I've just finished week 10 of my training here at the Data School - where the time is going, I have no idea!
This week we had the opportunity to teach a 1.5 hour session to the public at The Information Lab's Training Day - previously known as Learn What The Data School Learns (LWTDSL).
Half of my cohort taught sessions on Tableau, while the other half taught sessions on Alteryx. I was part of the 'Alteryx Group' and led a session on an introduction to Formulas in Alteryx.
Now, my first ever job was a tutor for primary school children and Maths was my favourite subject in school growing up, so you would assume this should have been a walk in the park for me right? Hmm, not quite. It's been almost 10 years since I tutored and as much as I like working with numbers, anything Math related is often resembled to marmite and requires a lot of patience and preparation to teach. Key word here is preparation.
If there's one thing that's emphasised during training is the importance of planning, and I can vouch for how it goes such a long way. Here are the steps I took to plan my Intro to Formulas in Alteryx session.
Step 1 - Start with the 'why'
The start of a training/teaching session is arguably the most important. It's your opportunity to grab people's attention and let them know why what you're teaching is important, why they should pay attention and why they should listen to you.
Using real life examples are great, as it allows people to relate to what you're saying, which in turn helps to grab their attention. For example, "At first glance, Alteryx can be quite intimidating and confusing, especially with over 270 tools! How useful and less time-consuming would it be to master one tool and be able to do 101 different things to improve your dataset, than trying to figure out how to use 101 different tools to do the same thing? This is why the Formula tool is something you should learn how to use, it's one of Alteryx's most versatile tool - from being able to clean data, create calculated fields to generate insights, format existing fields or do validation testing and so much more."
Step 2 - Walk through the 'how'
It's all good and well telling people how to do things but arguably showing people how to do said thing can be more impactful, especially when it comes to using tools they have little to no experience in and even more true when it comes to formulas.
For this reason, I prepared a walk through exercise to demonstrate how to use various formula types in Alteryx (numeric, string, conditional and date functions) within the Formula and Filter tools. This consisted of cleaning a dataset by replacing null values and formatting pre-existing fields, to creating new fields to enable validation testing and providing insightful analysis and more.
Step 3 - Expand the technique
Once you've walked through the 'how', it's good practice to expand the technique by providing a number of examples increasing in difficulty. This enables you to show all the complex and advanced things that can be achieved with the tool while ensuring the right pace for people to follow along and grasp the various concepts.
A good example of this would be starting off with using the Formula tool in Alteryx to return the absolute values of any negatives in a numeric field or to round a numeric field to a specified number of decimal places and then moving on to use the Formula tool to do some calculations e.g. calculating profit, sales ratio etc and then taking it a step further by categorising some of the values in a field using the 'IF' statement.
Step 4 - Wrap up with a Review
The wrap up or closing of a session is just as important as the beginning. This is where you review or recap the key concepts you've explored and explained in the session, as well as explaining some use case scenarios of how and when those things will be useful/can be used. Bonus points for explaining use case scenarios that relate to what the people you're teaching currently do, to further reinforce how impactful and useful those things are.
Other Top Tips
- Practice Practice Practice! - Practicing your session beforehand will enable you to apprehend how long your session will take as well as, how easy it is to follow along, potential questions that may come up and the potential direction that the session might go in
- Find a way to your engage your audience early on - you can do this by finding out their interests/hobbies/passion, this also helps to break any ice
- Understand what level your audience is at - this will help you gauge how to pace your session
- Be clear on what the learning outcome/objective is from the onset so people know what to expect and to manage their expectations
- Prepare extra exercises or content incase the session goes at a faster pace than planned
- Ensure you have exercises at various levels of difficulty to ensure that everyone at every level is challenged