[If you haven't already seen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/29/all-students-should-learn-to-code-right-not-so-fast/,
it's very relevant...]
Hi,
I wrote briefly about running SWC as a regular university course in the
"Lessons Learned" paper:
The Software Carpentry course materials were updated and released in
2004-05 under a Creative Commons license thanks to support from the
Python Software Foundation. They were used twice in a conventional
term-long graduate course at the University of Toronto aimed at a mix
of students from Computer Science and the physical and life sciences.
The materials attracted 1000-2000 unique visitors a month, with
occasional spikes correlated to courses and mentions in other sites.
But while grad students (and the occasional faculty member) found the
course at Toronto useful, it never found an institutional home. Most
Computer Science faculty believe this basic material is too easy to
deserve a graduate credit (even though a significant minority of their
students, particularly those coming from non-CS backgrounds, have no
more experience of practical software development than the average
physicist). However, other departments believe that courses like this
ought to be offered by Computer Science, in the same way that
Mathematics and Statistics departments routinely offer service
courses. In the absence of an institutional mechanism to offer credit
courses at some inter-departmental level, this course, like many other
interdisciplinary courses, fell between two stools.
We have also found that what we teach simply isn't interesting to most
computer scientists. They are interested in doing research to advance
our understanding of the science of computing; things like
command-line history, tab completion, and ``select * from table'' have
been around too long, and work too well, to be publishable any longer.
As long as universities reward research first, and supply teaching
last, it is simply not in most computer scientists own best interests
to offer this kind of course.
Long story short, it's hard to convince universities that a lab skills
course is worth a graduate credit, and without credit, the dropoff rate
is very discouraging (60 started, 6 finished the non-credit version). I
think we'd have better luck getting instructors to incorporate parts of
our lessons into existing courses, i.e., use our stuff as the first 2-3
weeks of their "Computational Methods in [name of discipline goes here]"
course, if only because this *doesn't* require approval up front from a
curriculum committee.
Cheers,
Greg
On 2014-09-29 12:36 PM, Daniel Chen wrote:
Hi everyone:
I was wondering if anyone has had any success teaching the swc
material as a semester long lab course? Assuming 1 lab a week for 1.5
hours a lab, if we mimic the swc workshop pace we have at least 6
weeks of material:
Bash: 2 weeks
Git: 2 weeks
Python/R: 2 weeks
Now, this could be 2 half-semester courses or it can be expanded to
include LaTeX, SQL, data carpentry material, for a semester long
course. Has anyone else thought of this or tried to pitch this to a
department chair?
I've touched base on the idea of such a course with numerous faculty
members (from CUMC and the EE department at CU), and the response is
all positive. I'm mostly asking to see what logistical/administrative
hurdles I will encounter.
- Dan
--
Greg Wilson
Software Carpentry | http://www.software-carpentry.org/
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