Align Objectives with content in introduction

[Talishask]

I'm a member of The Carpentries staff and I'm submitting this issue on behalf of another member of the community. In most cases, I won't be able to follow up or provide more details other than what I'm providing below.

As part of the check-out procedure, I have a suggestion for an improvement. In the lesson "OpenRefine for Social Science Data" > episode "Introduction" (https://datacarpentry.org/openrefine-socialsci/01-introduction/index.html), two of the Objective may be changed as they are not covered in the episode:

• Differentiate data cleaning from data organization.

• Experiment with OpenRefine's user interface.

Instead features of the application are described, e.g.:

• Understanding that OpenRefine's is located locally on a computer and not in the cloud.

[brownsarahm]

Thanks @Talishask this person raised some good concerns.

I think that differentiating data should be kept as a learning objective and the content should be changed to fulfill that objective instead. That is essential knowledge for setting expectations over the rest of the lesson.

The "experiment" learning objective i agree should be removed, it's more or less redundant to the "describe features" learning objective

Adding "OpenRefine runs locally on a computer and not in the cloud" is a good keypoint to add

[bencomp]

I think the first point is (better) covered in #56.

I agree that "Experiment with OpenRefine's user interface" is not a good learning objective, and it's not covered by the episode's contents. I tend to explain the user interface in episode 2, when we load the data.

Perhaps we can replace the "Experiment" objective with "Understand that OpenRefine runs on your own computer."? That would also tie in with #63, although #79 suggests to add that it's possible to run OR on a server as well.

[bencomp]

I've started work on changing the first episode and think loading data (including exploring the UI) should go to the introduction. See #102 for some of my thoughts. That means the learning objectives may still include something about the UI, although it still isn't a good one.

It's really time to make changes in this episode.

[bencomp]

We should explain in the introduction that we're going to clean a dataset and note that we are not going to clean the whole dataset.

[boon19]

I'm doing my instructor training check-out and would like to offer some suggestions for consideration.

1. To help learners absorb new ideas, we try to help them relate new information to their prior knowledge. So, it might be useful to give a short comparison between OpenRefine and Excel (which many users are familiar with) and point out some of the stuff that both Excel and OpenRefine can do (eg. split columns, change spellings) and things that OpenRefine is clearly superior (eg. identifying words that are somewhat similar)
2. In the Overview, the header is 'Questions' but there is only 1 question. Maybe this is a good place to add another - "What is the difference between Excel and OpenRefine?"
3. As the carpentry workshops draw audience from different countries, it is useful to share that "OpenRefine is available in more than 15 languages" so that users know that they can choose their native language.
4. We may like to share the url to the official OpenRefine user manual "designed to comprehensively walk through every aspect of setting up and using OpenRefine, including every interface function and feature." See https://docs.openrefine.org/

[bencomp]

Thanks for your contribution, @boon19! I agree with points 1 and 2, which are covered by #103. It's good to mention the similarities too.

Regarding the languages: it could be very helpful for users. I do wonder if we should stress it for workshops, because learners with different languages in the OpenRefine interface could get confused if the instructor has a different interface language.

A link to the manual is included in the "Other resources" episode, so I wouldn't want to also include it in the Introduction. I suggested in #102 to remove the "Getting help" from the Introduction altogether. (Maybe the resources should be removed as episode and added as an extra page. But that's a different discussion.)