course_template
A template repository for NumFOCUS Academy courses.
We are using GitHub Classroom as a way to collect materials from course developers. After creating an "assignment" with this template repository, the lead course instructor can be sent a link that will allow them to create a repository for their course, under the NF Academy org. Having a common folder structure will help us when building courses in the online platform with the contents on GitHub.
Delete this file (or rename it) and replace it by a README file that targets the contents of the repository, populated with your course materials.
Instructions
Use the link from GitHub Classroom to create your repository based on this template.
Add your content as Jupyter notebooks in the notebooks folder, and name them with a numeric prefix:
01_title_of_first_lesson.ipynb02_title_of_second_lesson.ipynb
The typical course will be 4 or 5 notebooks, fully narrated (i.e., please include full prose explaining all code and worked examples). Use plenty of headings to organize the content, and split Markdown cells at each heading. If a section is longer than what you might read on a single scroll of a laptop display, split the cell (this will help us when building the online course from the notebooks).
Put any data sets used in the worked examples in the data folder and add a file index in the README.md file in that folder.
(Include any credits for data that you sourced from others.)
Add in the images and scripts folders any images embedded in the Markdown cells of your notebooks and any scripts imported or ran within code cells, respectively.
Optionally, you can share any slides in the slides folder. We prefer text-based source, but you can also drop PDF files in there (please no binaries like .pptx).
Important: Add all code dependencies to the requirements.txt or environment.yaml file.
For more detailed instructions, read the Course Development Guide.
How we build your course
The NumFOCUS Academy uses an instance of the Open edX software platform for online learning. We will build a course learning sequence by pulling content directly from your Jupyter notebooks, which will be displayed as embedded HTML in the course. Sections of a notebook can be displayed in the online course as a "unit" of the learning sequence, interleaved with videos or student assignments (graded or ungraded).
Open edX allows a variety of problem types, such as multiple choice, dropdown choice, numerical input, and even math expression input problems. We also have a third-party extension for graded assignments using Jupyter notebooks and nbgrader.
License
The source materials for NumFOCUS Academy courses are copyright of their authors. We ask that materials be shared under an open-source license of the author's choosing. Our recommendation is: BSD-3 (or MIT) license for code, CC-BY license for text and media, CC0 for data.
General information
What is NumFOCUS?
NumFOCUS is a 501(c)-3 non-profit in the United States. Its mission is to promote open practices in research, data, and scientific computing by serving as a fiscal sponsor for open source projects and organizing community-driven educational programs. NumFOCUS envisions an inclusive scientific and research community that utilizes actively supported open source software to make impactful discoveries for a better world.
NumFOCUS Academy
The NumFOCUS Academy is an educational initiative begun in 2020, to develop online learning opportunities for our community. It first served as a platform for the online conferences JupyterCon 2020 and PyData Global.
In 2021, we are developing a catalog of courses to build your skills on the most useful open-source software tools for data science and technical computing.
At NumFOCUS Academy, we aim to create learning opportunities inspired by the open-source ethos. Our courses teach about the NumFOCUS projects, often by the project contributors themselves. No other learning platform has this to offer!
Our instructors are members of the NumFOCUS international community, contribute to our open-source projects, and share their expertise widely. Want to be a part of it? Get in touch by emailing: [email protected]