Creating a Compelling and Sustainable Tutorial

Perhaps you’ve got a great new research project that you’d like to share with the world. Maybe you built a new open-source simulator or hardware design that you want to encourage others to adopt. A natural next step is to consider creating a tutorial to advertise the work and generate a user base. That sounds like a lot of work! And would you really give it more than once?

To answer to all of the above questions and beyond, on March 25, 2023, a team of architecture professors and graduate students hosted a meta tutorial at ASPLOS'23 Conference. The theme was on creating a compelling and sustainable tutorials on open source hardware projects and was organized with Jonathan Balkind (UC Santa Barbara, Assistant Professor), Sagar Karandikar (UC Berkeley, PhD Student), Elba Garza (University of Washington, Assistant Professor), Zach Sisco (UC Santa Barbara, PhD Student) and Nazerke Turtayeva (UC Santa Barbara, PhD Student). The tutorial was intended to help lower the barrier to entry of creating an academic tutorial in architecture and related fields. Attendees expected to develop their goals, learn about best practices, and start to think about the nuts and bolts of running a tutorial. We focused on enabling tutorials which are repeatable to amortise the startup effort and attract interest over longer timescales.

Particularly, these were the topics included:

- Defining tutorial goals

- Identifying and targeting an audience

- The pedagogy of choosing tutorial-friendly content

- Hands-on demos - software and hardware

- Nuts and bolts: scheduling

- Gathering and incorporating attendee feedback

- Sustainability and reproducibility

For more information, please refer to the following presentation slides and transcript of the tutorial contents.