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I went on a course for course givers a few years ago, and the course-giver's course giver ably demonstrated that a good lecturer can put across a short course very adequately, regardless of their familiarity with the subject matter given a few provisos:

  • The course material, slides, notes exercises etc, are well prepared by someone very familiar with the subject matter.
  • The course-giver, prepares themselves by fully familiarising themselves with that course material.
  • The audience is non-familiar with the course subject.
  • Q&A sessions are kept short, and confined to the material just (or previously) presented.

    Any questions falling outside this constraint are fended of with: "Your question is beyond the scope of this session/course, but if you would take the time to write it down and hand it in at the end of the session, I will get write up an answer for tomorrow and, time permitting, present the answer to the class at the end of tomorrows session".

    It becomes important that this is done.

    This leads to the final proviso...

  • The course-giver must have the ear of an expert between sessions to interpret, answer and explain anything that moves beyond his or her expertise.

I'm not sure how helpful any of that is to the described situation, given kids -v- adults and 12-weeks -v- one, but provided that the class doesn't contain too many self-taught programming whiz-kids, and a source of some good course materials can be found, your friend could be ok.

Three weeks isn't very long to prepare a 12-week course, but it should be just about enough to get the first couple of weeks ready. Hopefully, they will be able to overlap the preparation with the course and stay ahead of the game.

Maybe the best thing you could do for your friend is ensure that they will have reliable access to this place and a "known id" that the uber-monks could be asked to keep a look out for and prioritise in the event that the 'awkward question' should arise.

Update One additional thought that came to mind on this.

Depending on how well the school is set up for teaching stuff using computers already, one of his biggest problems may be organising the students work online.

If the directory structures, permissions etc. are already set up, great. If not, this could easily become a more dominant factor in devloping the course than the actual language.

It struck me, that when it comes to organising code, Q&A's, tutorials, reference materials etc. The Everything Engine as used right here in the Monastery is probably as well developed as any other system I have encountered. I have no knowledge of what is involved in from the back end, but from the users perspective, I think it could easily accomodate most of the requirements for this sort of course.

I just got to wondering if, given the limited time available, if it wouldn't be possible to set this up for him/her?

I could see the tutorials section here containing the course materials. The Seekers Of Perl Wisdom as a place where homework assignment questions would be posted, with the individual students supplying their answers in the normal way.

Most AM's that encounter the site seem to work out how to use it reasonably quickly, and most kids work these things out even quicker than their parents.

Just a thought.


What's this about a "crooked mitre"? I'm good at woodwork!

In reply to Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl? by BrowserUk
in thread Can a non-programmer teach Perl? by Ovid

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