Fast.ai 1v2 MOOC planning

Part 1 (2018)
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Do we know when this will be released?

I’m planning to start a meetup to go through it. Is there any support/advice for how to create a local group to go through the course together?

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checkout nurture.ai. They are organising study chapters in different cities. If your city is not there, you can sign up as an ambassador.
https://nurture.ai/ai-saturdays

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Right Now, they’re gonna start with the Part1v1 but then step it up when the MOOC of v2 goes live.

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I’m guessing early Jan.

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@wbrucek I started learning fastai together with few friends (@Dee, @johnnyv and @HilaryGoh) in my living room. Within a year, the Perth Machine Learning Group has over 280 members from diverse backgrounds. Now, we even have corporate sponsors (a local government agency, co-working spaces and AWS) who provide generous support to grow local talents in ML/DL.

Start with few friends with interest in common, then later use Google group/meetup to organise and advertise. We have found focusing on practical coding preferable to general discussion.

Key takeaway:

  • Start with the resource you have
  • Don’t overstretch yourself (ie don’t do too much at once)
  • Make what you do measurable (ie be results-driven)
  • Do it with your friends and have fun!
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Hi @Moody, That sounds pretty awesome! Last time we had a meetup around fast.ai 1v1, lots of people came for the presentations, but few people were actually working through the notebooks / coding themselves. How do you structure your meetups so this happens?

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How can I apply for meetings?

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It is a very challenging question. There are few factors (which stand out to me) contributing to it:

  1. the programing competency of participants
  2. the culture of the meetup
  3. the barrier of entry

For 1, you need to explain the “why” before the participants are interested in the “how”. Coding is the how. We fully embrace the idea of teaching domain experts who won’t necessarily have coding backgrounds. So, you need to relate to them why coding is important. For example, lesson 1 Dogs and Cats notebook, it is an image classification problem. How can this help the participants to solve their real-world problems? Best to encourage two-way communication rather than a one-way presentation.

For 2, we are upfront this is a coding group. We are welcome to those (including me at the time) who have no coding background. We also encourage our members to share their codes with us to showcase their success or ask the group for help if they got stuck.

For 3, This seems to be the biggest show stopper: Setting up an AWS can be intimidating, we helped participants set up their machines or let them share their learning experience every now and then. We also invited AWS representative to demo in our meetup. Last week, I used Crestle to demo lesson 1 notebook. It was well received. :blush: This is still a challenge for us. We are currently investigating SageMaker and a number of other providers offerings as well as considering setting up our own hardware to enable this.

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Where are these happening? Is there any slack channel? Is it happening to any cities?

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I’ve compiled the lesson videos into a playlist here (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNdixr1LyE_7EDYqnBjKq-8yPvHaj83af). It’s unlisted as the official one is still not released. Mainly it’s meant for personal use, but feel free to use it if needed.

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