Looking Back and Looking Forward: Scaling Collaborative Curriculum Development

In February 2018, Data Carpentry was awarded funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support creation of sustainable infrastructure and scalable processes for curriculum development and maintenance. In May 2020, our funding for this initial scaling effort wrapped up. Here we report on lessons learned, work accomplished through this funding, and where our curriculum development and maintenance sustainability efforts are headed in the next few years.

Our primary deliverables for this grant were:

Lesson templates and guidelines for open and collaborative lesson development
New curricula and community focus on teaching foundational skills for data analysis and data management in Economics and Image Analysis
An outline and set of milestones for the development of a curriculum in Chemistry.

Major accomplishments in each deliverable area are listed below, and detailed information about each can be found in our end of grant report.

Lesson templates and guidelines for open and collaborative lesson development

Across The Carpentries Lesson Programs, we have more than 40 active lessons, with an additional 30 lessons under development in The Carpentries Incubator and Lab. Interest and momentum for open, collaboratively developed curricula continues to increase, and we want to ensure that we can support and foster that interest and demand. To this end, we:

Established a Curriculum Development Team - Through this grant and related funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we were able to add Dr. François Michonneau, Dr. Zhian Kamvar, and another team member (to be announced soon!). Together, this team supports community-driven lesson development and ensures the stability of our lesson infrastructure.
Developed a Curriculum Development Handbook to provide guidance for community members developing Carpentries-style lessons. In line with our Strategic Plan, this handbook will be translated into a curriculum, to be offered as a synchronous, hands-on workshop.
Developed infrastructure for the maintenance of lessons and for building an Instructor community around new lessons, including onboarding for new Maintainers and for Instructors interested in teaching newly released lessons.
Established The Carpentries Incubator, as a low-barrier place for community members to share and collaborate on Carpentries-style teaching materials at all stages of development. The Incubator supplements The Carpentries Lab as we continue developing editorial processes for vetting and peer-review of community-submitted materials. Continued development of The Carpentries Lab is part of our recent funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Flowchart showing process for development of lessons falling into the official track, community track, and Carpentries Lab track of lesson development

Simplified our templates and other infrastructure for our lessons and workshop websites, to make it more accessible for community members with a range of technical backgrounds. This infrastructure work will also continue on our new grant.
Coordinated updating and release for 36 of our core lessons to provide publication credit for the 1100 contributors to, and maintainers of those lessons.
Developed life cycle badges for lessons (pre-alpha, alpha, beta, stable) associated with clear milestones to signal to the community the readiness for teaching.
Created a Community Developed Lessons page to serve as a resource for community members interested in teaching Carpentries-style lessons on different topics

New curricula and community building in Economics and Image Analysis.

Worked with Dr. Miklos Koren at European Central University to complete an alpha version of a curriculum for economists - including lessons on Stata and the bash shell. In line with our community values around open access, we plan to translate the Stata lesson into R after beta piloting.
Prioritised training of Instructors with economics domain expertise. In the past two years, 88 individuals with economics experience have become fully certified instructors and another 58 are in the process of certifying. This represents a healthy instructor population size to support future workshops, as this curriculum becomes an official Carpentries offering and is requested by hosting organisations.
Worked with Dr. Tessa Durham Brooks and Dr. Mark Meysenburg at Doane College, and Constantin Pape and Dr. Dominik Kutra at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to bring an Image Processing curriculum to beta stage in final preparation for publication.

Community building to support a future Chemistry curriculum

Prioritised training of Instructors with chemistry domain expertise. In the past two years, 126 individuals with chemistry experience have become fully certified Instructors and another 150 are in the process of certifying.
Although we have not yet been able to connect with a chemistry domain expert who has the time and motivation to engage with us in the lesson development process, with the resources and infrastructure that we have established over the past two years, we are now in a position to support community development of curricula in many domains, including chemistry.

Thank you!

The work accomplished through this grant would not have been possible without the immense contributions from so many members of this community, including:

Dr. Tessa Durham Brooks, Dr. Mark Meysenburg, Dr. Erin Doyle, Dr. Raychelle Burks, Constantin Pape, Dr. Dominik Kutra, Trisha Adamus, and Uwe Hilgert who created, taught, and organised workshops using the Image Processing curriculum.
Dr. Miklos Koren, Dr. Arieda Muço, and Dr. Andras Vereckei who created, taught, and organised workshops using the Economics curriculum.
All of the community members who participated in interviewing and evaluating our new Curriculum Team members during the hiring and contracting process.
Angela Li who, in her role as Maintainer Community Lead has revamped our Maintainer Onboarding program, re-energised our Maintainer community meetings, and renewed much of our Maintainer-related documentation.
All of our lesson Maintainers and the members of our Lesson Infrastructure Committee who work tirelessly to keep our lessons and lesson infrastructure healthy.
All community members who have submitted materials to The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab, enabling the broad community to benefit from their labor and contribute to lesson improvement.
Members of each Curriculum Advisory Committee for Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry curricula, and the Library Carpentry Advisory Group.
The 1100+ individuals who have taken the time to contribute improvements to our core lessons.

Next Steps

As we move into the next stage of developing and sustaining infrastructure and processes for ensuring the stability and scalability of our lesson stack and community-contributed lessons, we are supported by funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Since November 2019, and continuing through May 2021, we are focusing on improving The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab as a viable and stable platform for community-driven lesson development and sharing including:

Developing an indexing system to make it easy for users to locate relevant materials,
Providing a clear pathway for users to submit content,
Updating our lesson template to make it more user friendly,
Creating clear checklists and guidelines for lesson acceptance,
Developing a metadata schema for lessons,
Establishing an editorial process for lessons progressing to The Carpentries Lab,
Facilitating creation of alpha-level materials for at least three lessons for biologists (prioritizing image analysis, machine learning and/or single cell analysis),
Encouraging and maintaining community interest in developing and contributing lessons,
Establishing community engagement in lesson maintenance, and
Creating a strategy for scaling up the results of this 18-month pilot.

Get Involved

If you’re looking for ways to get involved in curriculum development and maintenance, please consider one of the following opportunities:

Submit your lesson materials or ideas to The Carpentries Incubator as a proposal.
Browse existing community-contributed lessons and engage with the lesson developers through GitHub issues.
Provide your review and feedback on the Curriculum Development Handbook.
Complete one (or more!) of the lesson-specific Instructor onboardings and let us know at team@carpentries.org so we can add you to our list of prioritised Instructors for those workshops.

We are incredibly grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan foundation for enabling us to initiate this work, and to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for supporting the next stage of our sustainability efforts.