New and Improved Instructor Training Workflow!

Instructor Training is a primary benefit of our Membership program, serving to build local capacity for offering Carpentries workshops and spreading The Carpentries pedagogical model to other teaching environments at member institutions. In addition to bringing this training to our members, we also offer it free of charge to individuals at institutions not able to finance a membership. Through this dual model, we have trained more than 1,600 Instructors in over 45 countries around the world.

As our Instructor Training program has grown and changed, some of the processes we developed in the past for managing trainee enrollment have become cumbersome and outdated. The Carpentries Instructor Training staff team (Elizabeth Williams, Karen Word, Maneesha Sane, SherAaron Hurt, and Erin Becker) has been working over the past months to revamp our workflow around Instructor Training to bring maximum value and convenience to both member-affiliated and open-applicant trainees. We are excited to share the changes we’ve made and how these will make things easier for our members and others in the community seeking Instructor Training.

Here’s what’s new:

• Member-affiliated trainees can now directly register for the training event of their choice. In the past, Member sites needed to schedule all of their trainees for a single event, which was time consuming and sometimes limited who they were able to invite. Now they are able to give their selected trainees a registration code to register for any open event that matches their individual schedules.
• Open-training applicants receive invitations to join available events and can register themselves directly. Previously, accepted open-training applicants were directed towards a spreadsheet where events were added as they became available. Applicants needed to continue to check the spreadsheet until an event was added that worked with their schedule. Now, accepted applicants are sent invitations each time an event opens up, relieving the need to continuously check for new opportunities. They register through the same platform as Member-affiliated trainees, and are tracked through the same process - greatly reducing staff overhead and increasing our capacity to accommodate open-training applicants.
• Our information for Member sites has been updated to include guidance on how to select trainees and how to schedule your team for training.
• We’ve overhauled all of our email templates for communicating about Instructor Training to ensure clarity and consistency of messaging.

What do you need to do?

No action needed from you! This new workflow has already gone live and shouldn’t case any additional work for you - in fact we hope it will substantially reduce your workload in signing yourself or your team up for Instructor Training. If, however, you notice a broken link, confusing instructions, or something else that doesn’t seem to be working properly, please let us know so we can correct it. You can contact the team at team@carpentries.org.

A big thanks to @sheraaron @maneesha @karenword for all of their work on this project and to @ewilliams for providing insights from the membership perspective so that the new workflow fits into our goals for membership. A thank you also to everyone who provided informal feedback about our old workflow and provided the impetus for these improvements.