Mark more of the material advanced/optional and default to not teaching it?

[jack89roberts]

In general, I think we're struggling for time to get through all the material and/or to have enough time to do the exercises (or to do them justice at least). A solution could be to explicitly mark more of the niche topics (such as 7.7, 8.5, and 8.6) as advanced/optional and recommend that those are not taught in the live deliveries. This might also create more room to add topics like GitHub actions, which we don't cover much at the moment but probably should, or to shuffle topics between modules so that some (like the first few) aren't so pressed for time.

On the other hand, more than half of the students today preferred to continue with teaching rather than return to the exercise.

[radka-j]

I agree with this! It's also worth saying that students chose to continue with teaching rather than do the exercise but the last notebook in module 7 is really quite niche and it's not likely that they knew exactly what they were choosing. Personally I think they would have gotten more out of doing the exercise than going through notebook 7.7.

[jemrobinson]

I'm also wondering whether a couple of the large problems like:

• earthquakes (3c)
• refactoring (7)

ought to be moved into optional "do this in your own time if interested" content in order to free up teaching time which is already quite short.