Based on recent education research, long lecture-based courses are not efficient at deeply learning skills. Students have rare occasions to practice concepts by themselves in class and rarely receive specific feedbacks to allow continuous improvement. Deliberate practice states that active learning through intense practice with frequent feedback can build efficient mental representations, finally leading to expertise.
Students doesn't necessarily aim to become experts in a given IT field, but there is a huge potential to learn from the various research on expertise to build practice driven courses. This is why students and teachers need to adopt deliberate practice !
Delibay is based on the science of deliberate practice, a specialized type of practice used by top level experts all around the world to achieve extraordinary performances. These principles are designed to get the most out from the brain and body adaptability.
Intense and challenging training
Continuous feedback and adjustment
Specific goals
Building efficient mental representations
A relevant quote from the book Peak, How all of us can achieve extraordinary things by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool:
What exactly is being changed in the brain with deliberate practice? The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.
[Page 63 - Peak, by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool]
IT teachers wanting to apply deliberate practice in their courses will need a specific tool to create training opportunities and get a clear vision on their class understanding.
The challenge now is to take the deliberate practice principles and find ways to apply them to the IT tools, context and challenges.
TODO...
We want to help teachers in the design or redesign of their courses, based on what we learned from DP. More coming soon...
TODO: show exo formats... TODO: show sync system... TODO: show priority mode...
As a teacher, are you tired of the Word -> PDF -> Upload -> Inform about update process to ship your exercises to your students ? Bored with editing dozens of course contents in various forms ? Annoyed to manage solutions in separated files ?
How much time you spend in this process ? 5-10 minutes ? And how much does it slow down frequent updates ?
Delibay takes another strategy: manage the course with text files outside of Delibay in a public Git repository.
Once configured, deploying a course takes under 10 seconds. You can use your prefered IDE where you already feel productive and the deployment is a git push away.
Let's say you have a course on regexes, you have a Git repository named DRX, here is the deployment process.
This fast deployment strategy allows a course to have very frequent improvements, to adapt to student's feedback and to continue to enhance training opportunities. This makes collaboration between teachers and contribution a breeze to manage (via Pull requests).
In your Git repository, you can define your course information and your exercises with human-readable text files using an intuitive syntax called the DY syntax.
Exo: Who is the creator of the Linux kernel ?
Solution: Linus Torvalds
Exo: Introduction
Which statements are correct ?
Options: [multiple]
- C is an interpreted language
- [ok] C is a compiled language
- [ok] C is used in the Linux kernel
- C is mostly used for web applications
More to come related to the DY syntax...