Organising Online Carpentries Workshops

As The Carpentries Core Team continues to transition to offering online workshops, the Workshop Administration Team would like to share additional information pertaining to Instructors to help you prepare for your workshops. Information shared in this blog post is a supplement to the Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online. Most importantly, we want to update Instructors on a few logistical workflows we have changed to support online workshops.

Registering your Self-Organised online workshop

Please be sure to register your Self-Organised workshop, as you begin planning your Carpentries online event. It is important that you use a unique workshop ID so that we can add your workshop to our database and provide the proper communications to you.

When creating your workshop website, please use the following naming convention: YEAR-MM-DD-sitename-online

We updated the workshop website template to make it easier to indicate that a workshop will be taught online. Instructions to customise your workshop website are available on the customisation page.

Instructor Selection for Workshops

For Centrally-Organised online workshops, we will recruit up to 4 instructors: Two experienced Instructors and two Supporting Instructors. Instructor selection will remain at the discretion of the organisers for Self-Organised workshops, but we suggest a similar model, based on The Carpentries Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online,

Experienced Instructors

For this purpose, an experienced instructor is a certified instructor who has taught at least three workshops. We will not look at how recently the workshops were taught as long as you have a total of three over time.

Supporting Instructors

While we are adjusting our curricula to fit the online modality, we would like to ensure we are keeping to our core values. Even though we are recommending experienced instructors, we would like to be inclusive of all. For Centrally-Organised workshops, we will be introducing a new role: Supporting Instructor.

The Supporting Instructor role is intended to offer experience with online workshops to Instructors with less practice teaching Carpentries curricula. It also ensures that the instructional team consists of several Carpentries-trained participants. The Supporting Instructor role will be assigned to certified Carpentries Instructors who have taught less than 3 workshops.

How to sign up

There will be an additional column in the Instructor Signup sheet that will allow you to indicate your desired role for online workshops. Supporting Instructors may choose whether they wish to teach a portion of the workshop or participate as a Helper. In either case, they should expect to participate fully in planning the workshop as part of the instructional team. Service as a Supporting Instructor will count as having taught a workshop for future selection as well as for Instructors’ active status (see below).

Instructors Active Status

We understand that several workshops have been postponed or cancelled due to COVID-19. Our by-laws document our rules for Instructors to be considered active and eligible to vote. During this time, we will be indefinitely relaxing these rules. Instructors who were active either last year or this year will be eligible to vote on Carpentries matters.

Cancelled Workshops

If you are scheduled to teach a Centrally-Organised workshop and the host cancels, you will still receive credit for the workshop. If a workshop is scheduled and you have to resign from teaching, you will not receive credit for the workshop. This policy does not apply to Self-Organised workshops.

Frequently Asked Questions Page

We recognise there is a lot of information being shared regarding teaching The Carpentries workshops. The Workshop Administration Team is developing a Frequently Asked Questions Page to help instructors navigate teaching all (Centrally-Organised, Self-Organised, in-person and online) workshops. Once this page is complete we will share it with you for you to bookmark!

If you have any questions, please contact team@carpentries.org.