As a lot of readers may know, I teach a biological computing course, with my labmate Ben. We're a weird little entity: we're endorsed by the university's Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. We can't offer course credit, nor can we incentivize participation. This creates a really odd dynamic:
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Students can come learn
* But they have to be self-motivated
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Students can get code feedback
* But they're putting in their own time and receiving no credit
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Students can come hang out and get to know the UT biological programming community
* But again, this is time out of their day
We break our semester into two halves. As you can see on our site, there's a bit of basic python for the first few sessions. The second half is made up of speakers from the UT community coming to talk about how they use computation to make their work easier, faster, more reproducible, etc.
We also invite people for beer. To foster community, of course.
So that's our intro course. We're sending out the evaluation surveys for the first half of the class in a bit here, so I'll be back with some analytics on retention in a couple weeks.