Call for Applications to December Instructor Training

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This blog post was amended with the information from this other post.

This blog post was updated with the answers that we got so far.

As we announced previously, we will run another round of the free/open Instructor Training in December. People who are interested in participating in this round can now apply to take part.

Rules

Students must apply in groups that are able to co-locate in one room for the duration of the Instructor Training. And each group should commit to jointly run at least one workshop no later than June 1st, 2016. Please note: how to run a workshop is covered in the curriculum.

Each student is expected to:

How to apply

Groups must fill out this survey to apply for the two-day training course in December 2015. There is a cover letter sample at the end of this document.

Individuals must fill out this other survey with informations related with the tasks that we are requiring. Groups do not need to wait until all their members fill this second survey.

Update: Please use this etherpad to find people interested in also join instructor training.

FAQ

What is the selection criteria?

Groups will be selected based on:

  • Group members were involved in SCF/DC, e.g. members were learners, helpers or instructors in a workshop, members have opened issues or pull request to one of SCF/DC lessons.

  • Group members were involved in a group that organizes Software Carpentry-like workshops, e.g. The Hacker Within, Python and R local user groups.

  • The group's plan for the follow-up workshop.

Groups will not be selected based on:

  • Affiliation with a particular institution, lab, or university. All groups will be considered equally.

  • Academic qualification. Faculty and students will be considered equally, as will groups from different academic disciplines.

What is the minimum/maximum number of people to a group?

We prefer groups with at least 3 people. Groups must be at most 10 and if your group size is over 5, you will need to commit to running two workshops after the training to ensure every new instructor has an opportunity to teach after the training.

What level of knowledge is needed throughout the group?

We expected that each member of the group are comfortable with (or master) the content of at least one of our lessons. For example, if the answer of one is yes for at least one of the following questions s/he can be part of your group:

  • Can you search for one word in all text files of one project using grep?
  • Can you get the changes that your collaborator sent to GitHub yesterday, solve the conflicts and push your changes?
  • Can you read one file in Python and print the lines that match a given criteria?
  • Can you read the gap minder dataset R and plot any information from it?

Is is absolutely necessary that our group members have attended a Software Carpentry workshop before?

No. If you live in one city that had a couple of Software Carpentry workshop in the past year we hope that you had attend at least one of our workshops. If you live somewhere that never had one of our workshops we expected that you are comfortable with the content of at least one of our lessons and participate in any local project that help people learn programming.

There is any cost for me or the institution that I'm affiliated?

No. This round of instruction training is free. The workshop that your group will need to organize will be considered Self-Organised so you or the instruction that you are affiliated do not own anything to Software Carpentry Foundation. If the institution that you are affiliated can make a donation related with the instructor training and/or the workshop we will be grateful.

What is the timeline

  • 2015-10-26: blog post announcing the selection goes online.
  • 2015-10-26: group applications for two-day online class open.
  • 2015-11-18: group applications for two-day online class close (there will be no extension).
  • 2015-12-04: blog post announcing group selected goes online (selected groups will be contacted before this date).
  • 2015-12-07: two-day online class begins.
  • 2015-12-08: two-day online class ends.

How my application should look like?

Dear SCF Mentoring Subcommittee,

we are writing to express our interested to attend the two-day training course in December 2015 as one group composed by:

  • NAME_OF_1ST_STUDENT (GITHUB_ID on GitHub),
  • NAME_OF_2ND_STUDENT (GITHUB_ID on GitHub),
  • NAME_OF_3RD_STUDENT (GITHUB_ID on GitHub),
  • NAME_OF_4TH_STUDENT (GITHUB_ID on GitHub),
  • NAME_OF_5TH_STUDENT (GITHUB_ID on GitHub) and
  • NAME_OF_6TH_STUDENT (GITHUB_ID on GitHub).

NAME_OF_1ST_STUDENT attended a SCF workshop in 2014, NAME_OF_2ND_STUDENT attended a SCF workshop in 2015. and NAME_OF_3RD_STUDENT attended a DC workshop in 2015. NAME_OF_1ST_STUDENT was a helper at the last SCF/DC workshop organized at our university that was lead by INSTRUCTOR_NAME.

If we are selected for the instructor training we will use the conference room of our department that you can check below. We already made reservations for that room in advance.

We are planing to organize two workshops at the beginning of 2016. One will be Python based and will have NAME_OF_1ST_STUDENT, NAME_OF_2ND_STUDENT, NAME_OF_4TH_STUDENT and INSTRUCTOR_NAME as instructors. The other one will be R based and will have NAME_OF_3RD_STUDENT, NAME_OF_5TH_STUDENT, NAME_OF_6TH_STUDENT and INSTRUCTOR_NAME as instructors. We will use the same room used for the last workshop and we already talked with INSTRUCTOR_NAME about those workshops.

Thanks for your consideration.


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