General Information

The Carpentries is a community of practice centered around teaching foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. This Lesson Developer Training teaches good practices in lesson design and development, and collaboration skills, using open source infrastructure. The target audience is groups of collaborators with an idea for a new lesson they would like to create together, especially if that lesson is intended for short-format training (e.g. part or all of a two-day workshop).

What is taught in this training?

After attending Carpentries Lesson Developer Training, participants will be able to:

• collaboratively develop and publish lessons using The Carpentries lesson infrastructure (aka The Carpentries Workbench)
• identify and characterise the target audience for a lesson.
• define SMART learning objectives.
• explain the pedagogical value of authentic tasks.
• create exercises for formative assessment.
• explain how considerations of cognitive load can influence the pacing, length, and organisation of a lesson.
• configure and maintain accessible and usable lesson repositories using best practices, readily available for collaboration.
• identify and correct accessibility issues in a Carpentries lesson.
• update and improve lesson material guided by feedback and reflection from teaching.
• review and provide constructive feedback on lessons.

What is not taught in this training?

Because we have only limited time, some things are beyond the scope of this training. We will not be learning:

• How to track changes and manage branches with Git. To learn these skills, we recommend that you follow the lessons from Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry:
  • Library Carpentry: Introduction to Git
  • Version Control with Git
• How to teach a lesson in a workshop. The Carpentries Instructor Training teaches foundational skills for excellent teaching.

What to expect in this part of the training

Lesson Developer Training events are hands-on throughout: short lessons are interspersed with frequent practical exercises, through which trainees construct the basic outline of their lesson and begin to fill in some of the detail. For more information, see the Lesson Developer Training Curriculum.

The training takes place in two parts separated by an extended break.

This first part focusses on backward lesson design and techniques for the development of effective exercises and accessible lesson content. Trainees will define the target audience and intended learning outcomes of their lesson, produce an outline of the lesson content and narrative, prepare exercises and examples for a chosen section, and start building this material into an open source lesson website.

Trainees are required to trial part of their new lesson with a real audience during the break between this first part and the conclusion of the training. When they return for the second and final part of the training, participants will reflect on this experience and discuss how they will approach the remaining stages of lesson development.

Code of Conduct

All participants are required to abide by The Carpentries Code of Conduct.

Where

This training will take place online. The instructors will provide you with the information you will need to connect to this meeting.

How to Prepare for Lesson Developer Training

Before the training, please complete our pre-training survey. You will receive a custom link for your event when you receive your connection information.

Before joining the first training session, take a few minutes to think about and note down your answers to the following questions:

1. What is the topic of the lesson that you plan to develop based on this training?
2. Have you created training material on this topic before?
3. What is motivating you to create this lesson?

Prerequisite Knowledge

Before joining Collaborative Lesson Development Training, participants should be able to:

1. write formatted text - bold and italic, headings, links, bullet point and numbered lists - with Markdown.
2. log into GitHub.com and create and edit files using the GitHub web interface.

If you need to learn or refresh these skills before the training, visit our Primer on Markdown and GitHub for links to resources to help learn these skills.

Attendance and Cancellation

Trainees who miss more than 1 hour of the training may be marked absent. Lesson Developer certification cannot be completed without full attendance at an Instructor Training event. If you unexpectedly need to miss more than 1 hour of your event, please contact your Trainers (contact info below).

For events in which registration occurs through The Carpentries via Eventbrite, cancellation may be performed in Eventbrite up to the start of the event. Cancelled seats cannot be filled after the 1 week registration deadline for these events, so we ask that you only cancel if absolutely necessary.

Contact

Please email tobyhodges@carpentries.org for more information.

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Training Materials and Schedule

Please see the Lesson Developer Training Curriculum for course material and sample schedule for a 6 half-day event.

The training is divided into two parts and includes an extended break between the two parts. Part 1 ends with a wrap-up session after the section on Preparing to Teach. Part 2 begins with a reflection on the lesson trial runs trainees completed during the break, then switches focus to discuss effective strategies and tools for collaboration.

Surveys

Before attending the workshop, please fill out our pre-training survey.

After the workshop, please fill out our post-training survey.