Set realistic timings for episodes

[gcapes]

Currently teaching all episodes takes around 6 hours, rather the advertised 3. This demotivating for instructors.

[colinmorris]

I see 4:30 in the schedule at http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/. Do we say 3 hours elsewhere? But either way, definitely agree with the goal of more realistic timings.

I personally haven't taught this lesson recently or frequently enough to feel confident about my ability to estimate better per-episode times. Do we have any veteran shell instructors who could volunteer estimates?

(Alternatively, I wonder if there's some way we could request that instructors who teach the lesson in the future write down how long they spent on each episode and send us the data so we could come up with a rough empirical average?)

[gcapes]

Sorry, that's my bad memory. It was 3 hours once, but I amended it a while back #680. I think a report from instructors on the current material would be useful. It's hard to update the timings during a PR because you won't have actually taught the new material yet. I'll put some times up next time I teach it.

[gcapes]

Here's a placeholder if anyone wants to copy it and put their times up:

Episode	Teaching (mins)	Exercises (mins)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

[fthommen]

The instructor guide still says (emphasis mine): "All of this material can be covered in three hours as long as learners using Windows do not run into roadblocks [...]"

[fthommen]

I can't (yet) give values for the SWC curriculum, but I used to give a similar course for several years, and alone the basic commands, navigation, working with files and directories, some filters, permissions ecc., with exercises, but w/o any control structures, pipes or redirections took us a whole day (six to seven hours excluding coffe breaks and lunchtime) and an other, slightly shorter, day for some more commands, pipes, redirections and more exercises. Group sizes were between 20 and 30 persons and we usually had 2 -3 helpers besides the instructor. Course attendands were usually biologists with very little to no Linux experience. That seems to be a more realistic timeframe to me :-).

[AmandaSchi]

I have been in attendance at this lesson (as a helper) several times at my institution. We usually budget 3-3.5 hours for The Unix Shell and are able to just start/introduce episode 6, Shell Scripts. I helped teach this lesson in mid-May and recorded the timings (but only the total, not separated by teaching and exercises).

Episode	Teaching (mins)	Exercises (mins)	Total (mins)
1			20
2			40
3			25
4			25*
5			35*
6			15*
7

*entire lesson not covered

I'm not sure these timings will be that useful but it may be useful for others to know that we typically get through episodes 1-3 including all the the exercises. We are able to cover all of episode 4 except that some instructors skip a couple of the exercises ("Why Does uniq Only Remove Adjacent Duplicates?" , "Pipe Construction" , and "Which Pipe?"). Then episodes 5 & 6 are covered partially - what is left out depends on the instructor and the learners so it varies. We almost never have time to get into episode 7.

[kcranston]

I concur that the timings are unrealistic. From teaching this morning (did not separate exercises from teaching):

Episode 1 (intro): 9:30-9:35; 5 minutes; did not cover everything
Episodes 2 & 3 (files and directories): 9:35 - 10:45; 70 minutes; did not cover everything
Break 10:45-11:00; 15 minutes
Episode 4 (pipes and filters): 11-11:30; 30 minutes; redirect and pipes only
Episode 5 - skipped
Episode 6 - skipped
Episode 7 (finding things): 11:30-12:00; 30 minutes; demos of grep and find

• I did not teach any of the Nelle parts.
• bash is usually day 1 morning, which means losing some time to all start-of-workshop announcements and introductions. We did not start teaching until 30 minutes after start time.

[gcapes]

It turns out this has been a long-standing issue: #449

[smason]

Another comment to say that things took much longer than the suggested times. Were doing a hybrid (half in-person, half remote) session, and like @kcranston missed out 5 & 6 due to time constraints. We started around 9:30 and finished at 3:30pm, with a few breaks in the middle.

Maybe we had particularly interactive class, but from previous times running the session it feels like 4.5 hours is very optimistic. Especially if students have only been using Windows/GUI programs before.

[gcapes]

I forgot to keep a break-down of the timings last time I taught this, but I ran 090:00-16:00 with 1h30 for lunch and breaks. That's 5.5 hrs teaching, and I skipped some exercises and bit of material in ep3, 4 and 5 in order to cover ep6 and just touched on ep7.