How to Use Weights & Biases in the Classroom
Learn W&B makes teaching machine learning easier and how you can use it in the coming school year—for free
Created on July 6|Last edited on July 19
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Introduction
Few disciplines change as frequently or as often as machine learning has in the past decade. And there’s no reason to think that’s changing any time soon.
This presents a real challenge for teachers and researchers hoping to prepare their students for their post-college lives. The good news is that, as machine learning continues to grow and becomes more broadly integrated in businesses of every stripe, there are certainly jobs available for grads. It’s simply a matter of setting those grads up for success.
Weights & Biases is the perfect tool to do so. In this report, we’ll walk you through a few ways it can help you set your students up to both learn more effectively and be better prepared for their first job out of school.
Experiment Tracking is Table Stakes for ML Teams
There are certain skills every machine learning engineer needs to be successful in their role. One ready example is having a solid foundation in Python, but practitioners need an understanding of popular repos, frameworks, and techniques to excel. Being proficient in an experiment tracking solution like Weights & Biases is part of that package.
Gone are the days of shared spreadsheets and degraded screenshots. Basically every company serious about machine learning employs some kind of experiment tracking software and your students will be no exception. Introducing them to best practices in the industry gives them a leg up, whether they’re heading into their first interview or onboarding during their first week.
Essentially: Companies like OpenAI and Stability use W&B to better understand model training and collaborate efficiently. Understanding how to use any experiment tracking solution is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for ML engineers at every level.
Weights & Biases is Free for Academics
Since the inception of W&B, we’ve been committed to giving our tool to researchers and academics for free. This hasn’t changed and it won’t change. No matter how you choose to use Weights & Biases in your classroom, know we will not charge you or your students. We spend every day building the best tools for machine learning practitioners and take a large measure of pride that we’re widely used by top researchers and cited in hundreds of academic papers.
Real-Time Metrics Unlock Real-Time Insights
Remember back to the first model you trained. How did you know it was actually working? How did you know how it was behaving? How did you debug it? Were you sure you were using your compute resources efficiently? How did you actually judge your success?
With W&B, once your students start training models, they’ll get instant access to the metrics they need to answer these questions, streamed directly into their account. This makes both teaching these concepts a whole lot easier but students also get immediate insight into what their code actually produced. What’s more? At the end of the term, they’ll have an easy-to-digest, single system of record for all their work they produced.
Here's a simple example from an autonomous vehicle model comparison.
Baseline Experiments
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Examples of How to use W&B in Your Classroom
We’ve seen Weights & Biases used for everything from months-long group projects to homework assignments to an aid for in-depth lectures. In fact, we see new uses every year. The following list is meant to give you some of our most popular in-class use cases as a jumping-off point. Here are a few ways W&B can help in the classroom:
W&B Reports as Homework
One part of Weights & Biases that works especially well in an academic setting is our Reports feature. In fact, you’re reading one right now.
You can think of Reports as Notion docs attached to a particular project. Your students can embed relevant panels and metrics in a document to explain their thinking along the way. The panels are dynamic and alive: instead of static screenshots, you can actually interact with them, mousing over a parallel coordinates plot to see how individual parameters affect performance, for example.
In the end, Reports are documents with machine learning data and performance baked in. You can use them in whatever way you see fit. Homework assignments or take home tests or assessments are probably the most common uses here, but we’ve found Reports to be ideal in an academic setting. In fact, here's an example of a student's work for inspiration.
W&B for Group Projects
As an academic user, you’ll have the ability to create teams within your instance. Functionally, that means you can place students into smaller cohorts and have them work on projects together. They’ll be able to see each other’s code, collaborate on experiments, and understand each other’s work in a sophisticated way. Functionally, this is how many of our paying customers use the product: to collaborate asynchronously in a single, shared system of record, so working this way doubles as invaluable real-world experience.
W&B as a Teacher’s Assistant
Educators can use W&B however they see fit but one thing we’ve seen be successful is an offshoot of what we mentioned in our previous section: get everyone in your class in a single team so you can see each step of their progress.
Instead of asking a student for all the experiments they tried to make their MNIST classifier work, you can instead just see them whenever you’d like. You can comment on their best ideas, suggest follow-up work, dig into their thought processes, or see what concept they’re stuck on. Essentially: you’ll have deep visibility into each of your student’s work so you can provide better, more nuanced, personalized feedback.
There are plenty of other smart ways you could leverage W&B in a classroom setting. You could, for example, drop your students in an existing project to mimic the real-world scenario of an ML engineer joining a team with an existing product or currently active research. There are plenty of options here.
But the most important part is that experiment tracking tools like Weights & Biases are increasingly common in both research labs and industrial applications. Getting your students familiar with these tools sets them up for success, all while giving them a more granular understanding of what their code does in real-time. W&B can not only prepare your students for their next step but also help them learn concepts and best practices hands-on.
If you’d like help to get started, feel free to reserve your spot for our Intro to Weights & Biases session where we will show you how to effectively introduce Weights & Biases in any setting!
Resources for Educators:
GitHub Repo for Educators
Everything you need to get started using W&B in your class
How to Use W&B Teams For Your University Machine Learning Projects For Free
How you can use W&B teams for collaborating on machine learning projects
How Many Discoveries Were Lost Because They Weren't Written Down?
With Reports you can save your ingenious ideas and insights alongside a snapshot of your work and then share them with your team. Or just keep them all for when you need them.
Collaborative Research and Publication-Ready Graphics with W&B
Real-time collaboration and publication-ready graphics with a few mouse clicks or lines of code
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