Slide decks are often considered a universal currency in higher education. They are passed down over time to new instructors, given to students who missed class, and generally treated as the sole piece of writing necessary to deliver a lesson or class. Their universality does not mean they can fully replicate the educational experience, particularly in a technical context. The semester/quarter educational cycle creates a constant demand for reuse of not only one’s own lesson materials but also lessons crafted by others.
As practitioners of open science begin to migrate their educational material into platforms like GitHub and release them under permissive reuse licenses, the possibilities of reuse begin to align neatly with reproducible science practices. (And the challenges that instructors reusing materials face happen to be very similar to those of researchers attempting to reuse data or complete replication studies.) Tools like the Jupyter Notebook provide an excellent platform to combine narrative instruction and code in a single document. This narrative can be written for readers and presenters, making it valuable for students as an independent educational document and a basis for rerunning a lecture. Harnessing their rendering features, Jupyter notebooks stored in a public repository like GitHub can now be stored with additional documents, metadata, and provenance information. The benefits of this approach include:
Elizabeth Wickes explains how open science practices can be used in an educational context and why they are best facilitated by tools like the Jupyter Notebook. Along the way, Elizabeth shares pointers and suggestions that are relevant to both formal (e.g., academic) and informal (e.g., internal training, documentation, tutorials, etc.) educators from any domain. While Elizabeth offers a short overview of common open science practices and perspectives, the focus will be on Jupyter notebooks as the primary medium for lesson development and publication.
Elizabeth Wickes is a lecturer at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, where she teaches foundational programming and information technology courses. Previously, Elizabeth was a data curation specialist for the Research Data Service at the University Library of the University of Illinois and the curation manager for Wolfram|Alpha. She currently co-organizes the Champaign-Urbana Python user group, has been a Carpentries instructor since 2015 and a trainer since 2017, and is an elected member of the Carpentries executive council for 2018.
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