Curriculum Development in The Carpentries

  • 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.

A Collaborative Lesson Design Process

  • When designing a new lesson, we recommend starting by identifying your target audience, thinking about what they already know, and what you want them to be able to do by the end of the lesson.
  • Backwards lesson design is an iterative process for lesson design and development that focuses on the desirable, observable behaviours the lesson should teach to learners.
  • Lessons are being developed in The Carpentries Incubator. You can go there to find an existing lesson to contribute to, or to propose a new lesson of your own.

The Carpentries Workbench

  • Lesson sites are built from source repositories with GitHub Pages.
  • A new lesson repository can be created from a template maintained by The Carpentries, and configured by adjusting the config.yaml file.
  • The main pages of a lesson website are created from Markdown or RMarkdown files in the episodes folder.
  • A local version of a lesson can be built and viewed with sandpaper::serve().

Crediting Contributions to Lessons

  • The Carpentries values all contributions.
  • It can be challenging to appropriately credit all contributions made to a lesson.