Motivation and Screencasts

Notes:

1. Our next meeting will be March 20 (several people have said they have mid-term work and holidays coming up, so this will give us a bit more time to create and review screencasts).
2. QuickTime on recent versions of Mac OS X can record screencasts, so Mac users don’t need to use Camtasia if they don’t want to. (Thanks, Chris.)

Many people found it difficult to come up with a good motivating story. In our meeting on Feb 26, we turned that around and ask, “What demotivates learners and instructors?”, then tried to come up with remedies for those demotivators. It’s similar to what many good project managers do: think of things that could go wrong, then come up with ways to prevent, detect, and remedy each potential risk.

The most interesting moment for me came when one participant asked me whether people actually give negative feedback when I ask, “Was this useful?” The answer is, “Not at the beginning of a training course, but (hopefully) by the end.” Musicians, writers, and athletes all learn how to critique each other’s work, and by doing so, learn how to critique their own work as well. Being able to reflect in that way is a prerequisite for becoming an expert practitioner; I hope that the comments we’re giving each other on these exercises are helping you learn how to see your own work more clearly.

For our next exercise, I would like you to create a three-minute screencast to teach a short topic of your choice. Our goals are:

1. To learn how to do video-based teaching, which is different from teaching live or making written materials.
2. To explore the differences between teaching nouns (facts) and verbs (procedures).
3. To get more practice giving feedback.

To start, pick a topic that you can teach in three minutes or less. (And three minutes really does mean 180 seconds here.) It can be the topic you’ve been using so far, or something new, or even something that someone else has used, but it must be a process, like setting a breakpoint in a debugger or creating and installing SSH keys, rather than a fact like the way floating-point numbers are stored or the syntax of if/else statements.

Second, you’ll need some software. If you’re using Windows or Mac OS X, download a trial version of Camtasia; it’ll take you about an hour to install it and learn how to drive it. Tooling is a bit more complex on Linux: people have had good luck with Screencast-o-matic, but there’s some buzz now about SimpleScreenRecorder and Freeseer as well.

Third, do a couple of practice runs, but no more than a couple—in the past, some people have spent several hours trying to make their video perfect, but that’s not what we’re after:

1. We want to see and hear what you’d actually do and say in front of an audience if you were teaching live.
2. In real life, you’ll never have four hours to make a three-minute video anyway (not unless you have a Hollywood budget).

Once you’ve recorded your video, post it on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other sharing site, and then blog a short description of what you’ve taught and a link to the video in the category “Round 8.4″. Please try to get this up by Wednesday, March 12, so that everyone has a few days to watch and comment on at least two videos, and we’ll meet again on March 20 (so we have three weeks between meetings this time instead of two).

If you’ve never created a screencast before (or even if you have), you may enjoy reading this guide. Links to screencasts created by previous instructor trainees can be found here, and as always, questions are very welcome.

What specific things demotivate learners?

• The topic is too difficult to understand
  • prepare the right material for the level of learners
  • using pretest to determine the level of the learners
  • stop and evaluate often, use sticky notes to see if most people are ready to move on
• Being compelled to do something that they see no value in
  • This might indicate some sort of institutional problem — possibly address that?
  • Try to understand why those students are there
  • Try to get them to see value
  • Allow those students to steer course direction to a certain degree?
  • Convey your enthusiasm on the topic
• Instructor not prepared enough on the topic
  • Better preparation for the instructor
  • Do a test class
  • Try a walk through before you deliver the lesson
• Instructor clearly doesn’t care/doesn’t want to be there
  • Be obnoxious and ask the instructor questions
• Instructor says they *also* don’t understand something, but “just accept it this way”
• Instructor keeps saying “You just …” or “It’s easy to…”
  • Don’t say that — don’t imply it’s easy, because if it was, they’d already know it
  • Instructor introduces several linked new topics/ideas all at once without disambiguating them
    • (eg — entering commands in vim but not telling people that they’re in something called vim, and that it’s different from regular commmand line)
• Lots of references to future things you haven’t covered yet
  • eg “…this will also become clear in future”
• Related: Instructor encouraging questions in words but discouraging them through their actions, eg (recent examples)
  • “are you okay on this?” followed immediately by “should be okay, yeah?”
  • “Is anyone lagging behind?” immediateley followed by “You’re all okay, yeah?”
    • Possible strategy — when asking, pick the person who will answer the questions (who looks confused, or is quieter), if they are struggling, try asking one of their peers w/ hand in the air to explain it — not to you but to them.
• Not knowing how to use what they learn to solve the problem at hands
  • Give more hands-on exercises
  • Try to show common underlying patterns
• Having an instructor who is teaching at a different level
  • There is an onus on the student to reach out to the instructor.
  • Also, if the instructor was sampling the class, they should be able to pick this up
• Being stuck (not knowing what to try next)
  • Force yourself to ask the instructor
• technical issues (can’t install a program, old laptops etc.)
  • Minimize setup requirements
  • Have a backup (e.g., Linux VMs on the web they can connect to)
  • Paper copies of notes (in case the network goes down)
  • Small number/none of the teaching assistants familiar with Windows (if many participants on Windows as opposed to Mac OS/Linux)

What specific things demotivate you as an instructor?

• Students clearly not being interested
  • Try to engage the students by picking them out to answer questions
  • Try to show value in what they are learning
• Not being able to explain the underlying concepts clearly to someone who is desperate to understand
  • Take a break, regroup, prepare again and come back to try again
• Feeling unprepared
  • have a meeting with instructors before the class to see if they’re ready or need help with something
  • Understand what your goals for the lesson are: so even if you are actually unprepared, you still have a target to get to.
• Dealing with things that aren’t teaching (bad university WiFi, etc.)
  • get there early
  • have a contact of the IT person
  • have the contact of the building supervisors as well
  • have a local guide if its a foreigh venue
• Being assigned to teach a topic that they are not good at or they don’t want to teach
  • other instructors may help the instructor prepare for the topic
• It doesn’t demotivate, so much as scare me: having students who know much more than I do
  • The times that it’s happened I’ve tried to turn it around and get those students to teach the rest of us.
• Feeling that students will not be able to follow
  • Develop layered conceptual models

What specific things demotivate learners?

• Not seeing the value of what I was learning, and not seeing the connection between the things I am learning in different contexts. (I guess I’m not very interested in learning for learning’s sake, in most cases)
  • make connections explicit
  • motivate lessons explicitly with realistic stories
  • motivate lessons implicitly by using more realistic examples throughout
• Abstract examples (or lack of examples) — “this will be useful in your research”
  • think of examples ahead of time
  • Think of topical examples likely to resonate with the participants
• Content that isn’t challenging, or is too hard (outside my ability to understand, or something I already understand)
  • Prepare: Have a flexible enough plan to change the pace
  • Diagnosis: check in with students often, assess if they got it or not
  • Use a pre-test to find out if you need to cover this topic at all
• Getting stuck at some point — falling behind
  • Provide video instruction so that people can go at their own pace.
  • Have checkpoints, make sure students haven’t fallen behind
• Teacher saying that something is easy and I don’t get it
• Getting or feeling left behind
  • Instructor checking in often to see if people are keeping up (raise your hand if you have NOT gotten it working — in the kindest, gentlest way, of course)
• Being behind, accompanied by failure of instructor to acknowledge the problem
  • Regularly assess, and pose simpler problems so that students who are behind can make progress
• Content not suited for audience (too advanced/basic)
  • Survey leaners self-assessment at or before start
  • more objective assessment onging, adapt if possible
• Not knowing where to turn next
• Jargon
  • use definitions, especially acronyms
  • test definitions with lay-persons before providing them to students

What specific things demotivate you as an instructor?

• Learners clearly not interested (there because they have to be, not because they want to be) +1
  • Yes, lack of student engagement. It totally kills my ability to commit to the lesson
  • Learners paying more attention to Facebook than class
• Learners not following instructions and stridently insisting the software/language, etc is broken
• Struggling to connect with students’ needs or interests
  • Poll students for interests and learning goals
  • talk to students beforehand
• Language barriers — English
• No one shows up
  • include budget for cookies
• Having to cope with difficulties that aren’t really teaching-related (e.g. the school’s IT department) — Yes, especially draconian IT security policies that interfere with workshop
  • set up the previous night
  • have a checklist, so you can make sure you hit any problems before students show up
• Stuff only working in the classroom
• Being the only instructor there

What specific things demotivate learners?

• getting into a “stuck” state that i can’t get out of w/o an expert’s help. example: learning how to use a sewing machine but getting the machine jammed somehow, where only the instructor can un-jam it.
  • providing a helpful community, e.g. a forum or IRC channel etc, that learners can visit to get help immediately
  • actually teach “debugging” so the learners can get out of hairy problems themselves
  • A big reset button
  • multi-level history/undo (similar to reset button, but could help people figure out where things went wrong, or get as close as possible to a known state)
  • google to reach documentation or message boards where these questions are addressed
  • simplify the problem a bit, and help/empower students to dig their way out of the problem, hopefully increasing understanding
  • tell them it’s okay to try anything, even if it’s wrong, you can try again to fix it
  • work from the beginning again in small steps
  • Try to explain how you solve a problem
• TL;DR: copy/paste commands w/o explanation. When I first saw LaTeX+R+Sweave in action, the instructor started with a text editor full of options & commands, instructor simply copied/pasted commands with little explanation of why or how. The instructor also started with all the options and aliases they set rather than jumping into basics.
  • Pretest and see if people know anything or a lot
  • forget about setting up options and .*rc files for special use cases — jump right into basics line-by-line
  • type out everything and explain each word & piece of punctuation as you go
  • explain a little before a command; do the command; then explain so students have enough info to understand in general what they will see, experience doing it and seeing the result, and then more info about the broader what happened
• jargon
  • simplify your words
  • teach them proper terninology — this will help them ask better questions too
  • use both; start with plain English and then use the jargon so they start associating the concepts with new tech terms
• having an instructor dismiss a task as easy
  • Be aware as an instructor how you are explaining things, and avoid using phrases like “you just do …”
  • “Just” is the passive dismissive adjective (Michael Feathers)
  • “babble at the board” speak each concept or info that guides thinking and decisions about what to do next
• Not being taught why to do things just being told to follow a list of instructions, kind of expands to not seeing the point of something
  • Tell in advance you will do both; 1.Quick tour of what we’ll do, 2.Detailed explanations; 3.Hands on you do it
• Huge learning curves (too difficult too quickly)
  • handouts
  • proper pre-evaluation
  • empathize — tell them it took you a long time to learn too
• thinking you’ll never be as good as an expert
  • explaining the Imposter syndrome, as Greg did, very helpful
  • intructor explains how they were once a novice
  • potentially also that ‘experts’ don’t know everything and still have to look things up and explain how this is done (though this could be counterproductive).
• frustration when nothing works outside the classroom
  • if multi-day, ask for them to bring in items from outside, hmm, if time for them to play
  • provide opportunities for people to try things for themselves in the classroom, or where possible to come back and discuss the next day
  • offer out of classroom email support
  • teach them to be more resourceful (i.e. google, stack overflow)
• No clear usefulness of material +1
  • provide context of material to the field, at the begining and at the end
  • work through examples in class that are directly applicable to students’ interests/research/etc.
  • have the students work on something that they can show to their peers right after the workshop, and/or use themselves (and find useful)
  • if you’re teaching multiple classes (or one really long one), show at the very beginning the useful awesome thing they’ll be able to do at the end of the class, so that they understand that everything they’re learning along the way is a prerequisite for the awesome thing they’ll be able to do at the end
• knowing what you want to accomplish, but being overwhelmed by how much you need to learn to get there—and also facing the problem of forgetting gained knowledge/skills if you use the knowledge infrequently

What specific things demotivate you (as an instructor)?

• Feeling like I’m doing a crap job because I didn’t have time to prepare (or didn’t get motivated enough until too late)
  • realizing that i can learn from the experience to make the next session i lead better
• Teaching something because it’s in a prescribed curriculum, not because I believe in it
  • Push to teach what I like instead? (Revise curriculum?)
• teaching something I’m not an expert in
  • just go for it — you’ll probably find you’re qualified enough to teach beginners
• People not being interested in why they are there
  • Charging money sometimes helps
  • choosing only to teach in workshops where participation is voluntary rather than required
• Students explaining the wrong answer to their colleagues without bothering to ask about something
• people who aren’t there to learn
• distracted students (chatting in class, getting off topic)
  • Make sure sessions don’t run too long
• blank stares
  • More frequent feedback attempts
• Facebook, Twitter, email, taking care of everyday responsibilities in class. Difficult to distinguish in a programming workshop from students actually trying to learn and do stuff themselves.
  • Inject short exercises between short periods of instruction/demonstration
• unrelated technical difficulties — e.g. being told that a “modern browser” would be on the students’ computers, finding out it’s IE8 with View Source disabled for no apparent reason
  • Virtual machines?
  • ensure that tech support is available
  • enforce pre-course requirements
  • prepare for well-known technical difficulties—e.g. having a backup plan for the case where the wifi is broken/unreliable
• No feedback that my work is helping them in real time besides ‘hmm’ (AM learned by volunteer experience) [hmm need help maybe; the money helps as said above]
• Students and/or admins who don’t care
• too much material to be covered
• Arbitrary standardized tests