Online Workshops on The Carpentries

Instats Pilot: What and Why? (and a Call for Helpers)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of 2025, we began exploring a partnership with Instats to offer recorded Carpentries workshop sessions. Instats is a mission-driven organisation that focuses on delivering a diverse range of seminars that inspire high-quality, ethical, and impactful research.

Why are we partnering with Instats?

The goal of working with Instats is to create more opportunities for anyone who can’t attend in-person or locally hosted workshops due to availability in their region, and circumstances such as time zone conflicts. An added benefit is the ability for all learners to engage with our lessons at their own pace.

Piloting Meal Reimbursement: A Way of Saying Thank You

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 2020 we launched the pilot of online workshops, and our Instructor community rallied around this new format. Much effort has gone into organising, coordinating, and teaching these workshops. We are beyond grateful for your continued commitment and support, and we would like to show our appreciation for all of your efforts. Over the next few months, we will pilot meal reimbursements for select online Centrally-Organised workshops as a way of saying thank you.

Online Workshops and the Supporting Instructor Role

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a long wait, but the news is finally out…online workshops are here to stay! After two years of implementing workshops online, we know that there is a lot that goes into the planning and execution of these workshops. The Core Team will be making changes over the course of 2022 to make the online workshop process as easy as possible for all; hosts, Instructors, learners, and members of the Core Team. One of these changes is that we will no longer distinguish between Experienced and Supporting Instructors.

The Future of Online Workshops

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It has been 20 months since The Carpentries convened a Task Force to address the urgent demand for remote Carpentries workshops. To date we have run over 700 online workshops. With the feedback and recommendations we have received from Instructors and Host we have been able to provide updates to the Official Guidelines for teaching Carpentries Workshops Online.

We know that the transition to online workshops presents its own set of pros/cons and it may not have been easy but our community rose to the occasion. The demand for our workshops did not suffer, in fact, we saw an increase with requests for Centrally-Organised workshops.

I See, UC, We All See Carpentries: Collaboratively Scaling Workshop Instruction Across a University System

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This Carpentries workshop ran online over the course of 3 weeks.

Week 1: Unix shell, Git/GitHub, SQL (one lesson per day, 9am-12pm)
Week 2: R (3 days, 9am-12pm)
Week 3: Python (3 days, 9am-12pm)

Following the success of the virtual Southern California Library Carpentry workshop, Carpentries instructors from UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, and UC Berkeley decided to run a joint Carpentries workshop open to students and researchers affiliated with these three University of California (UC) campuses. The plan for this workshop was to run online sessions over the course of three weeks. The primary idea and goal for this workshop was to further connect a Carpentries network across the University of California campuses. Similar to the Southern California Library Carpentry workshop, this joint UC workshop came together because of the already established collaborative partnerships between the Carpentry instructors at these three campuses. Tim Dennis at UC Los Angeles proposed the idea for this workshop to the other campus instructors, Reid Otsuji at UC San Diego and Scott Peterson at UC Berkeley, to begin planning the workshop. Each of the hosts reached out to Carpentries instructors on their campuses to gauge interest in teaching in this workshop. There was a great response and interest from the community of instructors at all three campuses.

Running an Online Data Carpentry Workshop in Iran

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It was my aim for a long time since I started to learn basics of programming in Python in 2017. I was excited to teach whatever I learned to other people and extend it. I am an analytical biologist and I have a lot of colleagues who were searching for someone speaking Persian to learn programming skills from.

I think learning in a maternal language is crucial to make the lessons more efficient. Teaching Data Carpentry could help them to make their own way in their research projects and improve the quality of their studies. I planned this workshop two months after I got my certificate as an instructor of The Carpentries. Because of COVID-19, the workshop in Iran was to be online too. Good for me! I participated in several online workshops around the world such as in the US and South Africa to learn and have experiences in teaching in online workshops and become an experienced instructor.

Outcome of October Community Discussion for Nordic and Baltic Countries

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost is repost of a blogpost at CodeRefinery and is based on the notes made on Carpentries Community Discussion Etherpad on the 30th Oct. 2020.

Summary

The Carpentries say “never touch learners keyboard”. Should instructors rigidly follow this advice in online workshops or should we be more flexible in order to overcome the challenges of teaching online?

On October 30th 2020, a Carpentries community discussion was held with discussion focused on Nordic and Baltic countries. The host was Annika Rockenberger (Carpentries instructor trainer). Including the host and the co-host, totally 15 participants joined: 6 from Norway, 3 from Sweden, 3 from Finland, 2 from Denmark, and 1 from Bangladesh (Thanks for joining, all!). A complete list of the participants can be found below.

Thank You SO MUCH Carpentries Community!

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The image above is a composite of our Core Team’s photos - from left to right,
first row : Zhian, Talisha, Sher!, Angelique, Kelly, Karen, Toby
second row: Serah, Omar, Maneesha, Kari, Erin, François

TL;DR

What a year! As we come to the close of 2020, in all our reflection and retrospectives and reporting and winding-down and planning for 2021 - the most accurate sentiment to sum up how we feel about our community in THANK YOU. There is so much we can collectively say as a team, in fact, we started to co-author our thank you notes to all of you, and seven pages into our collaborative document, we still have more to say, and the wise words of many of you at the back of our minds - short and succinct, that is how all Carpentries posts should be!

Back to the future: Online Carpentries Workshops now and in 2021

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On 13 July The Carpentries released a second version of the Official Guidelines for Taking Your Carpentries Workshop Online. The Carpentries Core Team has since then undertaken various initiatives to support remote versions of all Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry workshops.

The quarter in review

The Infrastructure and Curriculum Development teams collaborated in creating an online infrastructure to serve as scaffolds or safety nets for learners who were unable to install software onto their computers using cloud services from MyBinder and RStudio. The workshop website template was also adapted to facilitate workshops scheduled to take place over more than two days which includes a custom schedule file.

Teaching a Library Carpentry Workshop in Southern California (and the Virtual Yonder)

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From August 10 to 13, we taught a virtual Library Carpentry workshop to 18 librarians, primarily from California.

Our Audience

Our primary audience was librarians and library staff from the California State University (CSUs) system, a system that is relatively new to the Carpentries. When we first planned this workshop, we planned to teach it in-person at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) campus and therefore we anticipated our audience would be mostly from Southern California. While we missed the benefits of in-person connections and interactivity, our instruction team was excited to be able to reach a much wider audience across the CSUs. We had attendees from all across California, from Humboldt State in the north to San Diego in the south, and many points in between. Additionally, we opened up slots for librarians from other California academic libraries and also had one international attendee from South Africa!

Reflections on my First Data Carpentry Workshop

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted by the author on Medium and has been cross-posted here with the permission of the author.

It was 6:00 AM GMT on 28th September 2020, a Monday morning in Ghana and I was up and ready behind my computer, taking a final glance through the materials for my participation in a Data Carpentries Workshop, organized by SADiLaR (South African Center for Digital Language Resources) in partnership with the Carpentries in Africa.

Lessons Learned - Data Carpentries Workshop for SADiLaR (August 31, 2020)

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The call went out for instructors and helpers to cover the Data Carpentries Workshop from 31 August to 4 September 2020. Five instructors and two helpers were selected. We had two instructors from England (Jannetta and Varshita), one from France (Samuel), one from Kenya (Benson), one from Japan (Maggi), and two from South Africa (Marissa and Lactatia).

Preparation for the workshop

The workshop was organised by Angelique Trusler, the Regional Consultant for Southern Africa. Attendees were sent instructions in an email on how to download and install the data and software required. A couple of weeks before the workshop the instructors and helpers were put into contact with one another via email to decide who would do what during the workshop. We used a shared online spreadsheet to indicate which parts we would like to teach and who would be able to act as helpers on what days.

Running Newcastle University's First Online Software Carpentries Workshop

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How it all started

On April 1, 2020, Newcastle University’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) team became one year old. We are a very new team, but have great plans for the future. One is to badge as many as possible of our team as Carpentries Instructors so that we can run Carpentries workshops at the university for research staff and students.

I managed to attend an online instructor training workshop towards the end of March 2020 just as lockdown started. Inspired and enthused at how well the instructors’ workshop worked online I quickly completed the checkout process and then started exploring opportunities for an excuse to run a workshop. Being the first to complete the instructor training, hopefully, a few more of my colleagues will follow in September 2020.

Report from the Mega-Coderefinery workshop

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the CodeRefinery website. In the CodeRefinery project we teach research software engineering tools and workflows, using the Carpentries style.

In May/June 2020, CodeRefinery ran a large online workshop with about 100 learners in attendance. We overcame the challenges with some clever strategies, and we feel the learning outcomes were similar to that of in-person workshops of around 30-40 participants.

After that workshop, some of the same staff held an even larger “High-performance computing (HPC) Kickstart” workshop (180 learners, more than four universities). This provided another perspective and reinforced some of the lessons learned during the large online CodeRefinery workshop.

Geospatial Data Carpentry Videos

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Instructors at the University of Wisconsin (at both Madison and Milwaukee) recorded videos of the Geospatial Data Carpentry Workshop They then held discussion sessions over the course of a week to discuss the videos the learners had watched Learners really enjoyed this setup and gave really good feedback. Instructors are still working on setting expectations about the setup better.

The Setup

Since mid-March, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus announced it would be temporarily closing, exploring methods for successfully teaching interactive coding workshops has been a continual discussion among our local community of Carpentries instructors. As The Carpentries staff like to say, the transition to online workshops has been a “chopportunity” (challenge-opportunity).

The Software Sustainability Institute's Guidance for Running Online Training

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the Software Sustainability Institute’s website based on lessons learned by SSI members.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Introduction

The following is guidance based on the Software Sustainability Institute staff and collaborators running online training events which have become more needed due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Steve Crouch has run afternoon training events online for the Scottish response to the Royal Society RAMP COVID initiative; Mario Antonioletti, Lucia Michielin, Aleksandra Nenadic and Giacomo Peru have been running Edinburgh Carpentries events online; Aleksandra Nenadic and Steve Crouch have run and facilitated workshops and instructor training events online. Rachael Ainsworth has excellent online event management experience especially during the recent delivery of Collaborations Workshop 2020 online. Shoaib Sufi has oversight of the Collaborations Workshop series of events and moved the selection of the Institute Fellows from a face to face meeting to a successful online event which has taken place for a number of years now.

Lessons Learned - Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online in Sweden, May 2020

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In May 2020, 16 learners from three universities in Stockholm, Sweden and two other Swedish universities attended online workshops focused on Carpentries SQL, OpenRefine, and Python lessons. Taught over the course of four days, the three hour sessions were led by a team of one instructor, three helpers, and a “Zoom-DJ” who kept track of things in the Zoom room, ensured a welcoming environment for the learners, encouraged questions, kept track of the time, and managed the breaks and break-out rooms. During each session, the instructor, helpers, and Zoom DJ appended their titles to their names and had video on to make it easier for participants to ask for help. Workshop leads switched between instructor and helper roles in the different sessions.

Lessons Learned - Teaching Carpentries Workshop Online UCLA Spring 2020

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the UCLA Library website. As a member of the Carpentries, we offer Carpentries and Carpentries-styled workshops.

Introduction

Between April 10 and May 1, the UCLA Library Data Science Center offered four online 3-hour sections in R programming from Software Carpentry’s R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis. Our usual in-person workshops have a capacity of 30 learners and a typical waitlist of 20. Our attendance for the online course ranged from 30-50 with a waitlist of 250. Our learners primarily consisted of UCLA graduate students in business analytics and social sciences.

Outlining a Successful Virtual Software Carpentry Workshop on Zoom

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Software Carpentry-Day 2 Git tutorial. Instructor: Bernease Herman

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of Data and Research Scientists at the University of Washington eScience Institute and the Department of Astronomy were able to hash out and test the logistics of running a four-day Software Carpentry Workshop with 20 participants using only Zoom and slack. The following is an outline of what worked for our group with added context.

Learners' Experiences from South Africa's Online Workshop

Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

COVID-19 has had an impact on in-person meetings globally, and South Africa’s Carpentries workshops are no exception. Under an ongoing national lockdown, tertiary institutions are closed leaving students without access to internet and computer laboratories. The General Household Survey of South Africa (2018) indicated that only 10.14% of households have access to internet at home.

There is a silver lining, some universities have stepped up to bridge the digital divide and are offering access to laptops and mobile data for students to continue the academic year online (on loan or reduced prices). SADiLaR used this ‘chopportunity’ to host its first three-day Online Data Carpentry Workshop from May 5-7. Six learners from South Africa and the United Kingdom attended the online workshop, which covered Data Carpentry’s R for Social Scientists curriculum.

Announcing a New Series of Online Workshop Themed Discussions

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As work on The Carpentries Online Workshops Pilot continues, The Carpentries is launching a new series of monthly themed discussions, led by members of The Carpentries Core Team. The goal of these calls is to discuss ongoing work around online workshops — from changes to workshop registration to best practices in using technology to manage the shift to online-only workshops.

Additionally, these themed discussions will allow time for direct communication with our community on experiences, learnings, challenges and questions arising from online workshops.

Learnings from the First Centrally-Organised Online Workshop of 2020

Thu, 14 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Make sure to consult the official online workshop recommendations for preparation. They played a large role in our being able to achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS)¹ of 75 in the Carpentries post-workshop survey. Our workshop was conducted online for Genentech. It started in the last week of April and took place over a two week period, with class being held approximately two hours every other day. The workshop covered plotting and programming in Python, Unix Shell, and Git/GitHub.

Organising Online Carpentries Workshops

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As The Carpentries Core Team continues to transition to offering online workshops, the Workshop Administration Team would like to share additional information pertaining to Instructors to help you prepare for your workshops. Information shared in this blog post is a supplement to the Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online. Most importantly, we want to update Instructors on a few logistical workflows we have changed to support online workshops.

Registering your Self-Organised online workshop

Please be sure to register your Self-Organised workshop, as you begin planning your Carpentries online event. It is important that you use a unique workshop ID so that we can add your workshop to our database and provide the proper communications to you.

Having a Great Online Learning Experience: A Guide for Students

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the Sydney Informatics Hub/Darya Vanichkina’s blog.

With the advent of COVID-19 we’re all having to do the unthinkable, which for an instructor like me means moving hands-on, practical coding workshops online. In this post, I’ll outline a few key things you can do as a learner to have what is hopefully the best possible experience attending synchronous online training.

Scaffolding Installation for Online Workshops

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Installing software is hard!

If you have been involved with a Carpentries workshop (or any technical workshop!), you have probably noticed that ensuring learners have a working installation of the tools that will be used can be a significant challenge. Installing software is an acquired skill, and troubleshooting the installation process often requires some of the very skills that we teach in our workshops! Some Instructors pre-empt these issues by offering an “installation party” the evening before the workshop - however, folks who have the least experience with software installation are the least likely to recognise how challenging it can be, and therefore often the least likely to show up for these installation help events.

Mapping & Planning a Live Coding Workshop for Digital Delivery

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This series of two blog posts was originally posted on the Sydney Informatics Hub blog here & here, and at Darya Vanichkina’s blog here & here. These posts were written in preparation for an ARDC Community call, where I shared my experience adapting our team’s training for online delivery at short notice. This is what I wanted to get out on the page and not talk about, because in my talk I instead focus on the “bigger picture” aspects of the training (pedagogy, design, on-stage activity and feedback), and on the personal experiences of my team and I. The video/slides of that talk are also available online.

Running University College London's First Online Git Workshop

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on University College London’s blog.

Tl;dr: We successfully ran a 3-hour workshop for 11 learners with one instructor and five helpers. We used Blackboard Collaborate as our main tool and shellshare to “look over the shoulders” of the learners.

Our team has been running training workshops since its start. Enabling researchers to make better software is one of our core goals. Most of our training benefited from The Carpentries’ methodology and material. We were early adopters and supporters of those - UCL became one of the first affiliate institutions of the Software Carpentry Foundation.

Lessons Learned from Running Code Refinery's First Online Workshop

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the CodeRefinery website. In the CodeRefinery project we teach research software engineering tools and workflows, using the Carpentries style.

April 7-8, 2020, we gave our first online workshop on introduction to Git (2 x 3 hours) with 22 participants and we plan to deliver many more such workshops on a number of topics based on our lessons.

The workshop went well. Online feels slower, but has a different set of advantages (we discussed later whether we actually covered significantly less than during an in-person workshop and we were not sure the pace was actually slower).

Official Guidelines (V1) for Taking Your Carpentries Workshop Online

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On March 17, The Carpentries convened a Task Force to address the urgent demand for remote Carpentries workshops as communities have shifted to distance work across the globe. The Task Force concluded on April 1, with an initial set of guidelines for teaching, supporting, and communicating about fully remote versions of all Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry workshops.

Task force members:

Angelique Trusler (Task Force Lead)
SherAaron Hurt (Workshop Administration Team Lead)
Serah Njambi Kiburu (Community Development Team Lead)
Karen Word (Instructor Training Team Lead)
Juan Steyn (Executive Council Liaison)
Elizabeth Wickes (Secondary Executive Council Liaison)

The guidelines for teaching these pilot-phase workshops now have a home on [The Carpentries website]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/online-workshop-recommendations/). We expect to update these guidelines regularly, and will announce major changes to the community. We also plan to host themed Discussion sessions and, ultimately, to offer short training opportunities for current Instructors who wish to advance their teaching skills online. We do not yet know whether online instruction will become a permanent addition to The Carpentries’ supported workshop offerings – this will be evaluated in view of the feedback we receive once in-person workshops become possible again.

More Community-Contributed Tips for Teaching Online

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We recently published a first round on community-contributed tips for teaching online. Today, we are publishing the second and final round of tips from our community members.

As communicated by Omar Khan on TopicBox on 26 March, The Carpentries has now set up a COVID-19 Response Task Force, and a more elaborate set of recommendations will be shared by its members in the coming weeks.

This post has been made possible by contributions from Julie Vecchio, Hanna Varachkina, Darya Vanichkina, Angelique Trusler and two anonymous contributors. Thank you!

Tips for Teaching Online from The Carpentries Community

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In The Carpentries #general Slack channel on Friday, 13 March 2020, several community members were discussing different approaches to employ in collaborating online, and specifically around curriculum development and teaching workshops. Lex Nederbragt and Laura Acion had a great thought to consolidate experiences in teaching and learning online from members of The Carpentries community, and share this in a more accessible space for others to read and adapt them for their needs. In the wake of COVID-19 and due to stringent measures taken to help curb its spread around the world, remote teaching and learning is quickly becoming a priority for institutions around the world. Acting on Lex’s and Laura’s suggestions, we put out a call asking The Carpentries community to share from their extensive experience in teaching and learning online.