Hi all! I'm the owner of the GitHub repo linked above. It's called "DAT8" because it was the 8th session of General Assembly's part-time Data Science course in Washington, DC.
Here's a bit of history, if you're interested:
- General Assembly launched a standardized Data Science course curriculum in mid-2013. The course used lots of slides, and taught both Python and R.
- Over time, the curriculum evolved in different directions as instructors around the world made their own modifications, both in terms of what was taught and how it was taught. By early 2015, I think all instructors had moved to teaching Python only.
- I taught the course five times starting in mid-2014. Over the course of those five sessions, I rewrote nearly all of the lessons and converted most of them to IPython/Jupyter notebooks. I would estimate that 95% of the material in the DAT8 repo is my original lessons.
- Earlier this year (2016), General Assembly rewrote and relaunched a standardized Data Science course curriculum. Therefore, if you take this course in the future, I would expect that you will be learning from that new curriculum.
For what it's worth, I wrote a 4000-word essay [1] about data science education after teaching the course the first time.
Really appreciate your comments here. And your essay (and the larger dataschool.io site), too. GA's data science class is one of several that I'm considering signing up for -- and I'm also considering applying to be an instructor. I think it's really promising that GA has instructors like you that seem to have both the interest in and latitude to make the course as enriching an experience as possible.
If you'd be open to answering some questions about your experience as an instructor, there's a few other things I'm curious about:
- What were your students like? Were they all qualified to be there? Were there challenges dealing with outliers (either overqualified or under)?
- What surprised or stretched you about your experience teaching at GA?
- What background did you bring to it before teaching there?
If you'd rather answer privately, email's in my profile.
ybrah: Great! I tried to write the IPython notebooks so that they could be understood without too much further explanation. As well, all of the exercises and homeworks have provided solutions. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
watty: I am the author of the repo, and I hear your concerns. After finishing teaching with General Assembly, I launched my own online course [1] because I wanted to provide a classroom-like experience to online students, and very few companies seemed to be doing that. By "classroom-like", I mean that I teach classes live (via webinar), hold live office hours (via Slack), assign pre-class readings, and assign homeworks (and provide feedback to students).
It will be interesting to see whether other players in the online education space start to provide similar offerings. The most similar structure I have found is companies [2][3] providing a set curriculum (via videos and written materials) along with a mentor you work with one-on-one.
JPKab/John! Hilarious to cross paths with you again in the Hacker News comments :)
Your compliment is appreciated, but you are way too generous!
So, after taking the first session of the course in DC (internally called "DAT1"), I was a TA for DAT2, the co-instructor for DAT3 and DAT4 and DAT5, and the solo instructor for DAT7 and DAT8. The repo linked above was my repo for DAT8.
The curriculum evolved quite a bit since you took the course. One major change is that by DAT3, we had moved to Python only. We had an increasing number of students without a programming background, which was one of the reasons for the shift to a one-language course.
And I totally agree: Students get out of it what they put into it.
