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Class information for teachers

This material under this GitHub organization is for a 5 session, 18 contact hour Advanced JavaScript continuing education class. It consists of:

Materials

All class materials and assignments are in public repositories under a single organization, which has the added benefits of:

  • Keeps everything easy to find
  • Giving students experience with:
    • Interacting and contributing to open source
    • Getting comfortable with Git & GitHub
  • Making it easy for others to watch changes, fork, create issues and pull requests against the class materials
  • Setting up an expectation of trust with the students – see the Statements on Plagiarism for more info

Structure

The structure of the class relies heavily on GitHub features, so as a bonus it acts as a testbed for recommendations made as part of the GitHub Education program. For example:

  • The syllabus is posted publicly, where students can "watch" to be notified of changes, give feedback on class structure, or even propose additional resources.
  • Assignments are structured using the Forks strategy.
  • A Gruntfile is included in each assignment repository to run HTML Validation through the W3C Markup Validator, JavaScript linting through JSHint, and in some cases, unit tests through QUnit.
  • Travis CI is set up to run the Grunt tasks, for every new or updated pull request, giving students near-immediate feedback.
  • The slide deck is a public webpage, hosted using GitHub Pages.
  • By setting the default branch in each assignment repository to be gh-pages, every student's fork/submission is then a live Pages site that can be used for grading, so the files never need to be downloaded for grading.
  • Students are added to teams by term (e.g. summer-2014), so that team mentions can be used to direct everyone's attention to important syllabus changes or important pieces of feedback.
    • As part of the first class, students submit pull requests to add themselves to the students repository. This is partially to collect their usernames, and partially to tie their usernames to their real names. A script is then run to automatically add them to the team for that term.

Basically the only thing that isn't done in the repositories or in class is giving the grades, which are done through NYU's Classes LMS (built on Sakai).

Engagement

This is a vocational class taught in a major tech hub, so I encourage the students to engage with one another, as well the larger tech community.

To learn everyone's names, I have each person write their name on a sticky note, and put it on the back of their monitor. On the first day, when everyone introduces themselves, I also ask them to name a topic that they think everyone else knows, but they don't. This is to attempt to create a culture of "I don't know", to show that everyone feels that way about something (or many things), and that they shouldn't be afraid to speak up when something doesn't make sense. In short: fighting impostor syndrome.

To encourage broader community engagement, instead of having office hours specific to one class (with potentially low attendance), I started a meetup called Hacker Hours that offers free programming help to anyone. Students can then come and get help from me or any of the other mentors that attend, and ideally connect with other learners outside of the class.

Sharing

The material is free to modify and distribute – if you end up using some of all of the material for your own class, training materials, etc., I would love to hear from you!