Day Lead Instructions

Thanks for being a Day Lead! This document and collection of sub-documents will serve as a guide for how to follow our specific guidelines to create awesome content for our Academy.

You will be provided the Learning Objectives of the full course, the outline of what topics will be taught when, and the Learning Objectives of your specific day by the Curriculum Chair. You will help create the tutorials, videos, and interactive exercises for the day you are leading.

First, please review  ⁠⁠Our Pedagogical Approach and Philosophy⁠  and  ⁠⁠CC-BY Copyright Requirements⁠ . Additionally, see  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead Instructions⁠ .

In  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead & Project Lead Instructions⁠  you'll see a link to a Curriculum Tracking Spreadsheet and a Google Drive link. The Tracking Document is very important! It's where you will turn in items for review and final products that will be produced and incorporated into the final course Jupyter Book.

If you're building a new course, you'll have the support of a Curriculum Specialist. See roles in  World Map⁠⁠Curriculum⁠ .

General Timeline of Content Creation

  • The Academy Course Director, Curriculum Chair, and Domain Steering Committee create the general plan for the course including Learning Objectives and topics for each day.
  • Day Leads create one-pager/outline of day based on the provided topic, learning objectives, and discussion with Curriculum Team 
  • First Review: Curriculum Team will provide feedback for you 
  • Day Leads develop full day in GitHub (with the help of Curriculum Specialists)
  • Second Review: Reviewed by Curriculum Team and provide feedback
  • Day Leads make any updates 
  • Published to Jupyter Book by TeTech Team and Curriculum Specialists  
  • Pre-Pod happens
  • Third Review: Make final updates to course content and videos based on feedback from Pre-Pod
  • Final Review & Publishing: Final content and code editing done by  Hammer and Wrench⁠⁠Production⁠  and  Laptop⁠⁠Technical⁠ 
  • Published to final course Jupyter Book

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Daily Schedule 

Keep this in mind while building your tutorials. You should create tutorial content for 2, 1.5 hour blocks - a total of 3 hours of content.

Students will be watching videos and reading material during the course. The total time it takes to go through the content should be within the allotted time for tutorials. 

Title
Title
Time (Hour)
Component
-0:30-0:00
Intro video & text 
  • Day Lead responsible for recruiting someone to create an Intro Video and writing intro text 
  • This is optional! Not every course has intro videos
0:00-0:15
Pod discussion I
0:15-1:45
Tutorials I
  • Day Lead responsible for creating 
1:45-2:45
Big break
2:45-4:15
Tutorials II
  • Day Lead responsible for creating 
4:15-4:25
Pod discussion II
4:25-4:30
Reflections & content checks


Recruiting Support 

As a Day Lead, you are welcome to ask others to help with your day! Post-docs, grad students, professors, etc. 

You are ultimately responsible for the full course day and ensuring everything comes together. 

All people who work on the day should be credited, this will happen in the tutorial template. All people should either be onboarded as a Neuromatch volunteer to fill out this  CC-BY Agreement.  

Curriculum Specialists are also here to support you. The Curriculum Specialist will work closely with the Day Lead to help implement the coding and structure for the day. Day Leads should provide a clear and robust outline for the course and ideas for the exercises. The Curriculum Specialists can help with the actual building of the python notebook and ensure that our template is used and the book is building correctly.

Content Creation 

Reminder to review  ⁠⁠Our Pedagogical Approach and Philosophy⁠  if you haven't yet!

One-Pager 

  • Create a Day one-pager that includes: 
  • Prerequisites
  • Learning objectives 
  • Outline of content addressing the learning goals (e.g. what’s in the tutorials)
  •  Here's a general template.  Be in touch with your Curriculum Chair for a course-specific template if not listed in the  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead & Project Lead Instructions⁠  .
  • First Review: When you've finished your One-Pager, upload it to the appropriate folder in the Google Drive and let the Curriculum Chair know via Slack or Email. See the curriculum tracking spreadsheet in the  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead & Project Lead Instructions⁠  .


One-Pager Review: 

The one-pager will then be reviewed by the Curriculum team for continuity of content across the course. 


Tutorial Creation 

A tutorial will consist of:
  • Written content
  • Recorded videos or mini lectures
  • These will be recorded after the second review
  • Slides
  • Coding exercises
  • Datasets (if needed)
You will most likely have more than one tutorial to make up your day.

Here are some examples from  Comp Neuro ,  Deep Learning , and  Comp Tools for Climate Science .

Start building your full day’s content 
  • This will include tutorials that have multiple mini lectures and interactive exercises.
  • See  ⁠⁠Types of Interactive Exercises ⁠ 
  • There should be one topic per video. The written content should reinforce the topic taught in the video. And the exercise should help the student learn in a hands-on way.
  • When building the tutorials, each tutorial and exercise within the tutorial should have a learning objective that feeds into the Day's larger learning objectives. Look back at your Day Outline for a reminder on the Learning Objectives!
  • Here is the full  Course Book Template  for making a new course
  • For updating materials, you can use the existing tutorials in the course book and edit, or use the  tutorial template . Either way, make sure to take a look at the  Course Book Template  for notes on notation and format.
  • Please make sure each tutorial has a separate notebook.
  • You’ll use the same template for each Tutorial 
  • Follow the naming guidelines exactly!
  • Share it with the people who will be helping you with content creation for your day 
  • Intro & Outro Sections 
  • These sections are not required (except the intro for Climatematch Academy). If you do create them:
  • Intro should include a quick introduction to what students will learn including the specific learning objectives
  • If you choose to include an intro lecture, it will go here
  • Outro section is a recap of the topics learned
  • Notation
  • Some days may overlap a little in their topics, so we collect all notation used to make sure it is consistent throughout the entire course. If there are discrepancies in notation used on your day versus another we will let you know and work out a solution.
  • See  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead & Project Lead Instructions⁠ 
  • Python Libraries
  • If any library cannot be installed through a common package manager (pip, conda, etc), let the curriculum chair know at once. We will try to find a solution.
  • For the number of packages used, more is less. Reducing the total number of libraries can make things simpler for students and building the final Jupyter book.
Tips on using the template: 
  • The tutorial template allows our TeTech Team to easily create the final book. It's very important you follow the template requirements.
  • Making a PR:  https://neuromatch.github.io/course-content-template/tutorials/W1D1_Instructions/student/W1D1_Tutorial2.html#section-2-how-to-create-a-pr 
  • Folder Naming and Structure when creating new tutorials:  https://neuromatch.github.io/course-content-template/tutorials/W1D1_Instructions/student/W1D1_Tutorial2.html#section-3-folder-structure-and-naming-conventions 
  • From the original notebooks, a student version (with solutions hidden) and instructor version (for TAs) will be auto generated. You do not need to create these yourself.
  • For tutorial student exercises follow the template  guidelines . A few highlights:
  • the exercises should have a student cell and a solution cell. those need to be identical in all their text and variables (with the following caveats).
  • the students cell should have missing parts of the code replaced by ellipses (...)
  • the students cell should have the following: 
  #################################################
  ## TODO for students: details of what they should do ##
  # Fill out function and remove
  raise NotImplementedError("Student exercise: say what they should have done")
  #################################################
  • the solution cell should have # to_remove solution in the first line
  • Bonus Material
  • We often have too much awesome material that students aren't able to get through in the allotted time. Feel free to add it to a bonus section.
  • For Bonus tutorials, number them regularly where you want them to appear in the series of the tutorials, but include the 'Bonus' aspect in the title: e.g. "Bonus Tutorial # : Tutorial Title".
  • Example: the tutorial file would be named W#D#_Tutorial#.ipynb but the title of the tutorial inside the notebook would be "Bonus Tutorial #: Tutorial Title".

For the second review (first review was day outline) you'll be expected to have:
  • Slides
  • Written draft of what each video will include (you will not record videos until after the first review the reduce the need for re-recording)
  • Written text
  • Coding exercises


Create Slides 

  • Please make sure to use the provided template. See  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead Instructions⁠ .
  • Slides should always have the tutorial objectives as the first non-title slide.
  • Room for a video box (rectangle in top right corner of slide templates) that does not cover any material on the slide.
  • Room for captions at the bottom, which will be added after you record your videos. Please remove the '[captions]' text from your own copy of the slides before recording as this will clash with the actual captions that are placed in that space.
  • Keeping formatting and design consistent helps students focus on the content
  • Also keep in mind  ⁠⁠Creating Accessible Materials⁠  when choosing fonts and colors.


Hosting figures, images, and date sets  

  • Ensure all images and figures are created by you and/or are CC BY licensed
  • See  ⁠⁠CC-BY Copyright Requirements⁠ 
  • Add credit and license type to your slides when using figures and images 
  • Datasets used in tutorials should be small enough to be handled by Google Colab and Kaggle and must be able to be hosted on  ⁠⁠OSF⁠  .
  • Kaggle:
  • Limited to 20 GB of working data in total across all notebooks.
  • Colab:
  • GPU: GPU 0: Tesla T4 (UUID: GPU-0efe3d31-30d9-77eb-4011-fe3341cea46d)
  • CPU: Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.30GHz
  • (1 core per socket, 2 threads per core)
  • MEM: 12G
  • Diskspace: 34G


Assessment Questions

  • Provide 3-5 assessment questions to measure students understanding
  • Must be multiple choice, or true or false
  • Do not use select all that apply
  • These should be connected to the tutorial learning objectives.
  • Provide 1 assessment question to be added to the pre- and post-course survey
  • This question should be directly connected to your day's Learning Objectives
  • It should provide an overall measure of student understanding from the beginning of the course to the end of the course.


Recruiting Intro Video Person

If your course requires Intro Videos or is making them option and you'd like to include one, follow these instructions. Check with your Curriculum Chair or the  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead & Project Lead Instructions⁠  for more information on if they are required.
  • Day Lead should start recruiting the person to record the intro video.
  • Intro videos should be a "celebrity" in the field or someone who's doing cool stuff that would get the student excited about the content.
  • Content should be fairly far along so that you can share an outline with the person recording intro video.
  • The intro video should get students excited about the day ahead, give them an overview of what they will be learning, and connect it back to a topics larger implications in the field and/or cool things that are happening in the field
  • Opening videos are usually 15-30 minutes long, check with the Curriculum Chair on requirements.
  • Intro videos need to be recorded with OBS
  • Make sure to send the instructions to the person recording:  ⁠⁠How to Record a Video with OBS⁠ 
  • Public link that can be shared externally:  https://neuromatch.slite.page/p/cIm22sHdnPE23V/How-to-Record-a-Video-with-OBS 
  • Please name your videos in the same style as the notebooks (e.g. W1D1_Tutorial1, W1D1_intro etc). For speaker introduction videos name them W#D#_speakerfirstandlastname_intro.
  • Slides should also follow our slide templates.
  • See the note of Slides above

Second Review of Content 

The CuCurriculum Team, Course Director, and Domain Steering Committee will review your content and share areas that need to be updated. 
  • Slides, written content, exercises should all be in a close to done format. 
  • Videos can wait until after the second review, but you should have an outline of what will be covered, slides complete, and an outline of what you’ll say for each slide. 

Focus of this review:
  • Cohesion of content across all days
  • Opportunities for explicit connections across days
  • Quality teaching techniques
  • Correct difficultly for students
  • Overall content review by other experts in the field

There is still discussion around what this review process should look like, see:  ⁠⁠What does a good and thorough review process look like? ⁠ 

Final Update before Pre-Pod 

Based on feedback, update your tutorial to a very near final version and record videos. 
  • See  ☠️⁠⁠Running Pre-Pod⁠ 


Record any Mini-Lectures to go with exercises 

  • Utilize  ⁠⁠How to Record a Video with OBS⁠ 
  • The Production team will be able to edit out some pauses, sound issues, interruptions, etc. from your video; but please try to make their lives easier by minimizing required edits. 
  • Things that are very difficult to edit is poor microphone quality or lots of background noise
  • You will upload your video and slides to the appropriate Google Drive folder. See  New Moon⁠⁠Course Specific Day Lead Instructions⁠   
  • Videos will not be edited yet, that will happen after pre-pod.
  • The TeTech Team and Curriculum Specialists will add in the final YouTube and BiliBili IDs to the Jupyter Notebook.


Production Team Reviews and Waxes Content 

From here, the Curriculum Specialists, PrProduction Team, and TeTech Team will upload your videos, review your code, and commit your iPython notebook to the main branch. This will publish your tutorial in the course Jupyter Book. Videos will be in a rough edit stage for Pre-Pod, the final editing will be done after. 


Pre-Pod & Third Review

See  ⁠⁠Running Pre-Pod⁠ 
The Project Manager recruits a variety of different people to participate in what’s called Pre-Pod. During Pre-Pod, participants do a condensed run through of all new content. They make comments and suggestions to make improvements to the course before it goes live. 

Third Review: Core Curriculum group does a Third Review based on feedback from Pre-Pod and their own review of the updated content and videos. They provide final suggested updates to the Day Leads.


Third Review & Final Updates 

Curriculum Team will take the pre-pod feedback and do a Third Review themselves and provide you with final suggestions for updates.
At this stage all content should be in its final form. You may be asked to re-record videos or update tutorials.
  • Mark content as finalized in the Curriculum Tracking Spreadsheet when you are done with your updates.
  • Alert the Curriculum Chair and Project Manager when you finalize content via Slack or Email.
  • Intro Video should also be complete. Day Lead should upload them to Google folder and add link to Curriculum Tracking Spreadsheet


Final Production Stage

The Curriculum Team, Curriculum Specialists, and TeTech Team doe the final review of any new code and content. They publish all changes to be live on the course. 
  • There may be some changes to your content before it's published.
  • Once videos are final, the PrProduction Team will send them to be edited.
  • This includes the Intro Video if being included for the course
  • Curriculum Specialists will do a final waxing of all code and content, making any final updates
  • The Curriculum Specialists and TeTech Team will publish the final Jupyter Book.