Details for instructors

Check the bash course to see the timing example. Here we have 4-5 hours of live in-person lectures converted to 2.5 hours of pre-recorded videos and eventually to two days in the online summer school.

Let us know if you need a cluster reservation and/or guest accounts on Cedar or Graham. By default we are not creating these. All WestGrid Central courses will use a dedicated 6-node (2 cores, 3GB per node) virtual training cluster on Arbutus.

In live Zoom sessions, if we have many participants (more than ~20; in some sessions we might have up to 100 participants which is our current limit in the Zoom Pro plan), we might not be able to debug everyone’s problems. The goal is to try our best to debug the most common / important problems and share the solutions with all participants. In WestGrid Central courses we will be using Socrative to set 10-15 checkpoints per session at which participants will be invited to provide information on their problems or lack thereof. We will be using Socrative also for quizzes and to track attendance and participant engagement. If you are interested in using Socrative for your course, please develop your quizzes using a free Socrative account, share it with us, and we will import it into WestGrid’s Socrative Pro account (with 150 student seats).

In other words, we encourage you to structure your Zoom sessions in such a way that there is a feedback loop to allow large-scale problem debugging. If we have several helpers, you might also want to use Zoom’s breakout rooms feature.

If you expect problem with software installation, please consider scheduling a separate software installation session before your course starts.

Finally, please let us know the starting times (in the Pacific timezone) and lengths of all your Zoom sessions, so that we could schedule these and email the details to you and to all registered participants in your course.

Recording software

If you decide to pre-record screencast videos for your course, we recommend OBS: it is open-source and multi-platform, and works really well, but there is some learning curve. I record the screen and my audio, but not my head.

For editing out pauses, etc. I use Shotcut on my Mac, but really any free editing software will do. If you want, we can even edit for you – simply email me (Alex) the original screencast recording.