Running a series of Cloud Study Jams
How we organized a series of study jams spanning over 45 days for nearly 1000 folks …
Recently, Google Developer Relations launched a fantastic approach of learning (& self-learning) — The Cloud Study Jams. Before we get into more details, let me quickly explain what are these study jams.
Cloud Study Jams are community-run study groups to help the developers learn different Cloud Technologies right from Containers, Chat-bots, Machine Learning or even advanced Data engineering. These are facilitated by community organizers (with the support of your regional Google DevRel Team) and helps the developers grow their technical skills such that they can be industry-ready. This also means that these programs are not only for student enthusiasts but also designed for working professionals looking to up-skill themselves or solve a particular challenge that they might be already facing. Read more on the official details for Cloud Study Jams.
Let me share the entire experience of this seasons’ Study Jams executed by Google Cloud Developers Community (Mumbai).
We started off by identifying Facilitators (Speakers/Trainers/Mentors) who were experts in some or the other areas of these study jams. The facilitators need not necessarily be your community team members, if you find external speakers, Googlers or even regional Google Developer Experts (Btw, I recently became a GDE for Google Cloud Platform), looking to help the community, feel free to go ahead and approach them. This phase somewhat became easy for us as most of our core community team members were kinda experts in at least one of the areas of these study jams. Meet our facilitators —
Once we finalized the facilitators, it was now time to self-learn the areas that we intended to cover as a part of these study jams; although we all had been professionally working on these areas — preparation is the key to delivering any talk/session. Facilitators get credits on Qwiklabs — the platform used to run these study jams. More on it in another blog; but you may refer a quick How To use Qwiklabs. So as facilitators, we first completed the labs we had planned to take up during the study jams. Participants during the Study Jams will get 1 month of free Qwiklabs access worth $55 and can get additional month of access upon completing quests.
Next was our planning around a schedule and venue; not too difficult but was quite a tight schedule I must say. We kept all sessions on weekends to engage maximum participation from both working professionals as well as students. A huge thanks to Xoriant Solutions for facilitating us with the Venue as their Mumbai office for the entire duration of the Study Jams.
Coming to the important one — Reaching out to your audience/participants. We used Meetup platform to launch and manage our events and some heavy round of social media activity using every possible channel.
And yes, don’t keep them hungry, order some delicious and healthy food for your participants 🍕 🍟 🍩
Here are the links to the Qwiklabs quests for Cloud study jams that we conducted —
16-Feb-2019 : Machine Learning (Beginner)
23-Feb-2019 : Machine Learning APIs (Advanced)
09-Mar-2019 : Cloud Architecture : Infrastructure Track AND Architecture Track
23-Mar-2019 : Kubernetes : K8S in Google Cloud AND K8S Solutions
30-Mar-2019 : This one is on special demand; we ended the season with a ‘Student Only’ Study jam for the Machine Learning Track and also a TensorFlow Summit viewing party. Thanks to AP Shah Institute of Technology for hosting us.
Afew experiences/lessons learnt or you may say Do’s and Don’ts while we executed this huge program :
1) You may not always want to run the Beginner and Advanced tracks as separate Study Jamsy; it can be run as one-single day study jam. We gauged this during our 1st two study jams and found out that majority of the audience grasps things quickly and are already at a stage where they can also run with advanced stuff.
2) Each Qwiklab quest has labs that are individual topics that help you understand the technology. These labs are timed, so please be careful of the delivery style while running a Qwiklab. As an instructor, what we experienced is that the below works best to deliver a session-
- First explain the concept behind the technology.
- Run through the steps given in the lab and explain the meaning of each step.
- Once your lab has ended, then you ask the participants to perform the lab by themselves and guide them wherever they need assistance.
We learnt that if the participants run the labs along-with the instructors and in case they get stuck, most of them would end up running out of time (as well as the instructor) while the instructors explain the concepts. Running it classroom-style works best !!
3) Two important things : Power ⚡️and Internet 📡…. Please ensure that you have adequate power sockets available for the participants, you don’t want participants struggling with low battery while running labs. Try and have a good Internet connection that can handle the approx no. of participants. Also do remember to test whether the Qwiklabs work fine using the WiFi connections at your venue; it may often happen that you are hosting at a Co-working space or some Corporate organization and their firewalls might block certain links required to start the labs.
4) Don’t aim at running all the labs in a given Qwiklab Quest, curate a list of relevant labs from the beginner and advanced topics and then run these during your study jam. Also it is sometimes important to choose topics that would create an interest and curiosity in the participants, create a story around the topic, use practical scenarios and examples to explain those technology components. This will help working professionals a lot as most of them would be quick to grasp the technology, but a practical scenarios using industry examples would make sense for them.
5) Participation is the key to Study Jams, encourage your audience to actively engage in conversations with facilitators. Also don’t forget to motivate the participants if they are like — Regular Attendees, Complete all Qwiklabs (There is a way to showcase your Qwiklab Badges that you have earned from your Qwiklab profile page), Helps in volunteering/facilitating other participants etc.
6) With any kind of meetups, be prepared on the fluctuating participation levels. In certain sessions you might have a huge and interactive audience and in some you might even struggle to fill in seats. Lastly, but importantly, don’t forget to collect feedback and improvise based on it. After all you are running this as a community, keep that momentum going..
Running such a long series of Study Jams can be hectic, but will be a good ride if you plan well in advance and you shall definitely sail through, it’s a Team effort. Feel free to reach out to us in case you need any help running such Study Jams or meetups 😃
Here is the awesome GCDC-Mumbai Team.. 🔥
Oh yes and we did collaborate with GDG MAD during our 1st Study Jams for a Panel discussion around Community Contributions… & we had Biswajeet and Harsh from DevRel Team visiting us.
Finally a huge round of thanks to our Google India DevRel Team — Biswajeet Mallik, Harsh Dattani, Siddhant Agarwal and GoogleDevsIndia team — Thanks for all your support, looking forward to the drive ahead 👍 😃
