Creating paths through the content to speed up instruction times

[keanmcd]

Greetings Maintainers, Instructors and the Curious,

Numerous previous issues have indicated that this lesson can be a bit lengthy (13 hours of instruction) for full delivery in its entirety. I propose creating paths that shorten the length of instruction time and provide different outcomes for learners. This could be included in the presenter notes on the course site.

It might be helpful to offer instructors suggested paths through the content. Due to the vast nature of vector and raster data, It can be hard to effectively convey both bodies of knowledge. I would suggest that one path highlights Raster data and the other focuses on vector data. Splitting into paths could help the instructor to better manage time and learner outcomes. There’s plenty of content here to create multiple paths using the existing course content. Each of these paths could provide a separate, and slightly more detailed, flavor of geographic inquiry.

A slight departure from the “atomic” nature of issues, raster analysis can be helpful for certain fields of inquiry, however many early learners need to be able to analyze tables and create a choropleth map. Moreover, the previous lesson, Intro to R for Geospatial Data, focuses primarily on the manipulation of tabular data. It could have a cognitive benefit to begin the next lesson with vector-based datasets with a tabular component. To me, It’s more of a direct comparison than jumping into digital numbers and raster data.

Again these are two related thoughts and I’d like to see what people think.

Thanks!

[jsta]

Good suggestion! We sort of have something like that already where a few of us have written debriefs describing our takeaways from specific workshops #93 #118

[jonjab]

I'm preparing a PR with slightly shortened timings for a couple of episodes (8 and 9) based on teaching experience.

Related, I am spending time on the instructor notes to add episode numbers for clarity and some recommendations from issue discussions references above.