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Regular Online Tutorials #57
Description
As a community service we could offer online tutorials hosted by one of the Dask maintainers.
The tutorial at https://tutorial.dask.org was designed to run in a three-to-four hour period (for SciPy). We could offer this, or some stripped down version of it as an online web video call. Hopefully it's relatively straightforward to deliver, and also a good learning experience for those involved in giving it.
My hope is that as more of us deliver this tutorial we then are able to refine and improve the tutorial over time. Preparing, delivering, and then tuning the tutorial afterwards would, I think, be a high value maintenance activity. I think that we may have the bandwidth to start delivering the tutorial somewhat regularly.
Reacted by Willi Rath, Jacob Tomlinson and Pavithra Eswaramoorthy
Activity
jacobtomlinson commentedon May 22, 2020
We could try using Twitch and/or YouTube streaming for this, that way they can be archived afterwards and watched back later. Many conferences that have moved online are using these services and it seems to work quite well.
I've been experimenting this week with streaming bits of my open source maintenance work on Twitch and it was pretty easy to get started.
TomAugspurger commentedon May 22, 2020
mrocklin commentedon May 22, 2020
It seems like there are two approaches to video tutorials
I think that they're both useful. It seems like twitch/youtube support more viewers, but don't allow for as much engagement. My guess is that they're better if we're doing new content every time. Video conferencing might be better if we have smaller groups (say 10-20) where the students are going through exercises on their own and being coached by community members. This seems better to me if we do the standard tutorial on a regular basis.
I think that the Dask/NumFOCUS account could be used if we're looking at something in the few hundred dollars range.
jcrist commentedon May 22, 2020
I recently gave the tutorial using the binder setup at tutorial.dask.org, and found it good enough to teach people how dask works and how to think about it. Yes, they didn't get a real "distributed" cluster, but they still got to see how dask's api works and learned how to reason about the various concepts.
jacobtomlinson commentedon May 22, 2020
@mrocklin yeah I agree with that assessment. I think Twitch/YouTube would be good for doing something like a talk. Especially if the recording would be useful afterwards. But then video conference would be good for a more workshop style session.
mrocklin commentedon May 22, 2020
If we have human resources, I'm inclined to try both and see what engages people.
If I were to organize this I would suggest the following:
suckersvolunteers to sign up to deliver these.TomAugspurger commentedon May 22, 2020
jacobtomlinson commentedon May 27, 2020
Happy to be a sucker, although I would like to rotate off Czar duties before that time so that I can spend that time preparing.
mrocklin commentedon May 28, 2020
jacobtomlinson commentedon May 28, 2020
Ok sounds good.
From when you sent that message that would be Friday the 5th of June.
Do you have thoughts on a time? I wonder whether we should try and do it at a time like 2pm, which would be practical for folks in immediately neighbouring timezones. Perhaps trying to alternate the presenter between continents week-to-week to be as inclusive as possible.
martindurant commentedon May 28, 2020
Happy to help out too
mrocklin commentedon May 28, 2020
I think that we'll want at least a weak of lead time to advertise and prep. +1 on switching around time zone availability to support a broad set of attendees.
jacobtomlinson commentedon Jun 4, 2020
Ok given that time is passing I suggest we go for Friday June 12th at 1pm UTC. That'll be 9am east coast US, 2pm for me and 3pm central Europe, so should have good coverage. I also suggest we pencil in 90 minutes for it.
Then maybe next time someone in North America could run it to get coverage for west coast?
I think we should also use Zoom for this first one. Do we have access to a Zoom pro account for avoiding the time limit and doing recordings?
@mrocklin are you able to coordinate promoting it?
mrocklin commentedon Jun 4, 2020
Yes, through NumFOCUS. I've sent you and support@numfocus an e-mail
Definitely. The obvious things to do is tweet it. I can see if there are a couple of other channels.
dgerlanc commentedon Jun 4, 2020
I taught a 4-hour workshop on oreilly.com focused on Dask Dataframes and teaching it again at the end of July. It alternates between lecture/exercise. May be up for doing a volunteer teaching session or integrating these into the docs. Here's a link to the notebooks: https://github.com/dgerlanc/dask-scaling-dataframe.
20 remaining items
cgentemann commentedon Jun 19, 2020
Hi! I attended this morning. Jacob and Matthew - great job!!!! I really appreciated the time and preparation you put into the tutorial.
I think it is interesting to re-imagine what a tutorial is, given that I was still in my PJs and no one knew. My commute was 10'. So, if we all aren't expending the effort to travel to a similar location, then there really isn't any need to meet for an extended period of time. I found Jacob walking us through the tutorials to be really interesting. I wish that it was about 50% slower and I wanted him to spend more time describing Dask and how it was being used, or what functions might be interesting to use here, or his thought process about how he uses these tools for different types of problems and how he troubleshoots/finds solutions.
While tutorials traditionally have show code / do code / repeat structure, I didn't find the coding part as useful during the tutorial. I want to try out the code, but I can do that on my own.
I also really liked reading the chat & response. It worked well to have Jacob focus on the tutorial and Matthew on the chat. I think it would have made it a little more interactive to have Jacob pause every so often & have Matthew answer a chat verbally or have a short conversation with the person who posted. Yes, this will slow things down, but this is why we are all attending -- there are lots of tutorials we can do online or by ourselves, I wanted to hear from Jacob/Matthew how they used Dask and have more of a conversation.
It almost seemed like it would be useful to break up the tutorial into much smaller bits and just do them more frequently.
Again, great job. This was really useful and I hope to see more in the future. I'd love to see how this works on twitch or other platforms.
lesteve commentedon Jun 21, 2020
This looks very nice! For some reason the YouTube video definition is 360p maximum (which makes it hard to read the text of the notebook) but maybe it is just YouTube that takes some time to upload higher resolution videos.
Also I edited the chat log to make it more readable, see https://gist.github.com/lesteve/12042f7df7c3843a9ddde52ccbd0e301 (I never know whether people get notifications from gist comments ...)
mrocklin commentedon Aug 12, 2020
I think that the plan is for @jacobtomlinson to write up the process that we used into a blogpost. Then hopefully @martindurant + someone else will use this plan to run through the process two weeks from now, hopefully at a time that is more convenient for US folks, especially on the west coast.
Additionally on the Pangeo call today I mentioned that it would be fun to repeat this process for other Dask-adjacent projects. I think that Xarray would be a good first candidate for this. @andersy005 said that he felt comfortable volunteering for this.
andersy005 commentedon Aug 12, 2020
👍🏽 I am looking forward to this post, and thank you in advance for putting this together!
martindurant commentedon Sep 15, 2020
@andersy005 the blog post appeared at https://blog.dask.org/2020/08/21/running-tutorials , if you didn't see. If you are interested in running a similar xarray online tutorial, I'd be happy to partner, to help set things up.
andersy005 commentedon Sep 15, 2020
Thank you, @martindurant! What does your schedule look like? I am thinking we could schedule the first session around Friday, Oct 2? @dcherian, would you be interested in join us?
dcherian commentedon Sep 15, 2020
Sure.
martindurant commentedon Sep 15, 2020
Oct 2 is fine with me.
andersy005 commentedon Sep 29, 2020
@jacobtomlinson, do you happen to know the exact root cause for the low quality recording? Do you have any recommendations for addressing this issue?
Also,
I am curious to know how the subsequent tutorials (after the first one) were delivered. Did you use Zoom again? How was the overall experience? Are there any recordings on YouTube? What are your thoughts on Youtube Livestream? I am thinking of using unlisted Youtube Livestream for the upcoming xarray tutorial since I don't have access to a Zoom pro account.
martindurant commentedon Sep 29, 2020
Yes, we used zoom, without any special effects - so the quality was totally fine. I believe the low quality before was to do with the use of OBS. You can screen-share and record the speaker and/or gallery (this with a licensed account). I didn't post the recording, being so similar to the previous tutorial. For some reason, the feedback buttons were missing from the chat on my session, that was the only annoyance, but I'm not sure I would have used them.
(I can, of course, provide a zoom room, if that makes life easier)
andersy005 commentedon Sep 29, 2020
yes, please :) and thank you! That would be very helpful. I plan to send a reminder email with the video conference information tomorrow morning... I will ping you via Gitter DM for the zoom link/password to use in the reminder email.
mrocklin commentedon Jul 12, 2022
Bringing this up again. @ncclementi @jsignell @pavithraes and @jacobtomlinson just organized and built a tutorial for SciPy. I'd like for us to consider delivering this repeatedly online. I'll suggest the following format to get started, but there are probably lots of improvements that could be made.
Thoughts?
jacobtomlinson commentedon Jul 12, 2022
Totally agree with the general sentiment here. I feel like monthly may be too much. When we did this the first time it felt like numbers dropped quickly after we reached saturation.
Perhaps bi-montly or quarterly would be a better place to start. We could always ramp up if demand is higher.
I like the idea of one hour per week for four weeks though.
mrocklin commentedon Jul 12, 2022
martindurant commentedon Jul 12, 2022
@douglasdavis - no pressure, but thought you might find this idea interesting