The value in teaching is not the content
it’s the teacher

Naarm (Melbourne)

Nicholas Tierney

Statistical Consultant
nipaluna, lutruwita (Hobart, Tasmania)

2026-07-10

course materials default: online & free

Course materials should be online and free^*

• People aren’t paying for your content
• They are paying for your time
• Time >>> content
• Your course should demonstrate:
  • The ideas are important and worthwhile to learn
  • It is possible to learn it
• The online materials continue to support that learning
• “Free” barring IP/copyright/contract rules

Audience poll

• Who teaches: 0.5…1…2-3 day(s), semester courses?
• Whose course material is online for free?

Time >>> content

• Time, not content, is the bottleneck for learning
• The learner carves out time: protects it from distraction
• The learner gets your time as the teacher
• They get to ask an expert, clarify misunderstandings
  • powers of observational learning
  • “How did you do that?”
  • “Why this way over XXX?”

Course ideas are important and worthwhile

I think the two most important messages that people can get from a short course are:

1. the material is important and worthwhile to learn (even if it’s challenging), and
2. it’s possible to learn it!

– Hadley Wickham - from a github gist in 2015

Online materials continue to support learning

• No searching through emails to find PDFs of slides
• Course materials are a living document, up-to-date
• Course materials easily downloaded
• Your material adds to knowledge base, provides help in the future
• Deepens your own understanding of the topic: built-in professional development

How is “free” sustainable?

• Your course shows expertise
• This is “Free advertising”
• Gets people in front of you
• These could be future clients
• Finding clients is harder than making content
• Works even if courses are primary income
• Helps those who could not otherwise afford

What materials are “free”?

• Slides
• Written notes
• Text books (that you have written)
• Quiz questions/answers

What is not free?

• I am not saying: “Deliver your courses for free”
• I am saying: People pay for their time in your course
• I am saying: give people an option
• If they want to put in the extra work, use your materials as a resource, to learn the thing, great
• If they want to see you “in person” (or on screen?), then they can pay for that
• But putting the course material up online kind of only really serves to help you

• If students/users are given a packet of slides or teaching materials, then if they return to them in the following weeks/months/years, then are they really going to be kept up to date?
• How do you find your teaching materials again? Is it in an email? What if you don’t have access to that email address again?
• Make your teaching material accessible - put it on github, on your website, on zenodo. Put it online.
• Congratulations, your teaching resource has now transformed into

What should people pay for

• Video recording of the course. Captures their experience.
  • Video privacy: safe space for private questions/sharing
• Online exercises
• Grading or assessment
• Your time
• Hard copy of book

This is essentially an extension of ideas that I have seen from peers in my community. There is a growing movement to make your textbooks free and available online.

Free learning is not new

• Statistical Rethinking on Youtube
• khan academy
• edX
• coursera
• Harvard’s CS50
• MIT’s linear algebra course

Examples in R community

• Write a book with Chapman & Hall, by Yihui Xie.
• Advanced R, Mastering Shiny, , by Hadley Wickham.
• Forecasting Principles and Practice, by Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos.
• git for scientists, by Miles McBain.
• happygitwithr by Jenny Bryan, STAT 545 TAs, Jim Hester.
• Stat545 by Jenny Bryan & The STAT 545 TAs

My course: qmd4sci

• Built upon “Rmarkdown for scientists”
• 10 (unprompted) outsider contributions
• github repo: njtierney/qmd4sci
• exercises: njtierney/qmd4sci-exercises
• website: qmd4sci.njtierney.com
• rmd4sci: 127 stars on github
• qmd4sci: 67 stars on github
  • inherent danger/flaw of tracking stars
• Give URL once - don’t need to share/update attachments

How to: put a course book online

From my post, “How to put a course book online”

• Make a quarto book
• Add an appropriate license CC BY-NC-4.0
  • Can share/adapt, must attribute
  • Cannot use materials commercially
• Put it on github
• Have it render when you make changes
• Deliver the course in-person, or online

On “free advertising”

• Register your interest at training.njtierney.com
  • R best practices
  • Quarto for Scientists
  • Making better graphs
  • Introduction to functions and debugging
  • Introduction to git and github
  • Introduction to targets and geotargets
  • Introduction to R packages

Take homes

• Course materials should be online and free
  • People aren’t paying for your content
  • They are paying for your time
  • Time >>> content
  • Your course should demonstrate:
    • The ideas are important and worthwhile to learn
    • It is possible to learn it
  • The online materials continue to support that learning

Thanks

• Travel Bursary, from Organising committee of “Essential skills for statistics leadership in consultancy and research”
• Maëlle Salmon
• Miles McBain
• David Borg

Resources

• quarto
• slidecraft

Colophon

• Slides made using quarto
• Colours taken + modified from lorikeet theme from ochRe njtierney/njt-talks
• Accessibility - contrast checker

Learning more

• Data Science training training.njtierney.com

• github repo njtierney/talk-teacher-over-content

• website njtierney.com

• github @njtierney

• email nicholas.tierney@gmail.com

End.

Extras

❤️ Hiking! njt.micro.blog

Cutting room floor

• One of the most useful things in a workshop is seeing the process - it convinces you that the thing is worth learning.
• these workshops help improve your mental model - which allows you to improve how you learn a thing, as you have more nodes.
• how much time are you affording to sit down and solve things - your coding resilience.
• Time: watch and learn
  • Contents are no substitute for watching someone work
• We need to put our knowledge back out into the community
• Not a LinkedIn™ post:
  • “The 10 types of clustering that all data scientists need to know. Let’s dive in:”
• Not a “free webinar”
• Your teaching materials

I hope to leave attendees with the conviction that creating useful, openly available learning content is not a distraction from building a consulting practice, but is a highly effective way to build, and sustain one.

Abstract

To build a sustainable consulting practice, I think you need a genuine value-add to the wider community. I am not convinced writing a post such as “10 things you need to do now to improve your data visualisations” cuts it. Teaching does. And more, I think you should share your course materials for free.

In this talk I will argue teaching and openly sharing your materials is a sustainable business model. The value learners pay for when they attend a course is not the slides or the code, those should be freely available online. The value they get, which they are paying for, is time with the instructor, and the commitment they make to carving out space to learn something new.

Developing free and open content compounds over time. It creates a living document you can refer to and update. It demonstrates your expertise not by telling people you know things, but by showing them. It surfaces your work to learners who would never have found you otherwise, and those learners become the pipeline for future consulting and collaboration. It also deepens your own understanding of the topic. So, you get professional development built in.

I will discuss a case study in R training: Quarto for Scientists to illustrate how this works in practice. I hope to leave attendees with the conviction that creating useful, openly available learning content is not a distraction from building a consulting practice, but is a highly effective way to build, and sustain one.