Picking a Topic
Tutorial Variants
We've found that there are roughly 5 different variants on what people are trying to teach with a tutorial.
Language Basics: A series of tutorials teaching the basics of how a language works for complete beginners. These teach fundamental concepts that learners will need to build on later.
A Task: Teach learners the steps to complete a specific task, such as running and evaluating a particular type of model, making a plot, cleaning data, or processing some files.
A Technique: Teach learners several different ways to do something or variations on use cases for a particular piece of syntax, a function, or a strategy for accomplishing a common piece of a workflow.
Package Overview: Give learners a sense of what a package (aka library, module) can help them do and help them understand the core logic or workflow of the package. For large packages, you may want to make this a series.
A Tool: Teach learners how to use some type of interface -- graphical or command line.
Think you have a topic that fits the general one-hour tutorial format but doesn't seem quite like one of the above variants? We'd love to hear it?
Defining Your "Topic"
Your "topic" consists of three components:
The language or program you're teaching. e.g. R, Python, MATLAB, Stata, slurm
The type of tutorial (variant), from the list above. Task, Technique, Package, Tool
The specifics of the type (except for language basics). e.g. Biopython, list comprehensions, job arrays, plotting with maps
Examples
Regular Expressions: language basics
R: package overview: ggplot2
Python: package overview: textblob
R: task: extract data from a website with rvest
Python: task: Bayesian GLM model with PyMC3
MATLAB: technique: optimize code for memory use
Python: technique: list comprehensions
SQL: technique: using summary functions
Tableau: tool: plot types
RStudio: tool: built in tools and helpers
Scope
You are creating a one-hour tutorial with 3-6 sections. As the teacher, this may not seem like much. For a learner, this is a lot of new material to learn in one hour. If you can teach learners how to do 3-6 new things in an hour, that's a great success!
Aim for quality over quantity and remember that you can't teach everything about your topic. You can always make another tutorial - everything doesn't have to fit into one.
You can't create a tutorial that is appropriate for all learners. In writing your workshop description, be clear about who your tutorial is for and what prerequisite knowledge you expect. When possible, give people information on how they can gain that prerequisite knowledge if they want to.
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