

The third day was an ABC Learning Design workshop led by Nataša Perović from UCL’s Office of the Vice Provost Education & Student experience. The workshop starts with an overview of the different learning activities types as described in Diana Laurillard’s work “Teaching as a design science”. We spent the practical side of the workshop, focusing on three of our courses. It was a very useful exercise that we should do more frequently to keep improving and fine-tuning our courses. In the afternoon, we learnt how to migrate our notes from Jamboard into the Learning designer tool from UCL’s Knowledge Lab at IOE. One cool feature that Nataša demonstrated to us is how our Learning Design structure can be exported into Moodle.

The last day was the hack day. We have a collection of mini-projects that we would like to work on, but that normally get postponed till we have the time… Well, finally the time arrived! We tackled four of these projects, two were completed quite quickly, and the other two got started (and that’s sometimes the harder bit!) and hopefully the inertia keeps them moving to a complete state soon. One project that involved an analysis of students grades included a good discussion at the start about the ethics and privacy of the project. This helped to make some decisions of which dataset we were going to use (e.g., the anonymous dataset provided by Moodle before the marks get released), and future ideas about how to clarify to the students how the assignments get graded anonymously.

That was how we’ve spent four days last week learning how to improve our teaching, reflecting on what we’ve done so far and planning what we can do to have better courses in the future. After the positive feedback and seeing how useful a focus week without other distractions can be, we may make this a recurrent annual activity!