Future Directions & things to think about for next year

[lopierra]

2024 update

Given the uncertainty about miniDREAM continuing in its current form, I would love to see it scaled down but tied more closely to Sage data/portals and packaged in a way that it can be more self-serve and serve as a way to highlight & educate users about Synapse/Sage portals.

Ideas:

• Probably don't do lectures - they're hard to coordinate
• Scale it down to some well-annotated notebooks and homework/challenges that can be automatically scored
• Instead of pre-loading data into R as we currently do, identify relevant datasets on Synapse/portal and teach users how to find & download
• Have a "Publish" workflow where students can set up their own wiki page to display their homework - they can link in their resume and could be linked to portal to show how data is being re-used
• Make this into a package that could be tailored (with hopefully minor effort from Sage + domain expert) to many DCCs - figure out how much time/infrastructure and add this to budget in future proposals
• Could also use this as a tutorial in the Synapse help docs

Older ideas:

• update/improve R resources and intro to R lecture (make more interactive?)
• find out whether any instructors got questions from students
• how to increase engagement in submissions
• why don't people come to office hours?
• consider encouraging tidyverse vs base R
• pre-homework for students new to programming? (eg. R bootcamp, Ready for R, etc.)
• next year can we post code answer key to assignments
• how to optimize for students who are attending on small screens
• follow up with previous participants? (see below)
• the manuscript! what is happening with that
• [2023] Can we leverage Software/Data Carpentries? Having a course that is more about tools and coding vs. biology content could be make it more useful/relevant to all students and be scaleable to more communities
• [2023] In general it would be great to have Carpentries instructor training at Sage - I think some past Sagers were instructors, not sure about present
• [2023] maybe introduce the group project at the start of summer and work on it throughout (use as framework)
• [2023] focus on what we want students to take away - skills vs systems biology knowledge? (current more focused on the latter; I think it should be the former)
• [2023] Consult with Betsy Rolland?

Think about how to set up a post-course activity that would use data and/or tools from the CCKP. Considerations:

• whether/how to clean up datasets?
• are there other tools that could be used on the mini-DREAM data?
• how to highlight students' participation in a way that would be beneficial to them, as well as promoting the CCKP
• who would have time to run this
• could this be something that would run throughout the year, so miniDREAM would be a bootcamp for this yearlong activity
• invite previous years' mini-DREAM participants?

[aclayton555]

thank you @lopierra ❤️