Designer and agile project owner, Sheila Braun; proof of concept, Ian Campbell, MD PhD. Based on ideas formed at the Summer 2019 Arcus Education Retreat attended by Joy Payton and Sheila Braun. The whole team has continued to revise the project. Other team members and contributors are Zoë Wilkinson-Saldaña, Patrick Dibussolo, Laura McNamara, and Lara Lechtenberg, all of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).
Many of CHOP’s principle investigators and their teams have become interested in expanding their data science skills. In support of the Arcus project at CHOP, one of our goals at Arcus Education is to create learning events and experiences in which 100% of attendees spend 100% of their time working towards their own goals at their own pace. We have piloted our approach with R and Statistics workshops, Python workshops, and by making lessons freely available to users via the ALEx website.
In our workshops,
- Each learner sets their own goals.
- Each learner receives an individualized curriculum based on their goals.
- Success is measured by the extent to which each learner perceives themselves to have met their own goals.
Learning event attendees have highly variable goals, from R basics to machine learning algorithms for genetic data to report writing for monthly metrics. We experimented with RStudio's R packages shiny and learnr to answer the question, “How can an instructor who has N attendees at a workshop create N different curricula based on N different sets of learning goals, while still treating the class not so much as a single entity, but as N individuals?”
To answer this question in a practical way, we created a tool that streamlines the process of matching an individual learner's goals to a curriculum--a learning checklist for achieving those goals.
The ALEx landing page is at https://alex.arcus.chop.edu. From there, you can create a customized curriculum for yourself or another, browse lessons, or add a lesson of your own to make available to learners.
All CHOP, Penn, and Drexel employees are welcome to attend our workshops. Registration is required. Click here to find out more and to register.
Make a pull request to include your teaching materials in the Arcus Learning Exchange.
Learn how to write a lesson in learnr
If you have a complete lesson, whether interactie or not, email Sheila to get your lesson reviewed and included in our library.
Thank you for adding to the list of lessons we can offer!
Related to the repo inside CHOP's enterprise GitHub.