Collaborative Lesson Development with The Carpentries Workbench

This session is running as part of the Research Software Camp: Next Steps in Coding, organised by the Software Sustainability Institute. It will be delivered by Toby Hodges and Zhian Kamvar from The Carpentries.

The Carpentries teaches software and data skills to researchers and librarians all over the world. Our Instructor Training program promotes good teaching practices, grounded in research findings in educational psychology.

Certified Instructors teach lessons developed and maintained by the community in short-format workshops. These lessons are developed in open source repositories and published online with a permissive CC-BY license.

This year, The Carpentries is launching The Carpentries Workbench, a completely new infrastructure for lesson websites, designed with accessibility as a central guiding principle. The Workbench has been built with a single purpose: to make it easier for our community to build, maintain, and teach lessons.

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.

There are no prerequisites for the workshop, but a GitHub account and some familiarity with Markdown and the GitHub web interface will be helpful during the interactive sections.