Curriculum Development on The Carpentries

Announcing organisational sustainability support from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that The Carpentries has received a two-year grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support initiatives that will strengthen our global impact and position us as a leading independent open source non-profit organisation. The project is designed to scale our mission meaningfully — building regional capacity, enhancing financial sustainability, and expanding our contributions to critical and emerging fields such as Research Software Engineering (RSEng) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee Approves the Introduction to MarcEdit lesson

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We are excited to share that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) announces the new beta Introduction to MarcEdit lesson. The lesson demonstrates using MarcEdit to profile, manipulate, and enhance library data in the MARC 21 format. It introduces the tools and functionality needed for many processes required for library and information workers working with library MARC data. This lesson is for those who have never used or have a rudimentary knowledge of MarcEdit. The primary learning objective is to provide learners with the necessary foundation to use MarcEdit and know where to seek more advanced skills.

Library Carpentry Curriculum Committee Approves Data Management Plan Lesson

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We are excited to announce that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) has approved a new lesson Data Management Plan Course for Librarians for inclusion in the Library Carpentry curriculum. This course was developed as part of an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to UCLA to develop open science lessons for Library Carpentry.

This course provides an introduction to conducting data management plan (DMP) services for librarians. By the end of this course, librarians should be equipped to offer basic DMP review services to researchers.

Curriculum Advisors Approve Redesigned DC R Ecology Lesson

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that a redesigned version of the Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists lesson has been approved for adoption into the Data Carpentry Ecology curriculum. The redesigned version will replace the existing lesson later this year. The Curriculum Advisory Committee previously published a call for Instructors to test the lesson and provide feedback, which includes a summary of the differences between the two lessons.

The new lesson lets learners dive into data visualisation much more quickly, letting you quickly appreciate the benefits of the lesson and enticing you to learn more about data storage, manipulation and analysis as the lesson progresses. The new structure of the lesson helps make it more approachable for beginners and more motivating for all learners, and has received great feedback from Instructors who have taught the lesson so far.

Advancing AI Education in GLAM: Highlights from the Library Carpentry Code Sprint

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The lesson maintainers for Intro to AI for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (the LC-CAC) co-hosted a seven-hour online code sprint on Jan 31, 2024 to help contribute bug fixes, edits, and improvements to this popular new lesson.

With the aim of moving the beta lesson closer to a stable release and adding it to the core Library Carpentry curriculum, a diverse group of global participants gathered to work on the lesson. Fourteen participants with a range of affiliations and expertise collaborated together during shifts that were hosted throughout the Sprint by Phil Reed, Cody Hennesy, Tim Dennis, and Leigh Phan. Participants included representatives from Hugging Face (UK), the University of Manchester (UK), the Medical Research Council at the Gambia Unit at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg (DE), The National Archives (UK), the University of California, Los Angeles (US), the University of Minnesota (US), and the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Piloting Collaborative Lesson Development Training

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

This June and July, we will pilot a new program of Collaborative Lesson Development Training. To apply to join the training, follow the link at the end of this post.

About the Training

Aimed at groups of collaborators who want to start creating a new lesson, Collaborative Lesson Development Training will focus on three main topics:

Good practice in lesson design and development
Creating lesson websites with The Carpentries Workbench
Collaboration skills

Spread over six half-days, with an extended break between sessions 4 & 5, participants will learn how to prepare an effective lesson to suit a defined target audience, how to implement that lesson as an open source website using The Carpentries Workbench, and how to collaborate and build community around a lesson project.

Reflecting on the first round of Lesson Development Study Groups

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In February-April 2021, we ran the inaugural round of Lesson Development Study Groups (LDSG). The program combined weekly group discussions with reading and practical “homework” tasks requiring participants to apply the skills and practices they were learning to their lesson as they developed it.

The Study Groups program was designed to help community members taking the first steps in designing a new lesson in The Carpentries Incubator. It focussed on good practices in lesson design, and elements of The Carpentries lesson infrastructure, with the aim of giving the participants a solid foundation from which to continue building their lessons. We also hoped that it would help us to identify gaps in the resources we provide around lesson development, as we work to improve the quality and accessibility of our infrastructure, processes, and documentation.

Apply to Join The Carpentries Lesson Development Study Groups

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce a new program of Lesson Development Study Groups for members of the Carpentries community who would like develop a new lesson in The Carpentries Incubator.

The Study Groups program will bring these community members together to develop their lessons as a cohort. Participants will benefit from the process by learning and discussing good practices in lesson design and share their experience as they build their lessons.

Features and Scope in Open Courseware

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A couple of weeks ago, Brian Granger (one of the core developers of IPython) posted some thoughts on features and scope in open source software. In it, he enumerates some of the risks associated with constantly adding new features to a piece of software (open source or otherwise):

Additional complexity in the code base (which makes future work more difficult).
Increased "surface area" for bugs (the more features there are, the more places a bug might be lurking).
Increased documentation and support time.
It forces developers to specialize, which makes "big picture" thinking harder.
Increased testing effort.
A more complex user experience. (Microsoft Word, anyone?)
Opportunity costs: time spent working on X is time not spent working on Y.

He then enumerates some things projects can do to throttle growth down to manageable levels: