| 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". |
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!