Choosing a Topic
- Looking at the learning paths to find gaps. Our goal is to build out a flow between courses.
- Don’t get too specific, we need a full day… 3-5 hours of material
- Our audience is typically “professionals”
- We’re looking to cover the core technology professionals will use in their day to day work. Niche topics are usually part of a larger topic that we can cover.
The Workshop Format
- You’ll develop your own style, but think about what teaching style matches your topics
- Check out popular courses.
- The framework courses typically benefit from covering more ground by building an app over the arch of the course, whereas language and fundamentals courses benefit from breaking the material up into exercises around core features of the language.
- 100% Code-Only, Build an App Style:
- With React the tough part is piecing together the whole ecosystem, as well as with Angular putting all the pieces of the framework together. These types of courses will cover the most ground as you piece the app together.
- Check out Brian Holt’s complete intro to react for reference
- Slides / Visual, with some Exercises:
- While with core languages the main parts are individual features like Scope, Closure, ES6 features and whatnot. Often will have more slides.
- Check out Will Sentance’s Hard parts series, Kyle Simpson’s deep fundamentals of JS or Bianca’s fundamentals to functional for reference
- Exercise Heavy, Minimal Overview Slides for Framing
- Another style is fundamentals courses like on core technology like Node. These are often exercise-heavy
- Check out Scott Moss’s Intro to Node, API design & GraphQL for reference
- Regardless of your style, focus on quick wins early on to build their confidence level.
Process
- 60/30/7 days before the workshop
- Make sure to get workshop description and bio in right away to open registration for the workshop.
Instructor Tips:
- The final audience, who you’re actually talking to, is the people watching the videos later.
- You shouldn’t refer to the time of day, since that won’t make any sense to the people watching it back
- 12 people in the room and 50+ online during the workshop.
- Keep the workshop moving along — people in the room usually ask related questions, but keep on task and know that you can say “no” to questions that could have you go off the rails.
- Online audience will ask questions and we’ll make sure the relevant questions will get asked to you.
- A source of anxiety is being perfect, but there are things we can cut and clean up. For instance, If you run into a really big bug, or you cough or sneeze while talking, we can restart at your previous sentence or point.
- You’ll be tethered to the podium, not a lot of walking around. Other A/V details are in the document.
Hope you have a great time teaching with us and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or to any of the other teachers — they’re usually really open to making sure our full community of teachers succeeds!