| Re: [eclipsecon-na-program-committee] raising the bar etc. for tutorial presenters |
I have only given two EclipseCon tutorials, one that I think went badly and one that I think was well received. I hope my very small sampling of experience can be of some help. Here are the reasons I think one of my tutorials went badly: - Way too many slides and way too much time spent on slide material. Attendees do not attend tutorials to watch a really long presentation. They go to learn how to develop and want hands on exercises from the very beginning. - Set up was overly complicated and nearly impossible to get everyone in the room setup. - The topics covered were way to broad. I think it is much better to teach well a few focused topics instead of just touching on a many diverse topics in a tutorial. - We did not make it through 50% of the planned content and the presentation material was not easy to follow on your own. When developing tutorial material plan for worse case scenarios where you will not cover all the topics. Plan to skip topics when time is short. For each topic in your tutorial material, make sure it is feasible to follow on your own without the presenter present. This will also make your tutorial much more useful as posted material after the conference. Here are the reasons I think my other tutorial went well even though I was the only presenter and there were no "helpers" in the room: - I took advise from Chris A. and created Eclipse UA cheat sheets. There are other ways to accomplish this, but the cheat sheets in Eclipse really helped me out because it presented the attendee with a well structure set of steps to click through for each topic. I was also able to use eclipse commands from the cheat sheets to perform mundane tasks for the attendee when they were following the tasks from the cheat sheets, such as creating a new plug-in project etc. - For each topic, I assumed previous topics may have been skipped. The material should be available in a format that assumes previous topics were skipped. If your topics build upon each other then make sure there is an easy way to "fast forward" the content of the projects up to the next topic. This helps if you need to skip topics because of time, but also helps if laggers in the audience need to catch up quickly. - My tutorial time was only 2 hours, so I was forced to keep it the topics very focused, but I think this made for a much better experience. - My slides were limited to 30 mins of speaking time (or 25% of total tutorial time). The rest of the time was spent on going through the exercises and cheat sheets. It was far from the best tutorial ever, but it definitely went much more smoothly (and less stressful!) than my previous tutorial and I felt the audience actually got something useful out of it. Here is a link to my projects in git that I used for the tutorial which includes the project with the cheat sheets and presentation material (org.eclipse.equinox.adaptor.cheatsheets): http://git.eclipse.org/c/equinox/rt.equinox.incubator.git/tree/demos/adaptors/ Tom |------------> | From: | |------------> >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |Anne Jacko <anne.jacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> | >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |------------> | To: | |------------> >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |Eclipsecon NA program committee discussions <eclipsecon-na-program-committee@xxxxxxxxxxx>, | >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |------------> | Date: | |------------> >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |01/23/2012 05:20 PM | >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |------------> | Subject: | |------------> >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |[eclipsecon-na-program-committee] raising the bar etc. for tutorial presenters | >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Hi all, You may recall that we discussed trying to improve tutorials at ECon this year. Past attendee surveys have consistently rated tutorials lower than other types of talks. The most common complaint is that tutorial presenters are not well-prepared and too much time is wasted getting people set up. Another issue is lack of organization in presenting the material. It's understandable that attendees feel frustrated when they have invested a half-day at a session and don't feel they got enough out of it. I will soon be contacting all tutorial presenters about their volunteer helpers, so this is a good time to convey suggestions or expectations to them. I would appreciate input from any or all of you about what to communicate to the presenters. Concrete ideas and useful URLs are best. Thanks in advance, and I look forward to gathering and sharing your input. Anne Jacko Eclipse Foundation 503-784-3788 (cell) (Embedded image moved to file: pic40727.gif) _______________________________________________ eclipsecon-na-program-committee mailing list eclipsecon-na-program-committee@xxxxxxxxxxx http://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipsecon-na-program-committee
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