Lessons learned from a 5-week online bootcamp with 102 signups from all over the world
This article will help you to create a better online training course. You will find tips and idea’s on how to optimise the delivery of content to your audience. Although the feedback collected during our bootcamp comes from a coding bootcamp, these tips can be applied to any online course. This article will not help you in the creation of content, but you are free to use our content or recordings.
The bootcamp Python for data analytics for beginners organised by PyLadies Amsterdam, is a five-week crash course for people with zero coding experience. In five weeks participants learn how to analyse two or more datasets, visualise their findings by using the Python coding language and practice story telling. A participant can choose to attent the capstone project in which they presented their code and finding to other participants and mentors. During the course, participants are actively supported by mentors from all over the world. This enabled us to have questions of participants answered at any hour of the day. We streamed four training sessions, 90 minutes each, from Amsterdam. The fifth session was solely dedicated to Capstone presentations. Fourteen groups took part in the Capstone project. During 2.5 hours we had participants presenting their findings from all corners of the world, teammates separated by thousands of kilometers. Just imagine how cool it was to interact with so many people from all over the world!
The bootcamp was free and driven bij PyLadies Amsterdam. Pyladies Amsterdam is a community based initiative to increase awareness for gender diversity in the tech industry with a focus on Python programmers. We promote gender diversity without explicitly stating it, by putting members of minority groups in powerful positions during social gatherings. Covid-19 forced us to give our bootcamp entirely online. It worked out better than we could have hoped for. It will be hard to go back to offline training sessions after receiving such nice feedback:
“Had it not been online, I would never have the opportunity to attend it and learn something wonderful in a friendly environment.”
“Lots of resources and sense of community.”
“I prefer to be part of a normal group, but with the Slack channel and the presentations live + on YouTube it felt like it was all I needed given the circumstances.”
“Best way to allow people from all over the world to participate.”
“ You can follow the course in your own environment. I could open multiple screens, one the Jupyter notebook, the other the online session.
Lessons learned
Our ideal format of an online (coding) bootcamp
- Start each session with testing your sound and the size of your screen.
- If it is not the first session, briefly recap your previous session with an exercise.
- Go through the sessions’ agenda and set expectation for your next session, be concise about what you are going to cover today and what not.
- Introduce each topic with why it is important and give real life examples. “You usually use this when…”
- Offer exercises after the introduction of a new topic and give participants a few minutes to solve them. In case of coding exercises, test the code upfront and keep your answers ready at the end of your presentation.
Give people a way to communicate immediately from the start of their learning journey.
For our bootcamp we created three different channels on our online tool. Two of them were public: introduction channel and help channel. The last one, for mentors, was private.
We want to highlight the importance of providing the opportunity for participants to interact with each other before they begin to work in teams for the Capstone. It engages learning and prevents dropout.
“My capstone teammate has helped me a lot. We have motivated and encouraged each other. Possibly having a teammate earlier on would be more beneficial.”
Test the level of participant upfront
People are usually not good in determining their own knowledge level. At the same time, they get disappointed if the level of your training does not meet their expectations. To mitigate this, give participants something to read upfront or give them a task to solve, which is illustrating the level of your course. You can also ask basic question about the easiest topic you will cover. “If you know how to work with … then this course is probably too easy for you / if you never heard of … read this article, if it is okay for you to follow, then this course is perfect for you”
Set clear expectations
Create a schedule with fixed deadlines and provide some reading material beforehand. Take into account some people pick up information faster than others or have pre-knowledge. To keep those people engaged, give them extra materials, for example in the from of useful links at the end of each session.
Choose a streaming medium with Q&A
You need at least two people for streaming the session. While one person acts as a tutor, another monitors Q&A section. The tutor should not be interrupted, so the session will go smooth. The moderator can filter questions and ask the tutor to answer the most interesting ones in front of the entire class. All other questions can be answered in the chat or in private after the sessions ended
Record your sessions
We received lots of positive feedback about the video records of our sessions and especially setup videos. People liked to watch and re-watch them in their own pace. However, be cautious if you want to immediately share the videos with the participants after each session. The video post-processing and upload on YouTube takes a lot of time. Count 4 hours for a 90 min video. So if you’d rather spend your nights sleeping than processing video’s, we recommend to upload your video’s the next day.
Create the base for the course upfront, finetune it later
Start finetuning your course materials when you met the participants and learned more about them and collected feedback. This way you can tailor you sessions better on the level of your group and do not do extra work.
Prepare emails templates on upfront
Use these email templates to save time when preparing your participants for a session. It will save you time so you can spend that on finetuning your session.
Introduction e-mail
- Welcome and something to get people excited
- Expectation management (what you will and will not cover in your course)
- The schedule
- Links to the study materials
- Links to how your communication media works and how to work with it
An e-mail before each session, to be send one day before
- How and where to ask questions
- Repeat how people should use your communication tool with instructions how to join your session
- Repeat links to study materials
Ask for feedback as much as posible
Feedback is how you improve. Google forms is your best friend. Add a form link directly to your content, if your sessions is not too long, otherwise use email. Get creative and use different media during during or directly after your sessions, you can use inactive tools such as menti-meter, that helps to engage with your audience. At the start of each session collect immediate feedback on
- Your tone of voice.
- The speed of which you speak.
- Visibility of your screen.
- Time lag of your streaming medium.
Try to avoid open ended questions like: “what do you think of my speed?”. Use instead: “type Y if I am going too fast, N if not and a ‘-’ if you think it’s fine. We also highly encourage you to ask feedback from drop outs.
Get inspired by our feedback forms, that we shared to collect feedback during and after the course. We also highly encourage you to get feedback from dropouts. It’s better to keep it anonymous, so people can be transparent and honest in their answers.
Create a certificate
People love to share it, which means more publicity for your initiative.
No more than 4 sessions in a row
Our ideal format is three or four sessions in a row bi-weekly with two projects one intermediate and one final. So both the participants and organisers have time to rest and digest more information.
Tips for coding bootcamps
- Use Kaggle for datasets and assignment
- Search for great introduction videos on YouTube, and study them before making your own.
- Show examples of well-written code. Feedback received: “At some point I realised that it is a bit hard to imagine what a good code for a good project should look like, and examining someone else’s work can be quite inspiring”
- Use zoom-in function on your laptop. If you think your zoom is enough, zoom-in more.
Tips if you work with mentors
Involve mentors more in your activities:
- Let them answering Q&A during the streaming sessions
- Connect them early with future teams
- Create a mentor advise board for Capstone, to share mentors’ comments after each team presentation
PyLadies Amsterdam supports diversity in technology. We offer a safe community for minority groups in technology and everybody is welcome to join, no matter what label (gender, sexuality or race) society gave you. We bring focus and real coding back to tech meetups so Python programmers can effectively share knowledge and enrich their coding styles.
We love to connect: learn and code with us, visit our GitHub and website. Contact us amsterdam@pyladies.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Meetup to receive free promo-codes for events and stay tuned for the upcoming ones.
Credits: This article is co-authored by Alyona Galyeva
Disclaimer: Statements made in this article are based on feedback of our participants and our opinions as Pyladies Amsterdam organizers (@demidendaas and @alyona.galyeva). Click here to find out more about PyLadies worldwide.
