Since I came to General Assembly to learn data science, beginning December 2019, I've been impressed by their learning model. It does feel like drinking from the water main at times. But I'm enjoying this format of learning much more than both my prior graduate degrees (one in business, the other in computer science).
The teaching system combines traditional classroom teaching with what they call the connected classroom. And they don't just mean a lecturer on a TV screen when they mean "connected classroom" though that would be what it might appear at first glance.
The lessons begin in the morning at 10am with two 55 minute lectures taught by one of our global instructors who rotate during the week, depending on the topic.
First there's a well presented telelecture on two side-by-side screens, one with the lecturer on one side and on the screen next to it we view either the instructor's slides or the digital notebook.
On our computers, we each have two windows open. One of these is the exact same notebook that is up on the screen.
It's the open source Jupyter Notebook, in which there is both the lesson (with diagrams and equations) that we analyze with the instructor and our peers in our class and the several others (conferences-in).
The notebook also has cells for us to code along and see results as we are learning or experiment with pre-filled demo code which we execute, view and follow along with the discussion about...
...or when we're going over the theoretical stuff, perhaps some diagrams or math equations...
Then comes the secret sauce: using Slack to keep the discussion going. Slack is an enterprise messaging application, but it's been used rather novelly by GA to allow the students and the instructors to engage each other.
The instructor asks us questions during the lecture, either in areas of theory, practice, or code, and we answer in slack through a variety of surveys and thread responses. If someone has a question during the lecture, often a classmate, or several, in the channel can answer it. When the instructor gets to a good point, he can go back over or expand on any answers to questions or for those that were unanswered he can answer them directly. In this social media era, the emojis even have a role: not only in engaging us as students but also in being able to answer questions or take the pulse of understanding.
In this slack thread post, this person's questions was answered with the AWS emoji.
AWS is a cloud computing services and this answer, via emoji, suggests running what's called a "bootstrapping" process on a more powerful AWS EC2 cloud instance could be a way to "speed it up."
Plus, if in the course of our lab time, we use Slack to direct message each other or post to various channels things that may be useful to each other...
Later, in the afternoon our in-class instructor leads a variety of discussions, which may reinforce areas he sees us weak in, delves into more detail about what was covered during the day, or does Q&A on our labs, projects, or coding challenges we're doing.
We (both the instructor, TA and us students) do a lot of white-boarding. All the walls are painted in whiteboard paint and there are marker holsters, spray bottles and erasers all around the room. Plus there's quite a lot of group and pair work.
I'm about five weeks in, and I find this fun and exciting. And exhausting, yes. My hopes are high in gaining competency in this field. And I feel quite a bit of camaraderie built up by us all in a very short period of time.
Comments