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Introduction User guide Getting started Manage your account Manage a course DY syntax Course and skills Exo formats Designing a deliberate course Concepts Advanced matching Best practices Edition experience Mass import Mass update Measuring progress Offline support Open exo format Ordering Rich diff of DY syntax inside forges PRs Rich intermediate feedback Shared logic Sync Website Fix exo format Contribute Developer guide Architecture DY parser Parsing system Security Technical documentation

Designing a deliberate course

Status: still in drafting

Redefining the IT learning experience implies helping teachers in designing their courses. The traditional way is often lectures during 1 or 2 hours, without any practice. In addition, students have to complete several projects in which they receive only a little feedback, and usually several weeks later.

We define a deliberate course in the context of IT learning (in any IT subdomain) as a practice-oriented course, focused on what students should be able to do (and not what they have to know). The practice and regular qualitative feedback is

Quotes:

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]

[...] a major difference between the deliberate-practice approach and the traditional approach lies with the emphasis placed on skills versus knowledge -- what you can do versus what you know. Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills: knowledge should never be an end in itself. Nonetheless, deliberate practice results in students picking up quite a lot of knowledge along the way. [Page 250]

When preparing a lesson plan, determining what a student should be able to do is far more effective than determining what that student should know. It then turns out the knowing part comes along for the ride. [Page 251]

Redesigning teaching methods using deliberate practice could dramatically increase how quickly and how well student learn - [...] - but it will require not only a change in mindset among educators but much more research into the minds of experts. [Page 254]