[Inpycon] RFC: Workshop Format

[Haris Ibrahim K. V.]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2019 at 09:56, Vijay Kumar <vijaykumar at bravegnu.org> wrote:
>
> On Sunday 10 February 2019 06:33 AM, Vijay Kumar wrote:
>
> > Hi Everyone,
> > I would like to solicit feedback on an alternative workshop format for
> > PyCon India 2019.
>
> Hi Everyone, Please do let me know, your thoughts on this.

>From a strictly personal experience, and not judging anyone else, if
there is a way to ensure that the speaker puts in extra effort
anticipating individual doubts that may be asked, then the alternate
format could work. I say this out of experience because of a couple of
things:

1. Feeling lazy to prepare because I get the feeling of "It is on the
students to ask questions and get the most out of me. So I don't have
to prepare as such". This maybe just me and if you think that wouldn't
happen at all, then you can ignore this point.
2. If it is a beginner-ish workshop or if it is an "introduction to
x", then I've seen being guided by a tutor giving the students a
proper framework to frame their doubts and thoughts within helps a
lot.
3. If there are quite a few people attending the same workshop and all
of them ask the same doubt individually, then it is wasted time having
to explain the same thing to each of them while another student waits.

While writing this, I think the neither format has a definite "better
than the other" badge.

With the 3-hour usual approach, I've been able to give participants
enough hands-on time, make sure everyone has time to practice and ask
questions on each stage of the workshop and been able to complete it.
Of course, this has the problem you mentioned where "hands-on is left
to the mercy of the instructor".

With the other approach, personally I feel it to be better suited if a
group of people are ready to teach the same topic so that individual
students don't have the bottleneck of getting individual attention
from a single instructor before having to move on to the next step in
the workshop.

Of course, these are just my thoughts. :)

> Regards,
> Vijay
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-- 
Haris Ibrahim K. V.
http://sosaysharis.wordpress.com
@harisibrahimkv