Ask HN: What would attract you to attend a 1day course on a tech of your choice?
I'm going to be delivering a 1 day irl intro course to d3.js. I'm trying to put together a format and offering that will stand out.
Regardless of the tech, what would (or wouldn't) attract you to attend?
E.g. Credentials of the instructor? Supported time to work on a self-directed project? 1 on 1 time? Etc. It would need to spend at least 80% of its time on activities where being in-person makes a difference. I don't want to spend 8 hours hearing a lecture that I could skim via YouTube in 30 minutes. Don't read presentations at us. Don't make us work through a curriculum that we could have done at home. If you are teaching a large group, odds are the individual attention is low enough that we could have just watched the course from home. Instead, show us things hands-on, where being able to interact directly with each other and the instructor matters - let people ask questions, speed up the course if we are getting fast, slow down when questions come up, and don't let one slow person or one fast person ruin the pacing for the rest of the group. I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but I'd think hard about why being in-person matters, and construct the day accordingly. Yess! All these things. My goal is to make it hands on as possible. Numbers will be capped so I can get around everyone. If more people sign up I'll have an assistant. When I've done this before it works well. The only snag is where people are at different levels and want to go different speeds. But this is where bonus exercises/stretch goals can set challenge for those racing ahead. I have to go to 1 day training courses etc for work all the time. Different industry… but still… here’s what attracts me: Networking opportunities. Extremely good catering. Free items such as pens, notepads and novel and niche items that are hard to come by. Some kind of “certificate” to prove I attended that I can put in my continual professional development portfolio so that if I get audited by the council that issues my certificate to practice I can show I’ve done some learning stuff. Being actually really relevant learning (ie, new technology that actually is a game changer - replaces old technology that has become outdated). Having the opportunity to do something really cool that you cannot do under normal circumstance. That last point, combined with a few things others have said really has me thinking. I'm not sure what it could be but some sort of physical element, setting or some 'toys' would be really interesting. Thanks for your thorough answer! What's been your favourite item that you've picked up at an event? i would say the top 3 things I’ve acquired are pens, notepads and keyrings. Some of the pens though are like really more just novelty items for promotional purposes than something you would actually use to write with (1 is 50cm tall with a hand on the top of it) - from a hand hygiene course I went to. I went to an infection control course once that had pens that doubled as spray bottles of alcohol gel. Also got a key ring that’s a bottle of alcohol gel. I also went to a blood transfusion course one time and got fridge magnets that had important facts you need to remember for blood transfusions, a reusable bag, that when folded back into its pouch takes the shape of a drop of red blood, I got a stress ball that is a big red blood cell, a note pad that has the blood bank logo and contact details at the very bottom, a red blood drop plushie, and I also got a really useful little book with all the information I could possibly need for doing blood transfusions. It’s still sitting on my bookshelf 6 years later and I still look at it from time to time to remind myself of stuff. The transfusion book is probably my favourite freebie because it’s really relevant to my job. But some of the other items were still novel and also bring a little moment of joy acquiring them. One point I’d make is that you can’t use random objects to be the main attraction, or main value of your course. The value still has to come from what it is you’re actually teaching, it needs to be really relevant, and teaching stuff that people in the industry actually want to know about, and take value from. To be honest, I don't think I would be willing to pay for a 1-day course. I really don't think I could get enough out of it to justify any cost I would pay. Quite understandable. Would 2 days be minimum? It would have to be a subject that is incredibly niche such that I couldn't find resources to learn it online - OR where there would be a necessary physical component, such as a laboratory, justifying the need for attending on-site. D3.js meets neither of those criteria. Ok so you'd be happy with it just being online. That's fair enough. (1) Instructor credibility - could be "fame," but could also be youtube videos where s/he appears to be a very good teacher. (2) Opportunity for good in-person networking with industry professionals. This is what sets an in-person event apart from online learning. (3) The opportunity to "finish a project" using the new tech, perhaps earn a cert, perhaps through free one-month membership into some expensive platform. I attended a recent half-day tech course on a FAANG campus recently. Much of our time was spent creating various online accounts and doing other setup and configuration, which could easily have been done as "pre-work" at home. Other than the pizza, it was a sub-optimal day. Ugh that's a bit frustrating. Indeed a little bit a prep could've gone a long way to making that a better experience. Re: 1, I'd be WAY more interested if the instructor were provably good, i.e., they have videos of either online lessons or past workshops showing their teaching style and level of knowledge. If instead of being a one day course it was a pdf file or a wiki. All the other stuff that goes with travel - [decent] networking, [maybe] related vendors, a "good place" to be ... etc I think the design of the course content is the most important. Honestly I’d go to something like this if I could bring my own projects and during the course of this workshop get real time help from the expert when I have questions. No noobs allowed. You must be experienced and bring something you’re actively working on that is commercially viable (not some side project). For example I work with some hairy Postgres stuff. I’d love a day with people who are god tier in regards to their Postgres knowledge and databases in general to help me with my specific questions. I don’t want to be in the room with bootcamp devs or people who don’t know sql or some lame shit like that. I want to be in a room of experts who want to interface with a god tier expert and learn. I’d also find it cool to be with other pros and learn what problems they’re facing or solving. This is interesting. For future I'm thinking I need to set up trading days that are as much self directed as instruction. For 1 day, "Free" would definitely catch my eyes. I'm trying to put together a format and offering that will stand out. Probably don’t. Unless you have a lot of experience and then you probably would not. Meet people’s expectations. They are the customers. Sure it is fine to exceed them. Here, that means they learn more, have a better time, and the pizza and coffee are above average. Nobody builds a good reputation all at once. Good luck. Ok keep it simple before doing any zany stuff never done it but the guy who wrote the yc recommended mom test also wrote a book about running workshops. maybe useful for you? Edit: It's probably https://www.workshopsurvival.com/ by Rob Fitzpatrick. Just bought a copy, thanks! Would you happen to know what it's called? I don't know which guy, or what the mom test is, but would love to read the workshop book. Oh I had no idea I'll check it out. I'm a frontend dev and I'd love to learn D3.js. And I generally prefer in-person classes. That said, I still probably wouldn't want to spend a whole day + significant travel expenses just to learn D3 :( It's the kind of thing that's not very efficient to learn in a classroom, IMO. I'd prefer a lot of examples with good documentation, not a classroom where you spend an hour getting everyone set up with a basic IDE just to get a single circle drawn on the screen. The pacing of such a class would likely vary too much between students, depending on their JS and visualization experience, and it's not a good use of time in a professional setting. If I had to go to a workshop like this (or if work was paying for it), I'd at a minimum hope that there are different tracks/curricula, like one for boot camp beginners and another for professional devs with some industry experience. I don't know how you'd do it for beginners (I probably wouldn't start with d3 in that case). As a working dev, I'd really want something that exposes me to experts in the field working on complex projects that have undocumented or non-obvious "gotchas". I don't want to sit in a room listening to someone talk about something I could've learned in 5 minutes of reading the docs. I'd want expert wisdom, like actual firsthand extensive experience using D3 in the wild and the resultant experience. Something like "Here's one project we did. We chose D3 because of X, and we used these specific visualizations because of Y and Z. It turns out our first attempts failed and confused people, so we ended up doing A and B instead, and had to solve for problem C that the docs don't mention at all." etc. In other words, real-world problems and real-world workflows. I also think a real-world Q&A would be helpful, if you're able to collect questions (and ideally code samples) from participants beforehand and then go through them live for the entire audience to learn from. Like "We got a question about using a treemap interactions on mobile, and this was the demo we got. I thought about it and tweaked it like this..." or "how do you do a good heatmap with accessibility considerations for colorblind users?" etc. At the end of the day, I think some live coding time with no required pre-set agenda, but available 1:1 time with instructor(s), would be helpful. Like people could bring their own projects they're working on, or tweak an example you provide (ideally in some easily cloneable environment / web IDE that doesn't waste time on pipeline setup), but have experts on hand to provide guidance. Or if not, they can just leave the workshop early or mingle in the break area or whatever. Hope that doesn't seem overly negative... was just trying to be honest about what would get me excited to attend such a workshop. I guess the TLDR of it is that I'd prefer it to be more able "sharing expertise from real-world professional usage" rather than "here's how you make a bar chart". No not negative at all. It's not the right fit for you. What would you go for out of interest? Anyway your idea about collecting questions ahead of time is great. I would love to just react to the audience with questions and allow people to get on with things but not everyone will be self directed. Having questions or topics of interest up front could help strike a balance though! Yeah, in the workshops I've run in the past (not tech related), having upfront questions that you can curate and research ahead of time can really help get the conversation going. But also leave time for in-person questions, because otherwise the audience can feel ignored when they really want to ask you something. And as you said, not every workshop is the right fit for every participant, and that's fine! In my case, if your workshop happened to be nearby, I'd probably go check it out "just cuz". I don't meet a lot of data viz people in my rural area (Central Oregon). If it required travel, I'd gladly go if my employer would pay for it (they won't, because it's not relevant to my current job). For me to be willing to take a day off work and pay for travel expenses & registration fees myself, probably the only thing that'd get me to attend is what I mentioned already, namely real-world expertise from people who use D3 a lot, not a beginner's workshop. To be clear, I AM a beginner at D3, but I've used a lot of other charting solutions in the past, and I probably wouldn't attend a workshop just to learn the basics. I generally learn basic usage better from written tutorials, but I still enjoy real-life conferences if there are more advanced panels/discussions. The difference (to me) is that the advanced discussions are less "how-to"s and more "here's stuff you probably never even thought about... avoid these pitfalls". Good luck with your workshop though, and thank you for running it! Sounds like a great opportunity for people who learn well that way. 'The difference (to me) is that the advanced discussions are less "how-to"s and more "here's stuff you probably never even thought about... avoid these pitfalls".' great distinction here, thanks!