Summary and Schedule
Workshop Prerequisites
Participants should be familiar with how to write formatted text (bold, italic, bullet point lists, etc) with Markdown, and the fundamentals of git for version control (add, commit, push, pull, remotes). Some familiarity with an integrated development environment, especially RStudio, would be particularly beneficial.
In this workshop, participants will explore the ecosystem of processes, resources, and infrastructure that supports lesson development in The Carpentries community. The first part of the workshop will provide participants with some steps to follow to help them design and develop a high-quality lesson. In the second part, participants will be able to follow an interactive demonstration of the key features of The Carpentries Workbench, and discover how they can use the infrastructure to create their own lesson websites.
The target audience for this workshop is RSEs who provide training as part of their role or in a voluntary capacity (e.g. as an Instructor with The Carpentries). It will be especially relevant to RSEs who wish to develop an open source lesson using the approaches and infrastructure presented in the session.
| Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 1. Curriculum Development in The Carpentries |
What is The Carpentries? How are lessons developed by The Carpentries community? What is The Carpentries Workbench? Why was the Workbench created? |
| Duration: 00h 12m | 2. A Collaborative Lesson Design Process |
How do I approach the design for a new lesson? What is backwards lesson design? How can I get started with lesson development in The Carpentries? |
| Duration: 00h 57m | 3. The Carpentries Workbench |
How is a lesson site set up and published with GitHub? What are the essential configuration steps for a new lesson? How do you create and modify the pages in a lesson? How do you preview changes made to a lesson? |
| Duration: 02h 02m | 4. Crediting Contributions to Lessons |
In what ways can people contribute to a lesson? How should we acknowledge contributions to lessons? |
| Duration: 02h 22m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
To follow the workshop, participants will need to bring a laptop with a working installation of RStudio and R version 4.1 or higher. (To download and install R, follow the link to https://www.r-project.org/, follow the “CRAN” link near the top-left of that page, and choose a mirror close to your location.)
Participants will also need a GitHub account with credentials set up to enable pushing changes to GitHub. Choose one of the following two options for these credentials:
- SSH keys - the Software Carpentry Version Control with Git lesson includes a guide for how to set up SSH keys for connecting to GitHub
- a personal access token - Happy Git with R provides a guide for how to set up an access token for GitHub with R