Curriculum Development in The Carpentries

Last updated on 2022-09-06 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • What is The Carpentries?
  • How are lessons developed by The Carpentries community?
  • What is The Carpentries Workbench?
  • Why was the Workbench created?

Objectives

  • Describe the process of lesson development and maintenance in The Carpentries.
  • Explain the motivation for an accessible, open source lesson infrastructure.

Introduction

Welcome to this workshop at the Research Software Engineers conference 2022.

In this workshop, we will explore how lessons are developed in The Carpentries community.

The schedule is:

Time Episode
13:30-14:00 Introduction
14:00-14:45 A Collaborative Lesson Design Process
14:45-15:00 Creating a Lesson Repository
15:00-15:20 Break
15:20-16:20 The Carpentries Workbench
16:20-16:40 Acknowledging Contributions to Lessons
16:40-16:50 Wrap Up

The Carpentries

The Carpentries

The Carpentries builds global capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. We train and foster an active, inclusive, diverse community of learners and instructors that promotes and models the importance of software and data in research. We collaboratively develop openly-available lessons and deliver these lessons using evidence-based teaching practices. We focus on people conducting and supporting research.

All of our lessons are open source, hosted on GitHub, and published under a CC-BY license.

Carpentries Instructors, who are mostly volunteering their time to teach, have taught more than 3600 workshops, in more than 70 countries, across all seven continents.

In addition to these Instructors, there are many other roles that people take on in The Carpentries community. For example, we have:

  • Maintainers, who take care of the day-to-day upkeep of our open source lessons;
  • Trainers, who teach and certify new Instructors through our Instructor Training program;
  • and Curriculum Advisors, who provide high-level guidance on the overall direction of our curricula.

Lesson Development in The Carpentries

Our official lessons are divided across three Lesson Programs: Software Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Data Carpentry. Each of these programs has a slightly different focus, either in their target audience or in the skills they teach, but all share a common goal of promoting efficiency and reproducibility in research and research-related disciplines.

line chart showing growth in the number of lesson repositories in The Carpentries since 2015. Since 2019, the number of repositories in The Carpentires Incubator has grown to represent mare than half of the total 158 lesson repositories.
The number of lessons under development in The Carpentries community has grown quickly in recent years.

In addition to The Carpentries official lessons, our community members use our open source infrastructure to create lessons of their own. This community development of new lessons is taking place in The Carpentries Incubator, a space for the community to collaborate on their own lessons with support from other community members and The Carpentries Core Team.

Schematic of a life cycle for lessons that includes four stages: pre-alpha, where a lesson is being designed and drafted for the first time; alpha, where the lesson is tested in pilot workshops by its authors; beta, where the lesson is tested in pilot workshops by other instructors; and stable, where the lesson has been thoroughly tested and can be relied upon by other instructors to be ready to teach and unlikely to undergo significant changes without warning. Stable lessons can be peer reviewed in The Carpentries Lab and can join the Lab or one of The Carpentries official lesson programs.

The Carpentries Incubator forms the first part of a pathway for the development of lessons, which can lead to open peer review and publication, and/or adoption by one of The Carpentries lesson programs as a new official lesson.

We are not going to talk much about that pathway for lesson development today, because we are also presenting a poster on exactly that topic at this conference. Come and find us there during the poster session - or any other time during the week - to talk more about our systems and processes for lesson development, review, and publication!

The Carpentries Workbench

TODO

Key Points

  • The Carpentries is a global community teaching software and data skills. Their primary audience is researchers and librarians.
  • The Carpentries community develops and maintains open source lesson websites, hosted by GitHub Pages.
  • The Carpentries Workbench is a completely new infrastructure for building lesson websites.
  • The Workbench was created to provide a lesson infrastructure that empowers community members to write and maintain accessible lessons.