Upcoming Changes to The Carpentries' Curriculum Program

Following last week’s news about changes in the capacity of the Core Team, and yesterday’s announcement of the Board of Directors’ resolution on the Strategic Renewal of The Carpentries Curriculum Portfolio, this post provides an outlook for The Carpentries curriculum program. It includes more details about the planned renewal of our core curricula and the adjustments to other elements of the program necessary in the current circumstances and foreseeable future.

Strategic Renewal of Carpentries Curricula

The Board has published a Resolution calling for strategic renewal of our curricula. Thanks to our Lesson Program Governors, this process is already underway with new lessons being considered for adoption into Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry. We are also excited to welcome HPC Carpentry to the fold, and to continue developing the AI Carpentry program to further strengthen our portfolio (more on both of these later in this post). However, it is now clear that the pace and scope of this renewal must increase.

In addition to continuing to support these activities, the Curriculum Team will be working with the community over the coming months to identify, prioritise, and implement updates needed to existing Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lessons. This is a great time for our Instructors to experiment with how they teach our lessons and to report back on what worked and what did not. If you try out something new and find that it works, or if you have already been teaching an updated/improved version of one of our lessons, your contributions to incorporate those improvements upstream would be gratefully received.

Retiring Two Data Carpentry Curricula

In response to the imminent reduction in capacity of the Curriculum Team, I have made the difficult decision to retire the Data Carpentry Geospatial Data and Foundations of Astronomical Data Science curricula.

Once retired, we will no longer organise Centrally Organised Workshops or register Self-Organised Workshops teaching these curricula, and we will offboard Maintainers and Curriculum Advisors responsible for the affected lessons. The lesson repositories will be archived.

These curricula were chosen for retirement based on the relatively low frequency with which they are being taught in workshops, and a similarly low number of visitors to their lesson pages. As with the other programmatic reductions announced last week, streamlining our curriculum portfolio will free up Curriculum Team capacity to focus on our strategic priorities.

This was not a decision that I enjoyed having to make. The Geospatial Data and Foundations of Astronomical Data Science curricula are products of many hours of community members’ time. I know that the retirement of these lessons will be disappointing to some of you reading this. I and the other members of the Core Team are deeply grateful to everyone who has developed, taught, contributed to, and maintained these curricula over the years. We encourage the members of the community who care about these lessons to fork the repositories and continue collaborating on them in the future.

The Curriculum Team is also in discussions with the Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry Governance Committees about how we can prioritise support for their essential curricula.

AI Carpentry

I will remain involved with the AI Carpentry project, leading curriculum development and coordinating the program. We are looking for hosts for pilot workshops of a curriculum that aims to empower novice programmers to make informed decisions about using generative AI to produce code for their research. Please get in touch if you are interested in hosting one of these pilots.

Call for Volunteers: GenAI in Teaching

The series of Generative AI and Teaching community discussions launched in June have proven very popular, with over 300 participants registering for the first four calls. Unfortunately, I had to postpone the August call to focus on other priorities and I expect to only have capacity to host the calls every two months. I would really like to avoid having to reduce the frequency of these calls, and I am looking for a volunteer to help me keep them going. If anyone in the community would be willing and able to devote an hour per week to assist with coordinating this program and hosting some of the discussions, please get in touch.

HPC Carpentry

We remain committed to and excited about the adoption of HPC Carpentry. Since we had aimed to launch the program next week, most of the necessary work has been done already to operationalise the new lesson program. But the ongoing reorganisation within the Core Team meant that focus needed to shift, and we reluctantly concluded that it would be better to delay the adoption briefly, to allow us time to get it right.

Our new launch date is 1 November. Further updates will be published on the blog in the coming weeks.

Clarification: The Carpentries Lab

Last week we announced that The Carpentries Lab would be closing. This created some confusion about what would happen to the lessons already accepted to the Lab. To clarify the new situation: we will not take down existing Carpentries Lab lessons. The closure means that all ongoing reviews managed by the Curriculum Team will cease, but documentation and lessons in the Lab will remain online.