Requesting Deployment Help

Not every instructor has the coding and math experience to feel confident facilitating a module on their own. As an instructor, you can get assistance with one or more of the following roles.

For all services other than Peer Consulting office hours, CDSS provides support on a first-come, first-served basis. To utilize GSI training, student presenters, or lab assistants, please request help from Eric Van Dusen ASAP.

Office Hours (Peer Consulting)

The Data Peer Consultants offer drop-in help with Jupyter notebooks, Python, and many other data science topics for undergraduates in any UC Berkeley course. Peer consultants can be a helpful complement to course staff- course staff can address domain-specific questions, while Peer Consultants can help with technical data science questions.

Consultations are held in the 3rd floor of Moffitt library. The full Peer Consulting schedule can be found at https://data.berkeley.edu/education/data-peer-consulting. Peer Consulting does not need to be requested ahead of time; however, if you have a large-scale deployment, or a deployment requiring special expertise (e.g. geographic information systems), please contact the Peer Consultants ahead of time.

GSI Training

CDSS offers an introductory Jupyter workshop at the beginning of the semester for GSIs in classes that are deploying modules. The workshop covers the motivation for a data science module, an overview of the software tools used in a module, and practice with using Jupyter notebooks. To add students to the invitation list for the workshop, please contact Eric Van Dusen before the start of the semester.

CDSS can also meet with course GSIs to walk through their particular module, answer questions, and give resources to troubleshoot common issues.

Lab Assistants

During a modules presentation or lab, students may have technical issues or questions that aren’t appropriate for the full class. To address these issues without interrupting the presentation, CDSS lab assistants can attend the presentation to support students one-on-one. For an interactive module presentation, the amount of help needed will be different depending on the experience level of your students, the size of the class, and the amount of coding in the module.

Student Presenters

For modules that are presented in front of a class as a lecture, demonstration, or discussion, CDSS student team members (often those from the team that developed your module) can act as facilitators.

While the student team members are proficient with coding and statistics, they may not have the domain expertise needed to explain finer details of the data or how it relates to other course content. In the past, many modules have benefitted from having a course instructor, GSI, or TA in the room for input on conceptual questions.