This is the thread inspired by Flock hallway conversations.
I know there are some folks in the Fedora community who do teach something to students in a university or college or some similar environment.
Can you tell us a little bit about the experience?
What do you teach? How does it work for you? Can you share the curriculum? Describe the experience? What would be your tips to people trying to follow the same path?
I am at University College London at the department of neuroscience, physiology, and pharmacology, where in my role as a post-doc researcher, i assist in teaching various modules. These are primarily related to computational modelling of neuronal systems (which is my primary research area). From last year, we’ve also included a computing workshop where we teach students the command line, python, and git—as tools that they should be using in their analyses. I am also a trained Software Carpentries instructor—where I teach similar topics, but from the carpentries’ cirriculum. Links:
Teaching is great, but perhaps that’s because I do small bits. I know plenty of colleagues who are overwhelmed—because they are expected to do their research and teaching all at once—it’s a common problem in academia here (and everywhere from what I hear).
I’ve done classrooms for the Fedora community in the past, and I’m hoping to restart them again (using carpentries lessons where they already exist). Ticket here for that, if you’d like to weigh in and get involved:
I teach 3D printing at the Czech Technical University in Prague. However, this is my final term as I no longer have the capacity.
Anyway, our materials are at GitHub - 3DprintFIT/BI-3DT: Materials for the 3D printing course at FIT CTU · GitHub
I am overwhelmed with post-Flock email, etc., so I don’t think I can sit down and type out the answers to all your other questions. Happy to talk about it some other day 
Another post-doc here, from the other side of the UK.
It’s all pretty varied, and depends a lot on how interested and engaged the students are as well. I’m based in an engineering department and it sounds like I’m in a similar position to @ankursinha - teaching is a small part of the job on top of research.
The last few years I’ve taught a small Python class - based in part on the Software Carpentry material. That’s a couple of lecture style classes and then supervised workshop time where the students work through material at their own pace and can easily ask questions.
I also help with some individual projects, and that’s sometimes a fun challenge as it’s helping the students find a way (and sometimes, any way) to handle the data they’ve collected.
Get some practice, and don’t pretend to know all the answers.
I started helping with lab classes as a postgraduate student (which is pretty normal here), so providing that support to classes as a group was a good way to get used to the environment (and pick up some extra funds!). The leap from that to teaching small classes wasn’t that bad, particularly if you’re already happy giving presentations.
I’d also say that teaching small classes in a university and teaching at a community group, hackspace etc aren’t that different - although you might end up with a wider range of pre-existing knowledge depending on the topic.
I retired in 2018 and spent much of my career using Unix and Linux, which often meant teaching colleagues how to use Unix, Linux, or macOS command-line tools. Twice I was involved in more formal teaching.
In the 1980’s university grads in my area were missing out on job opportunities due to lack of Unix experience. The local Uniform group got government support to set up a Unix teaching lab using 3 small systems loaned by vendors. We had evening classes focusing on the core concepts of Unix using the Bell Labs papers. Students found the experience helpful, but government funding was withdrawn after a couple years.
Decades later, this experience proved useful when our lab participated in a program for PhD level scientists from developing nations. The program was intended to provide introductions to a variety of marine research areas through a series of 2-week sessions. Participants were provided with Window laptops, but our topic relied on software originally built to POSIX standards on SGI IRIX64 and ported to Linux and macOS. Over several years, only a couple participants had previous Linux experience. In a 2-week workshop program, I ran afternoon “practicals” in which participants were expected to use the software for a small project and present their results at the end of the 2 weeks. I devoted the first two afternoons to Linux basics using the LinuxCommand.org book. My goal was to provide a basic understanding of the role of the shell and filesystem structure, together with the ability to use man pages and the Linux Command book to solve problems. Only a few of the students went on to use our software after returning to their home labs; many more found the Linux exposure useful. The other workshop organizers also found the linux skills from our workshop useful to their topics (as a result, our workshop was moved to an early slot on the year-long schedule).
Shooting (clays with shotguns, target shooting with air pistol and rifle), moto-X and off-road riding with a little bit of Trials riding.
I used to be a Computer Science professor, specializing in operating systems and distributed systems. I taught at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas) for 6 years, followed by 2 years at Utah State University (Logan, Utah). After that, I was seduced by the dark side and have been working in private industry ever since. I miss the teaching. I enjoyed interacting with the students and having access to a university library. I made the transition out of academia 19 years ago, so pretty much all of my curricula are out of date. 
Dang, that means there are people at university now who weren’t even born when I left…
Maths lecturer here. Currently Leibniz University Hannover, before various places in Germany and the U.S.A. Teaching maths at various levels to various audiences. These days we have quite a “spectrum” of students (in terms of prerequisites) within the same course, which poses some challenges.
I’m also a physicist and often draw my inspiration from there when I do or teach maths.
About paths to follow I’d say: The best path is your own, no matter where it takes you, if you’ve chosen it for the right reasons.
OK, that wasn’t very specific. For teaching I’d say: Be interested in what you teach and to whom you teach. You have to be intrigued by the subject (or remember what intrigued you) in order to raise your students’ interest; but, besides motivation, teaching is a lot about communication, which is why you have to know their “language”, their way of thinking and reasoning, and be in a permanent feedback loop about where everyone is.
This Software Carpentry project sounds really interesting. I haven’t heard about it before.
When I was a PhD student, I learned Emacs to write LaTex, Git to store and version my thesis drafts, Python to draw my graphs with GNUPlot, and Inkscape to draw some diagrams. And all of that was done in my free time, while procrastinating and hanging out with some Linux folks.
And at that time I was thinking that all of these could be really useful for my colleagues who were pure mathematicians, meaning the only way they knew how to interact with texts is to print them on paper and use red pen to make edits.
It is nice to see that there is project trying to address this gap in the academia.
Going to check out this book now Teaching Tech Together
I can totally see how the generic Linux experience was more impactful than the specialized software you were supposed to teach. And I’d say this is a sign of a well designed course.
A lot of the credit goes to the book by William Shotts. Some practices that helped minimize time loss to user typos entering commands and network congestion included a “buddy” system with one student entering commands while another checked for typos so only 1/2 of the systems were active at a time.