Plans for 2015: Instructor Training

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Instructor training has been going well: it looks like more than 50% of people who participated this summer and fall will complete and start teaching for us, which is a new record. What's even better is that we have 136 people signed up for the next online course. Even if only half of them complete, it will enlarge the pool of instructors by more than a third, and broaden our coverage both geographically and across disciplines.

The question now is when that course should start. Teaching a group that size will take two full days a week, and in the short term, I need to focus on building partnerships, getting grant applications out the door, and overseeing election of our Steering Committee.

I'm therefore pushing the start of the next online instructor training course back to February 2015. Doing so will free up eight days in January, which I will use to finish getting the SCF's finances in order and clean up things that current and freshly-minted instructors have been tripping over. We will still go ahead with the live runs of instructor training at UC Davis and the University of Melbourne in January and February as planned, and I hope we'll be able to start the next-but-one run of online training in May. By then, we should have at least one more instructor trainer up and running, two more partially trained, and the curriculum written down in an intelligible form, all of which will help keep us on track going forward.