I’m also new to teaching at DMS and it has been an interesting challenge to try and teach Deep Learning to an audience that doesn’t have a background in math, statistics, or computer science. Similarly, most of your audience won’t have experience in music theory, working with audio data, working with recording devices, sound design, or anything like that. They’ll be blank slates and I think the challenge of trying to build knowledge on these blank slates makes lecturing at DMS even more engaging than lecturing to students with more background knowledge. You are forced to be extra creative because you can’t assume prior knowledge of this topic or that topic. IMO teaching here is like a game that is more fun because of the extra constraints imposed on the player.
My advice is to be extra wary of your own expertise and practice teaching the lesson out-loud a few times. When you know a lot about a topic, the information is sort-of compressed in your mind and it is very easy to trick yourself into thinking that you’ll only need 30 minutes to explain something when, in reality, you need 2 hours. This introduces a sort-of engineering challenge where you need to determine the theoretical minimum of education you need to progress from topic-to-topic. This will be a level of efficiency that not even universities or professional programs are forced to care about and you may find that your own knowledge of your field will expand tremendously as you attempt to decide which details are vital and which are not.
I would argue that Dallas Makerspace is actually in need of this type of education. There is a very large audiophile community within Dallas (really most major cities) that we have yet to directly appeal to. I think expertise has been the primary missing puzzle piece since I know that past Digital Media chairs/volunteers have spoken with me about wanting to do something like this. I think this is a smart investment in digital media and the board tends to be an enthusiastic supporter of diversifying our education. Given the level of interest expressed in this thread, I think they’d be willing to purchases licenses for your choice of software (so long as it is affordable).
Personally, I am also interested in learning about this topic.
