FlyBy is a peer learning program founded and run by ITP students since 2004.
FlyBy sessions are instructional presentations by ITP students. This ongoing series leverages the strength and diversity of the ITP student body, offering every student the chance to share their own area of expertise with the rest of the community. FlyBy also serves as a forum for students to post topics that they would like to learn more about. Anyone can request or offer a FlyBy on a particular topic.
FlyBy tends to happen every Thursday at 9pm on the ITP Floor.
History
ITP students Christina Goodness and Meghan Trainor conceived of the FlyBy (originally called DriveBy) seminars as a way to create peer-to-peer teaching at ITP during the summer of 2004.
They utilized an online signup board (Wiki – online community website where anyone can post comments, links or other text) to organize the classes. On the Wiki, students could sign up for classes they wanted to teach and classes they wanted to take, and since everyone is a peer, students had to volunteer to teach a class if they signed up to learn from someone else. The idea behind the seminars is that every ITP student has something they are brilliant at, as well as something they haven’t tried yet.
In the end the student organizers selected the a good mix of classes based on most interest. The student teachers then could decide to create class Wiki pages where resources could be listed, students could go to post questions or they could request specific topics they wanted to be covered.
There were two main goals with this project. Because ITP has such a diverse student body — with computer programmers, musicians, artists, engineers, etc. — there is a huge diversity in the technical skills of students in a given area. Christina and Meghan tried to create a casual atmosphere where folks could catch up in an area they hadn’t quite mastered yet. The second goal had to do with harnessing the knowledge of the student body itself, which is arguably quite tremendous. Using the Wiki technology was a great way to identify skills people wanted to share, reveal new skills people wanted to learn and let the shared list evolve organically over a period of time.
The FlyBy tradition continues at ITP, though the original wiki has been replaced by newer tools to allow for better documentation of past sessions. Where possible, documentation includes presentation slides, audio, and video.