.. _response0: #################### Response to feedback #################### Full feedback at :ref:`feedback0` and :ref:`feedback1` First - thanks to all of you who gave feedback - it's very helpful. Here I'm concentrating on the critical feedback to work out the best way to change. We haven't said this before, but the course we're trying to teach you is new; we don't know of anyone else trying to teach course exactly like this, a combination of programming practice and concepts in neuroimaging. So please, bear with us, we are learning too. ************************** Course too slow / detailed ************************** I think the course could move a little more quickly, with more emphasis being placed on office hours when catch-up work is required. The focus on minute details -- a blessing of the course -- can at times become its curse, when lengthy, confusing discussions about obscure coding or math issues seem to detract from the big picture. Getting to the bottom of those details is without doubt important, but our time is limited, and attention could be better allotted to give priority to the most important things. +2 It may be useful to assign some reading before class introducing the issues to be dealt with next. For instance, the MRC webpages put together by Matthew and others are a good intro and may help to explain the problem we are trying to solve for anyone who doesn't have much fMRI experience. Then, before going through the code, we could go over how we will approach the problem conceptually (or go over the statistics before they are implemented in the code). This way, even if people get lost in the code, they will be able to take away a big picture lesson on how to deal with common imaging issues in the future. +1 It would be great if the instructors could point us to good reading material about the issues they aren't able to delve deep into. +3 It would be nice to achieve a couple "big picture" items per class in order to keep the necessary attention to minute detail in context.+1 I'd like to learn a bit more about the pros/cons of various pre-processing steps. For instance, how can we test the best parameters to coregister the images we may have? It's clear that: * We're going too slowly * There have been various times we've got bogged down in detail * We need to give a better overall picture of the analysis We don't want to give up on the - detail - because we want to teach you how to get down and dirty with the data, and this involves - detail. But there's some detail needed and some not, and we haven't always got the balance that we need if we're going to teach you efficiently. We are going to try restructuring the rest of the course to be explicit about the big picture of neuroimaging analysis, and how the work of each class fits into this big picture. The reading before the class is a good idea, but, we don't yet have a good grasp of what reading material would be useful, apart from the MRC web-pages. We'll update the MRC pages to match the course better; there is a start here: https://github.com/fperez/nipy-notebooks ************************************************** Need more detail on course curriculum and schedule ************************************************** It would be helpful to have a course outline at the outset so we know what to expect. The reason we haven't done a course outline is because we didn't know how the course would evolve, because it has not been done before. We agree that this is a problem and it would better both for our planning and yours to have a clear idea of the curriculum and how each day relates to the curriculum. We need to allow ourselves some slack to deal with the newness of the course, but we will (from now) put up the plan for each week, with reading material as we find it. ****************************** More on data analysis workflow ****************************** I don't know where we're headed, but it's really important to me that, by the end of this course, I know how to write all my own code to move from raw data to completed analysis. As long as the course provides pre-written notebooks to get from the beginning to the end, I should be OK -- whatever I don't understand by the end of the course I'll review after it's over. It's helpful for a python newbie to hear how the data is structured; once we have a baseline knowledge of what it is, it would help me to hear your workflow of how to handle it. I assume we'll get to that, though. We do need to get to data organization and analysis workflow, and we plan to get to that in the next few classes. We have found it difficult to get the balance between the convenience of the IPython notebooks and our daily practice of coding which has to deal - as you've implied - with big directory trees and long processing pipelines, as well as writing utility functions and analysis scripts. One way to help concentrate on this aspect is to spend some of the time in the class on solving your own analysis problems. ************************************************** Better balance between exercises and demonstration ************************************************** It would be nice to have some specific projects/assignments to work on soon +3 It would be nice if you left some Inputs blank so that we could try writing a couple of commands ourselves+2 I like it when we approach a problem as a class, rather than just reading code that has already been written (though that is definitely useful as well). +1 We've been aware of this problem from early on - it was clear to us and you that exercises were very helpful, but we haven't found it easy to break the flow of the notebook for exercises. We will work harder on this in the next few classes because we agree this is essential. Please feel free to annoy us about this if we don't do a good job. ************************************************************************* Difficulty of mixing people with different levels of background knowledge ************************************************************************* I find that I often get lost on these details as well, and most go over my head... as a beginner (with a very basic understanding of Python, that is), I feel happy when I understand about 50% of what we've covered. I may be alone in this... +1 I think this course might be better divided into two distinct sections: 1) A Python basics section that helps everyone feel competent with running basic Python code and using the notebook 2) A fMRI analysis section that gets into the higher level topics. I think this format could help with attrition.+2 This is a big problem, and we don't know how to handle it yet. I (Matthew) learned a great deal by going to courses in which I got nearly completely lost, but soaked up just enough to be able to think better about it the next time I heard it. In fact the course is designed to try and reduce this feeling of being lost by showing you how it's all done - but it's inevitable that we'll lose some of you for some of the time, given the mixtures of experience in the class. We'd really like to maintain this mixture though. We're planning how to provide some background for those who need it; for example, we teach on `Software Carpentry `_ courses. These can be very useful for some coverage of the basics of programming, Python, and version control. We've heard good things about the `Code Academy Python course `_, as well as the amusingly titled `Learn Python the Hard Way `_. We'll try and address this better next time through the course.