Announcing more GenAI in Workshops events

Following a successful first round of GenAI in Workshops events, we have scheduled more sessions between November and April. Visit the event listing for details of the schedule and registration.

These five-hour training sessions are an extension to Instructor Training, designed to empower Instructors to engage with learners about AI chatbot use during Carpentries workshops. Two participants in the first round of sessions shared their reflections in an earlier post to this blog.

Reflecting on the outcomes of the sessions run in August, we concluded that we need to make it easier for more members of our Instructor community to join this training and ensure that the workshops they deliver remain as impactful as possible. So I am pleased to announce that we have halved the price of participation in the GenAI in Workshops program. I hope you can join one of the upcoming sessions but, if none of the scheduled events are a good fit for you do not worry! Further training sessions will be added to the calendar from April 2027.

Key themes from the sessions so far

Participants in every event discussed the implications for workshops of chatbots being able to solve the vast majority of exercises in Carpentries lessons, referring to learner motivation, expertise, and formative assessment/feedback to Instructors. The Instructor Training curriculum is an excellent basis for rich discussion.

Many Instructors are keen to include more information about how learning works as part of the scene-setting for a workshop, drawing on content from the Instructor Training program to encourage learners to tackle the germane cognitive load (“good friction”) that is essential to learning. A recent update to the GenAI in Workshops curriculum added more discussion of what this pitch to learners could contain early in a workshop.

Our Instructor community has a wealth of experience and diverse, nuanced perspectives on the intersection of generative AI, software and data skills, and education. The conversations in these trainings have been consistently fascinating and I am so grateful to the Trainers who have led sessions and the Instructors who have joined them so far.