Announcing our new Director of Assessment

A Message from Erin Becker

It is with great pleasure that I announce that Dr. Kelly Barnes is advancing to a Senior Team Lead role and will now be serving as The Carpentries Director of Assessment. Over the past three years, Kelly has brought her expertise in assessment and evaluation to the Instructor Training team, improving and strengthening the Instructor Training and Trainer Training programs. In her new position, she will be able to expand her reach and bring high-quality assessment to all of The Carpentries core activities - including curriculum development and maintenance, workshops, and community development. Congratulations Kelly!

A Message from Kelly Barnes

I am thrilled to become Director of Assessment at The Carpentries. My work will build on a long tradition of impact assessment previously led by Kari Jordan.

It has been an absolute pleasure to partner with Karen Word to serve the Trainers and Instructor Training program. Instructor Training will always have my heart. I am so thankful to get to continue as a Trainer and on the Instructor Training Team while expanding my horizons. I am looking forward to engaging other sub-communities and serving the broader organisation.

I joined The Carpentries in May 2020, a tumultuous time. We had to change how we did things and fast. At the same time, we were tasked, through a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to scale our Instructor Training efforts. I was hired to support that scaling and lead Instructor Training assessment. It was important to ensure that as we grew we maintained our high quality. To that end, we published The Carpentries Instructor Training Assessment Report in 2021.

Since I started, we have trained more than 30 new Trainers, and certified more than 1,300 new Instructors. We have worked hard to improve the training experience by:

• supporting Instructors transitioning to online teaching through a bonus module and Recommendations for Teaching Online,

• overhauling our communications with trainees,

• updating our curriculum, and

• asking the community to help us improve the Checkout Process. I am excited to share those changes with you soon and begin implementing them next year.

In my new role, I will lead development of an organisation-wide assessment strategy to:

• translate our strategic plan and priorities into measureable outcomes,

• facilitate tracking of The Carpentries impact,

• use data to inform continuous program improvement, and

• streamline our assessment efforts, so we do not ask you to take too many surveys!

Thank you to the Executive Team for their trust and I look forward to the work we will continue to do together.

If you have ideas about how we can better measure our impact or if there is anything I can do to serve you, please reach out! You can reach me via email (kbarnes@carpentries.org) or on Slack. I’d love to speak with you!