Firas Moosvi- Teaching an Active Learning class with Jupyter Book| JupyterCon 2020

Key Takeaways

hello welcome to jupitercon 2020. this talk is about teaching an active learning class with jupiter book let's get started a little bit about myself my name is ferraz moosvy i'm currently a lecturer in the cmps department at the university of british columbia on the okanagan campus i wanted to introduce you to the jupiter book project so jupiter book project is something that i've been using for the past few months when teachings went online and i was struggling to find a way to give my students a coherent and linear outline of what to do when when teaching my courses typically i like to teach my courses with an active learning strategy where that's learner centered and i try to make sure that there's enough activities inside the lecture to keep students engaged and also to have them engaged with the material at a deeper level during class and then before class they do all the pre-readings or the lecture video watches lecture video watching that they need to do so i was struggling with a way with my current learning management system to just figure out that structure for the students and so i've discovered the uh the jupiter book project which allows me to use notebook files and just plain md files and then version control them so that i can reuse it for future courses and also remember what i did last year so the jupiter book project has uh three main features uh the interface has three main features on the left hand side is the essentially the chapters of the textbook and you can break them up into different parts so this is a get started part this is the right book part make your book interactive so this is the table of contents of the entire book okay so this stays with you wherever you go in the book so if you let's say i want to go to references and citations you click on that link this table of contents stays with you you can collapse it by using this button here and then expand it again using the hamburger buttons on the right hand side you'll see the right sidebar which contains the headers for the current open page and each of these pages are built either using jupyter notebook files or just raw md files and you can access that by clicking on this page here this this git octocats logo click suggest edit and that will take you right to that md file that exists where you can edit it on your own jupyter book all right so let's take you to an example that i had for one of my classes this is for physics 111 the first thing i did was i had to create a syllabus that conformed to my university's guidelines so i had all sorts of information on the syllabus a message for mayans from the instructor a way to contact the teaching team learning outcomes for the course what they need to purchase for the course etc once you have your syllabus or any web text you can use popular tools like hypothesis to highlight and annotate your text and i actually applied this on my syllabus for uh for physics so i've got a bunch of annotations here from a bunch of students who've had questions about my syllabus and this is the popular annotate your syllabus movement so if i click introduction to python you'll see that i've got a video here embedded using an iframe from dr mike gelbart of university of vancouver who teaches in the master of data science program these are fantastic lectures that are that he posts completely open source and also there's associated with it notebooks that exist and the notebooks take you through everything you need to know about how to get started with python for data science um and the cool cool part about this is that these notebooks are actually runnable cells in a browser so there's no need for environments and setting up these setting up python on your computer or r on your computer you can just get started with a notebook get students motivated and interested in the content that you're teaching them and then work on setting them up locally on their computer later so in this particular case i have this cell that has x equals 42 i can change that to x equals 45 and then print out x and then i get the output there so this is a very important feature for me to get students that are just starting out with python or are interested and get get them you know right into coding on day one without having to spend a whole week setting up their environments that part is necessary and it does come but i can defer that to later and initially just get them started with coding right away so that's the first example i wanted to show the second example is let's say you're teaching something like platforms where you want to have where you have typical slide um typical slides and so this again this is a jupiter notebook that you can go through in class but it turns it ends up being quite text heavy so with the addition of a plug-in actually called jupiter rise by damien great project by the way it's fantastic clicking on this button here allows me to present this notebook as a series of slides so this is actually a really really cool feature of jupyter notebooks as an extension actually and now i can actually present this material bullet by bullet segment by segment and i can you know do all sorts of things like draw on my on my screen here or i can have just a a whiteboard that just clears everything and then i can draw on there so it's a really neat set of tools that exist that allow me to present notebooks as slides i can actually have embedded polls in my in my notebook so i can this question is from the 2020 stack overflow developer survey i asked my students what the most loved programming languages and most of them guessed python incorrectly but it was actually rust so when when they vote on these slides i can present this this view for them with just a question and then when when they submit their answer they can see what the result is from this from uh from from what their classmates believe on to the next example the next example is let's say you're teaching something that's a little bit more run-of-the-mill more traditional let's say something like microsoft excel and it doesn't lend itself well to be taught from notebooks well then you have your slides your pdf or your powerpoint or keynote slides and you can also embed those into a jupyter notebook or and then just go through them as you would normally each week i give them a summary of what they have to do that week i give them an introductory video for instance i want to explain to them the main concepts of the course this week and then what they need for the homework what they need for the test et cetera there i also assign them specific videos that are sort of smaller in length and these videos are from jonathan palmer of flipping physics and also from crash course physics these are several physics videos that are really really quite excellent in terms of their quality we have these sphinx panels that are drop downs that allow students to click on the ones that they want to watch watch the video and then once they're done close them up and go to the next one and on the sidebar here you've got some check boxes here that essentially are a way for them to keep track of what uh which videos they've already watched and which videos they still need to keep going i'm not a chemistry teacher myself however this idea of embedding videos is very transferable you can also have these phet simulations that allow you to interact with molecules and then essentially explore different uh you know different configurations of these molecules and and this is kind of you know these exist for biology for chemistry for all sorts of sciences and these are really really great uh really really great simulations that you can use to give students again a way to interact with the material at a deeper level in addition to that you can also draw molecules with marvin js which is an online chemistry drawing tool where you can ask all sorts of detailed questions about this what happens when i add an oh here what happens when i add another oh here and things like that so that sort of you can build questions around these these marvin js chemistry draw structures so you can imagine how useful this would be for for a lab or a class that's run online or even in person when you want to do a demo in class of how things work you want this interactivity to exist that is a quick tour of the jupiter book project as far as it applies for active learning in teaching i've got lots of stuff here that you're welcome to to explore the best part about this is that if you actually want to to try this out it's really easy i've created a template that just with a click a button you can with a click of a button you can just create your own site within you know a couple of minutes so here's my chrome window i go to github.com i'm now logged into my demo account and i've got this short link that i can give you uh so jb underscore course and this gets this takes you to my jupiter book course template there's some directions and uses instructions on how you want to do it but essentially it's very simple you clicked use this template you give your new repository a name let's call it new course 101 you make it public and it's important to check this box here include all branches to access your website you just need to go to the settings and then scroll down to github pages and then your site is and it'll tell you that your site is published all right thank you everybody for listening as promised i've got the links for how to get to the course template as well as some of my actively ongoing courses where you can check out see how i'm using jupiter book in my lab classes this year i look forward to seeing some of you on twitter bye