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illdopejake#1

In discussing the structure of this week's lessons with @illdopejake, we had a general concern that kept emerging. Specifically, we realized that we are still unclear as to the kinds of students who will be attending this course, as well as the specific outcomes they will be evaluated on at the end of the four weeks.

One consideration this brings to mind is the balance between introducing students to this material vs making sure they are able to generate research products at the end of the course — on which they can be subsequently evaluated.

Expanding on this: If we have relatively few requirements, we will have a broader base of potential students. This, however, will come at the expense of the quality of research products they can produce at the end of the course, since it is more difficult to absorb and actualize large amounts of new information in only a four-week timespan. Indeed, we have seen this in past teaching experiences, where students with large potential do not produce high-quality research products at the end of a short-course or semester, but go on to have significant expertise on a one- to two-year time frame. Evaluating short-course research products in a standardized fashion, then, is particularly difficult.

One potential solution is to have more rigorous requirements for students joining this course. This is particularly appealing as it seems that time constraints will prevent us from covering many fundamental concepts such as basic programming (e.g., introductory algorithms) and multivariate statistics (e.g., the general linear model). It is, however, a very high-level decision, so we wanted to broaden the discussion to all involved players.

Although I'm sure we will discuss this point during in-person meetings, it would also be helpful to note here the final decision we make and its motivation, so we can point to it when evaluating this course after student evaluations.

Kirstie confirmed she's actually not going to be available this week.

What do folks think of Felix from Calcul Quebec coming to chat about Binder ? cc @jbpoline @pbellec @illdopejake