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Note: I wrote this post for Simply Statistics at the request of Jeff Leek after several conversations we had about building online courses.

Over the past few months I’ve been helping Jeff develop the Advanced Data Science class he’s teaching at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We’ve been trying to identify technologies that we can teach to students which (we hope) will enable them to rapidly prototype data-based software applications which will serve a purpose in public health. We started with technologies that we’re familiar with (R, Shiny, static websites) but we’re also trying to teach ourselves new technologies (the Amazon Alexa Skills API, iOS and Swift). We’re teaching skills that we know intimately along with skills that we’re learning on the fly which is a style of teaching that we’ve practiced several times.

Jeff and I have come to realize that while building new courses with technologies that are new to us we experience particular pains and frustrations which, when documented, become valuable learning resources for our students. This process of documenting new-tech-induced pain is only a preliminary step. When we actually launch classes either online or in person our students run into new frustrations which we respond to with changes to either documentation or course content. This process of quickly iterating on course material is especially enhanced in online courses where the time span for a course lasts a few weeks compared to a full semester, so kinks in the course are ironed out at a faster rate compared to traditional in-person courses. All of the material in our courses is open-source and available on GitHub, and we teach our students how to use Git and GitHub. We can take advantage of improvements and contributions the students think we should make to our courses through pull requests that we receive. Student contributions further reduce the overall start-up pain experienced by other students.

With students from all over the world participating in our online courses we’re unable to anticipate every technical need considering different locales, languages, and operating systems. Instead of being anxious about this reality we depend on a system of “distributed masochism” whereby documenting every student’s unique technical learning pains is an important aspect of improving the online learning experience. Since we only have a few months head start using some of these technologies compared to our students it’s likely that as instructors we’ve recently climbed a similar learning curve which makes it easier for us to help our students. We believe that this approach of teaching new technologies by allowing any student to contribute to open course material allows a course to rapidly adapt to students’ needs and to the inevitable changes and upgrades that are made to new technologies.

I’m extremely interested in communicating with anyone else who is using similar techniques, so if you’re interested please contact me via Twitter (@seankross) or send me an email: sean at seankross.com.