Open teaching stacks help us teach at scale

Elliott Hauser is CEO of Trinket, a startup focused on creating open sourced teaching materials. He is also a Python instructor at UNC Chapel Hill.

Well-developed tools for teaching are crucial to the spread of open source software and programming languages. Stacks like those used by the Young Coders Tutorial and Mozilla Software Carpentry are having national and international impact by enabling more people to teach more often.

Software wont replace teachers. But teachers need great software for teaching. The success and growth of technical communities are largely dependent on the availability of teaching stacks appropriate to teaching their technologies. Resources like try git or interactivepython.org not only help students on their own but also equip instructors to teach these topics without also having to discover the best tools for doing so. In that way, they play the same function as open source Web stacks: getting us up and running quickly with time-tested and community-backed tools. Thank goodness I dont need to write a database just to write a website; I can use open source software instead. As an instructor teaching others to code websites, whats the equivalent tool set? Thats what I mean by Teaching Stack: a collection of open tools that help individual instructors teach technology at scale.

Here are some of the major components of a teaching stack for a hands-on technology course:

You can see the key components: Where the instructor got the materials, how the students will access them, and what development environment each will use. All too often, one or more of the components of an instructors teaching stack amounts to Whatever I was able to throw together myself. A homegrown curriculum, student development environment, and course website can be extremely confusing for students. Theyre also an extraordinary amount of work for instructors, which means fewer courses are taught.

Based on my experiences teaching and observing workshops around the country, here are my three simple recommendations for Teaching Stack design:

Below Ill describe two teaching stacks that take these approaches and are working well at scale: the Python Young Coders Tutorial and Mozilla Software Carpentry. My message to instructors is once youve got a teaching stack that works, follow these projects example and make it easy for others to replicate and contribute to!

Before we dive into teaching stacks, Id like to briefly explain where the concept came from: the Web Stack.

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Open teaching stacks help us teach at scale