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PolicyViz Podcast Episode #9: Scott Murray
143 Plays10 years ago
What’s the best way to teach data visualization? How do you mix theory and practical applications? What tool or tools should you teach: Tableau, Excel, d3, Processing, something else? Scott Murray, Assistant Professor of Design at the University of San...
The post PolicyViz Podcast Episode #9: Scott Murray appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Scott Murray
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to the Policy of This Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. So we're moving along here in the podcast episodes. We've talked to lots of great folks, both practitioners, academics, people who teach, people who work on maps and color. And I'm really excited today to talk to Scott Murray, who is an assistant professor of design at the University of San Francisco. Scott, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, excited to be here. So if you don't know Scott, that's a shame, really. I'm sad for you. Famously a line left. Yeah.
00:00:42
Speaker
Scott wrote perhaps the second official book on D3. Interactive Data Visualization for the Web from O'Reilly. It was my first.
00:00:55
Speaker
dive into D3 and fortunately I think it came out I think I was emailing you shortly after you had released it because I was emailing you saying Scott help I really don't know what I'm doing and so now I still kind of don't know what I'm doing but at least I can talk intelligently about it because I've read the book so perfect so thanks for the goal is like even if you don't understand it at least you can sound like you understand it which is half the battle really the meetups and stuff yeah and everything just sounding good is you know
00:01:23
Speaker
Like Billy Crystal said, sounding good is better than looking good is better than feeling good.
Teaching Experiences and Course Design
00:01:30
Speaker
I'm really excited to have you on. You just completed a MOOC with the Knight Center and Alberto Cairo on D3. So I wanted to start by talking about that and ask you how it went and how many people you had and what people felt about it.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah. So the first thing is we're trying to introduce this. So it technically wasn't a MOOC. It wasn't a massive open online course because it wasn't open because as an experiment, we decided to try charging money for it. And, uh, or I should say the night, the night center did, and it wasn't massive because we limited the number of the people. So the idea was a normal, like Alberto's taught several of these moves through the night center before. And he has thousands and thousands of people just to pay. Um,
00:02:14
Speaker
or say thousands of thousands of people sign up and then some smaller percentage of that actually participate but there's with those courses with the MOOCs it's just set up so there's no expectation that you know as the single instructor he's able to actually like respond to everyone so yeah
00:02:30
Speaker
The platform is very much oriented around discussions, so I know it sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but sort of like students trying to help each other, and lots of resources are provided, so hopefully you can work your way through it. So what we try to do with this course, which we internally we've been calling it a BOC, a B-O-C, so a big online course. Oh, so I was thinking it was a small, I thought it was a SPOC, a small paid online course.
00:02:57
Speaker
Oh, that's good, yeah. Yes, it's a spot. Anyway, so it's... And there's a t-shirt there to be had too. Yeah, same box sounds stupid, but we called it a big online course because there's a registration fee, I think it was $95.
00:03:12
Speaker
And the idea was then we would limit the number of people who signed up. And at first we thought, okay, well, the fee will increase the engagement and motivation of the people who sign up because they had to sort of pretend a little actual money. So anyway, we got much
00:03:33
Speaker
many more people interested than we expected. We expected, you know, we're like excited if we would get 100 people, but we ended up keep getting more and more and more. And so we eventually we capped it at 500 and then we had some stragglers and some payment issues. Anyway, we ended up in the end, it was 526 participants. And the course ended two weeks ago and we had 173 people
00:03:59
Speaker
actually complete all the requirements in time. So you can sign up for these courses and you can basically just, a lot of people sign up just for access to the materials. So maybe I should explain a little bit about how it works. Yeah, I think that'd be helpful, yeah. So it's an online platform.
00:04:17
Speaker
And basically it's broken into modules. Each module is one week. This course was a six-week course. And every week you have videos, which are like video lectures from Alberto and I. You have readings, so like some are assigned readings, some are optional readings.
00:04:37
Speaker
What else do we have? Each week you have a discussion question so that you have to talk about in the forums, and that's usually like a conceptual thing. We have an exercise that you have to complete, so that's sort of like your main piece of homework, right? And in this case, each week it was a different sort of small D3 project, like make a bar chart, make a scatter plot, make an area chart, line chart.
00:05:01
Speaker
And you have a quiz that you have to take. So can the students download the videos? Obviously they can download the readings, but can they download the videos? So if they don't have time to do the course while they sound, can they download it so they can do it on their own? Right, so yes and no. So that was when we got a lot of feedback.
00:05:23
Speaker
This was totally an experiment. I think for both of us and for the Knight Center too, they had never done a course, because most of their courses are MOOCs, they tend to be less technical, sort of more accessible in terms of the content. This was designed to be an absolute beginner level D3 course, plus sort of Alberto was bringing this element of visualization principles and concepts.
00:05:48
Speaker
We were trying to integrate those two, but still this was the most, frankly, money that the Knight Center had charged for a course before. So that was an experiment to see how many people had to have, and it was very advanced.
Innovative Lecture Formats
00:06:03
Speaker
I mean, it was beginner level, as far as I'm concerned, but it was advanced in terms of their content.
00:06:09
Speaker
like usually three or four week courses that are much more digestible and the expectation might be two or three hours per week. Our course was set up with the expectation more like a regular college course where we, like the exercises, everything was designed so that you would put in five to six hours per week. That's like a regular course. Yeah, except that it was only six weeks. So we got a lot of feedback. It turns out,
00:06:37
Speaker
Something I didn't realize is a lot of people sign up for these courses just to get access to the materials, because they find that valuable. So they want, like you're saying, that option to download everything. The platform that we're using doesn't really have the facility for that. I mean, we have the videos posted. And you can sort of manually download them one by one. But we didn't provide people with one big zip file with all the materials in one big chunk. So that actually
00:07:07
Speaker
I don't know. This to me leads to a really interesting question because we even tried an experiment during the course. We had one or two people say, hey, I really like the video lectures. Could you provide them as a podcast? Because I actually want to listen to them while I'm commuting. And then when I get back to my computer at night, I can do my work at night. Because everybody pretty much in the class is working with this question. So for a week, we did this experiment. And the night center people were really patient with me. I was like, hey, we should try it.
00:07:38
Speaker
And everybody said, this is a course about visualization. It's crazy to do something that's just audio, but here we are on a podcast. Welcome, welcome to the podcast. So we did that. We took the videos and just cut the audio out and released them as MP3 files just for one week.
00:08:01
Speaker
for most people not, so I don't think we would do it again. It's hard to sort of put the material in practice, like on your computer. It's like if you're taking a programming course, you sort of want to be working as a professor, sort of saying, and now this is how you lay out this structure, you lay out this code or whatever, sort of want to be doing it, as opposed to like listening to it on your commute doesn't seem to be
00:08:29
Speaker
Putting the two together. I don't know. Yeah, I mean I think for the people who are requesting this it helps them Reinforce those concepts. Yeah. Yeah, I mean for me Yeah, it's tricky. Yeah, it's tricky. No, it's true So but I think this I mean to me this got this interesting question where we had so many requests for you know Hey, can I just download the materials and even I'm looking at the
00:08:53
Speaker
student evaluations now. By the way, anybody who is in the class, I know people fill out the evaluations, because we're really looking at everybody's feedback and trying to improve the next off. So was the response rate for this course similar to the response rate that you get in your USF classes?
00:09:16
Speaker
response, like in terms of evaluations. Yeah. The share people who responded. No, it was an explorer. I mean, we have, so far I've had about 10% of people respond. So I always find it interesting when I'm teaching and I say, I'm going to give you 15 minutes to fill out the evaluation. And I still don't get a hundred percent, but that's just the way it is. I guess people, not enough time, John. I know.
00:09:44
Speaker
We recently, at USF, we actually switched. We used to have the bubble charts, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just this semester, we switched to an all online format. So this semester, I have 100%. Yeah. That's not an approval rating. That's a response. That's just a response. Yeah, that's just a response. But just incidentally, it was 100%. Everybody was satisfied.
00:10:05
Speaker
with your class. Oh, for this class? For your class. I'm sure 100% says all fives, fives all the way down. Right. Oh, so I don't know, just keep dragging this point on, but I had this discussion with the Knight Center people and
00:10:26
Speaker
I liked this idea of packaging up all the materials into a big zip file, but their approach is really that the people who are looking at the course that way are thinking about it like it's a book, you know, or it's a text or something, and they want to be able to reference, you know, they've made a purchase. But the night center, sort of the philosophy they're approaching this with is that this is a
00:10:47
Speaker
Like a college class, this is a temporary learning community that exists for a certain period of time and then it's over. Just like a real class. And you can't sort of package up a whole college class into a zip file, but you participate in the class. And so it's really structured to encourage participation.
00:11:05
Speaker
Of course, probably I think the majority of people don't participate, so we had 34% as of
Course Outcomes and Reflections
00:11:12
Speaker
the other day. 34% actually completed all the requirements for the certificate, which means you took the quizzes, you did the exercises and all that stuff.
00:11:20
Speaker
Compared to their big MOOCs, they usually have a completion rate of like six to eight percent. Oh, okay. So we had a much higher completion rate, which is good. But, you know, still there are people who, you know, everybody's busy, so they sign up, right? Maybe it's too demanding, it's more technical than they can handle, or... Yeah, maybe $95 is not so much where they say
00:11:48
Speaker
It's okay if I throw away $95. If it was $1,000, you'd have higher participation. Right, and something I wanted, I think we got this in the student evaluations. I was really curious how many people's employers paid for this and how they paid for it themselves. These are all
00:12:11
Speaker
Let's switch gears for a minute to talk about your USF classes. Can you talk a little bit about the sorts of things that you're teaching at USF? The one thing I'm really interested in talking about is this balance between
00:12:26
Speaker
When it comes to data visualization specifically, the balance between the theory and the practical. And when it comes to the practical, what sort of tools people are teaching and using and how different tools are taught, those sorts of questions. So maybe you could just start talking about the sort of classes that you're teaching.
00:12:46
Speaker
Sure, so I teach some of our foundation design courses and that's sort of like introduction to static print-based design and also screen-based design like lab. And for upper division electives, I usually teach our interaction design and information visualization courses. So I'll be teaching those both next semester in the fall.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, this tools question is always a nightmare. So it's a nightmare. It's not a nightmare. It's why we love this field. But in design in general,
00:13:28
Speaker
not just for Infoviz, but for all of our design classes, we're constantly having to revise our curriculum because the tools are changing, the technology changes. So when you're talking about interaction design, screen-based design, it's like every year we get new crazy devices with touch interface, physical gesture interface, whatever. And so we want to be current and we want to
00:13:48
Speaker
give students opportunities and projects for experimenting with all these things. So that's all new. So we're sort of in this mindset of being used to rethinking things and definitely not setting up curriculum to be tied to a specific tool as much as possible. Information visualization specifically
00:14:12
Speaker
it's it's really it's really tricky i mean a semester of kind of on one hand feels like a lot of time but it's not that much time and uh i've gone back and forth so i think two years ago i taught the course with
00:14:27
Speaker
D3, I should say, so I work with design students. It's all undergraduate design students. So some of them, by the time they get to my class, they will all have at least basic HTML, CSS knowledge, but they may not necessarily have had any programming experience with a full-on programming language. So for me, that's my audience. And D3 was
00:14:56
Speaker
I had an amazing class that semester and they were real troopers and they stuck it out, but it was really, it was a lot, you know, it was really rough because we had really high expectations for the visual presentation and, you know, all the sort of proper design aspects. And there's just this huge steep learning curve. You know what I mean? You can work with T3 for months until you start to get really comfortable using it to implement your ideas.
00:15:22
Speaker
So that was a challenge. Then I went back to, I think probably what I'll do this next semester is use processing, which is what I was doing before. So actually we did a mix of Tableau and processing. So Tableau has been awesome in the classroom. I only started doing that this year. It's still a little bit like
00:15:45
Speaker
Funky, you know, there's like a little bit of a learning curve until once you understand the yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so you're gonna do Tableau and processing and so if you have in mind how to Is there a transition from one tool to the next or do you sort of say we're gonna use both of these tools over the course of the semester and then sort of a secondary question is Do you start with the tools at the beginning of the semester or? and then sort of
00:16:13
Speaker
come back into sort of a theory or do you sort of start with the design theory and then work your way into the tools? Yeah, so hopefully it's all integrated. Yeah. So that's another thing that we did. This is super interesting, but historically, like our design program, the courses where I think a lot of programs around the country used to do this were much more separated out. So you'd have like a tools course. Yeah, yeah.
00:16:40
Speaker
And then you'd have a separate course that's theory or conceptual and history course. So you can see like what are semiotics? How do we communicate with images? What do these things represent? What do colors mean? How does the brain interpret these images? And so before I came to USF, those used to be totally separate courses. And you can imagine it was not successful.
00:17:05
Speaker
Now, every class, we integrate concept, theory, history, and tools. So the challenge for us is always, you know, you could spend the rest of your life just on the tools part and ignore the rest of it. So we're always trying to figure out, like, what is the appropriate balance, you know?
00:17:24
Speaker
But that's part of being a designer. You have to be able to learn because the tools are constantly changing. You have to be able to learn them quickly enough and get comfortable with them. You can't be doing subpar work the rest of your life just because you haven't had time to learn the tools. That's part of the job. The audience is also key that you're teaching design students.
00:17:47
Speaker
Sure. So at USF, we have my information visualization course, which is in sign. We have another course by the same name and computer science. So that's a different audience. You can jump into a lot, you know, they can kind of come in with some assumptions about
00:18:05
Speaker
Comfort level with code and different knowledge right and we also have a master's in analytics program that has a course by the same name and that's graduate level students With a totally different background. So yeah, the audience is key. I think yeah, absolutely When I teach when I teach public policy students for business students, I mean those students are
00:18:27
Speaker
98% of them don't have HTML or CSS background, nor have they really done a lot of coding in anything. I mean, the policy students will know some Stata, which is a statistical language, not a visualization language. I mean, I think that's fine because you've written about using Excel and other tools. Yeah, right. It's always the defaults and focusing on the visual principles.
00:18:52
Speaker
So you don't have to know how to code. I think code just gives you, in some cases, more power and more flexibility around the visuals. Right. I mean, I think with any tool, Excel is actually a good example. You can do a lot more if you know how to code in VBA. But that's because the code gives you flexibility that the packages don't. But I know other people who will teach
00:19:19
Speaker
policy students or undergraduates, it'll sort of be data visualization, a broad class, and they'll teach as many tools as they can fit in. So it'll be a little Tableau, some Google charts, some Excel, maybe some Python, maybe some R. And I sort of feel like, I had tried that a few years ago, and I sort of felt like a two-hour lecture on R doesn't really give much. Because you only really learn a tool when you sit down and really work with it.
00:19:46
Speaker
for a period of time, and being thrown a bunch of tools, I'm not really sure people get a lot. You know, that's sort of my sort of general students of policy students. Maybe it's different in, well, I don't think it's different for design students. I would suspect giving them, throwing a bunch of tools at them, as opposed to giving them sort of the skills where they can say, oh, I know how to do this in D3, and I know the CSS, I know the HTML. Now I could do processing, or I could do P5, because I sort of have
00:20:11
Speaker
this background, this general skill set that they can apply to the tools.
00:20:19
Speaker
Actually, I'm remembering what I did last year. This is my backlash, because I did the D3 experiment, and it was really challenging. And then I think last year, when I taught the course, for the final projects, I said, you can use whatever tool you want. And we had looked at Tableau and looked at processing briefly, but I sort of decided we'd just eaten up so much time before on the tech side. And then that particular class height or range
00:20:48
Speaker
But it's students with a range of backgrounds, so they had some... Anyway, so some were like super comfortable with Illustrator, so we talked about like, okay, there are actually these, you know, kind of built-in ways you can chart data in Illustrator, or you
Design Education Philosophy
00:21:02
Speaker
can start in Excel, you can modify the style in Illustrator, or I had a couple students who were like, wanted to go call out with D3, and then some of them, you know, have used processing.
00:21:15
Speaker
I'm not sure that's the best solution either, but that was when one experiment was to leave the tool choice open, which means you'd have less class time and things that are relevant to most people, but it also means some of the students are more on their own and it's harder to counsel everybody when they're all using different things.
00:21:36
Speaker
Well, I guess you have the advantage of being able to do this every, at least once a year, if not twice a year. Like ongoing experiments, which are pretty good.
00:21:46
Speaker
I'm sure there are people out there who have probably already figured it out. I feel like I haven't figured it out yet. If folks are listening and they do have a great strategy, I would be interested to hear what the approaches are for other people in different fields. I think that's the other key. Like you mentioned, the audience is really important. It would be interesting to see how people are teaching these sorts of skills in different fields.
00:22:13
Speaker
Like you said, it's going to vary based on backgrounds.
Future Plans and Conclusion
00:22:17
Speaker
Scott, it's been great. Really interesting, ongoing challenges. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Sure. Can I give a quick plug? Please, go for it. Plug away. Oh, so we just the other day announced, well, we made the official decision, this first Spock that we offered through the Night Center,
00:22:37
Speaker
Because we couldn't get everybody. What's that? I get a free t-shirt for the Spock part. You get a free, yes. And this is your, you know, well, I was going to say, this would count toward your 10-year application. That's a contribution to the field. You point the term Spock. Right, right, right. Anyway, so we're re-offering, so Alberto and I, through the Knight Center, are re-offering the same course with the same materials. So that'll be August 17th to September 27th.
00:23:04
Speaker
so people can stay tuned. We're gonna open registration sometime in June, so you'll be able to register before you go on summer vacation and then you come back from vacation. And unless you're in the southern hemisphere, because we have people from all over the world, so winter vacation, anyway. And then we've announced a new course that's gonna follow on that that will just be D3, sort of intermediate level D3. I'm gonna be teaching that one. That'll be at the end of October.
00:23:33
Speaker
And it will finish in the middle of November. So people can stay tuned for that. And my last plug is that I just started work on the second edition of the D3 book. So that will not come out for quite a while, but if your copy of the first edition is totally worn through, then
00:23:52
Speaker
Get ready. And that'll be through O'Reilly? That'll be through O'Reilly again? Yeah, it'll be through O'Reilly again. And lots more chapters, lots more on mapping and all kinds of tips and tricks and things that have sort of come out of the software in the last two years. Yeah, the evolution has been pretty interesting.
00:24:10
Speaker
That's great. Well, all good plugs. I will post the links on my website, and people should feel free, obviously, to register and take advantage of these great resources. Well, thanks again. This has been great. And thanks, everyone, for listening. If you have comments or questions or suggestions, please hit me up on Twitter or visit the website at policyvis.com. And I am John Twabish, and this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thank you for listening.