Background
I have done A LOT of teaching on topics related to data science and
machine learning over the past three years. As a PhD student at the Center
for Social Data Science I developed course material for the coming
Master's degree in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. I
produced lectures and exercises on programming, statistics, machine
learning, deep learning, and network science, and taught these to multiple
batches of students.
I also took a side-job as external lecturer early in my PhD, at
DIS. DIS is a small independent institution that offers
university courses to US undergraduates studying abroad in Scandinavia. My
first course was 'Computational Analysis of Big Data', and more or less I
was given entire freedom over what I taught and how I taught it. I used
this as an opportunity to design the type of Data Science course I had
always wanted to take. Later I started teaching 'Artificial Neural
Networks and Deep Learning', and applied very much the same formula.
Key principles
Over time, my principles for teaching have evolved a bit. I have
experimented with lots of things that didn't work very well, and borrowed
ideas from my mentors and collegues. Most rewarding (and painful) though,
has been to try out the things my students suggested in their
post-semester feedback. The
key principles I have learned to be
most effective are:
-
Keep lectures short: Students are consuming SO MUCH KNOWLEDGE.
Most teachers cannot remember exactly how intense studying at a
university can be. Every week students are given new difficult topics
to learn in each of their 4-6 courses. If some fall asleep or ask
about something you just explained during your two-hour lecture, you
are wrong to put the blame on them (though most do). I usually find
that my students disengage when I move past the 50-minute mark.
Moreover, if I prepare good slides and think hard about how I want to
explain things, my lectures are usually shorter than 40 minutes.
-
Ideas first: AKA "get to the point". When introducing a topic,
I prioritize students' ability to understand its core idea rather than
the mathematical details. For example, when introducing principle
component analysis (PCA), rather than starting with covariance
matrices and eigenvector spaces, I focus on the idea of
low-dimensional projections in general and how they are just like
objects' shadows, only the shadows and objects can have any
dimensionality. Once they understand this, they get why it's useful
and worth investing brain power into, and will be more likely to care
about the technical details.
-
Avoiding completism: I don't cover topics completely (short lectures, remember?). When
my students run into trouble due to their lack of knowledge I
introduce them to Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and Google searches.
During tutorials, students fill their gaps with questions and chalk
discussions. This makes for a much more active learning experience,
where they seek out knowledge on their own, something they will
eventually have to learn anyway. In combination with the above
principle, I can cover much ground quite effectively, trusting that
whatever method they apply, they know at least what its purpose is.
-
Exercises as backbone: When teaching data science, there is no
learning without doing. A good lecture will only serve as framing for
the problems that students will have to learn to solve on their own
eventually. Therefore, I invest considerable time into writing
exercise sets as comprehensive Jupyter notebooks that interweave
explanations, examples and problems, like a guided tour through big
problems. My notebooks serve as the teaching backbone, which in
practice means that they contain all the lessons I want my students to
learn.
-
Examples first: We remember better when something is put in
relation to our existing knowledge. Stories are great for
introduction, because they employ the listener's imagination which
automatically links the new concept to all sorts of things. I, for
example, introduce neural networks not as networks, but as nested
logistic regression. I first tell a story about how logistic
regression can be used to decide whether to go to a party or not based
on different variables and how you weight those.
Then I motivate that if the decision boundary is non-linear, one model
is not enough, you need to couple output to input of multiple (the
TensorFlow playground
is great for visualizing this).
-
Projects! Not exams: This is probably my most important
principle. As a student taking conventional university courses, you
don't have much time to build a portfolio. Worse even, you are fooled
into not caring because universities make such a big deal
about grades that you think only they matter. Then after you graduate,
employers will completely ignore your grades and turn you down because
of your empty portfolio. I strongly believe in giving my students
space and guidance to complete awesome projects that they can use as
proof of their competences. This way they walk away with both their
precious grade and an even more precious portfolio project. I
have them write it up as a blog post, with a link to the code on
Github. AND IT WORKS! Every semester I get emails from past students
that land jobs at big companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft to mention
a few) using their project as leverage. Below I link to some of the
best projects my students have produced.
Effective tools
Beyond my teaching philosophy, I have also settled on a number of
tools that I find makes teaching easier and better:
-
Github: There's no reason not to
synergistically implement tools in your teaching, which your
students will have to learn to use anyway. Github is one of those.
Therefore, I maintain course material in a Github repo, put course
information on the repo Wiki and promote the use of
Issues for Q&A outside of class. Finally, students must share
their exam project code in a Github repository. Using Github is great
for a number of reasons: (1) Sharing new material is a command in my
Terminal. (2) Students fix issues (typos, code bugs, broken links,
etc.) using pull requests for extra credits. (3) Students answer each
other's questions for extra credits. (4) Keeping course repos public,
others can reuse my material.
-
Peergrade: Although my classes are rarely bigger than 30
students, the programmer in me burns out on the repetitiveness of
grading assignments. Moreover, my time is much better spent improving
the course material. So I use
Peergrade which is a SaaS that
facilitates peer reviews of student handins. It's an extremely
well-developed system, where the teacher creates rubric questions for
the reviewing students to answer when grading their fellow students'
handins. The students are usually happy to learn from others'
solutions, and since you can assign every student to review multiple
times each handin gets lots of feedback.
Disclaimer: I have no stake in the company, but the founders are my
personal friends.
-
Vent: It's important to allow your students to give you
feedback throughout the course. Usually they don't hold back the
positive things, which is great, but it's not always that useful.
Ideally, you want students to feel safe enough to share their negative
experiences, but due to the inherent uneven power relationship between
teacher and student (due to grading I suppose) this is rarely the
case. So I set up a webform on
my homepage where students can submit anonymous messages to me. Every
semester I get feedback which reveals something important, which lets
me adjust the pace or go more into depth with important topics I
explained poorly. Moreover, I think it's just important for the
students to have a place to vent their frustrations, risk-free, if
they need to.
"Hall of fame" projects
Every semester I'm blown away by the quality of some of the projects my
students turn in. Most come into my courses having had no practical
training with data science and coding in Python, so seeing a blog post for
example getting featured on Towards Data Science is pure delight for me.
Below I have listed some of my favorites throughout the years, in no
particular order: