In the wake of COVID-19 in early 2020, The Carpentries community came together to share experiences, tips, and best practices for teaching online. This page lists all the resources developed and links to ongoing conversations by The Carpentries Core Team and community on different platforms.
The Carpentries convened a Task Force to address the urgent demand for online Carpentries workshops as communities have shifted to distance work across the globe. The Task Force concluded its work on April 1, with an initial set of guidelines for teaching, supporting, and communicating about fully online versions of all Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry workshops.
- Official guidelines and recommendations for teaching pilot-phase Carpentries workshops can be found here on The Carpentries website.
- April 24, blog post with information about cloud instances that are now available as backup for learners in Carpentries workshops with installation issues
- April 28, blog post with information to guide Carpentries Instructors as they teach workshops remotely.
- FAQ For Workshop Coordination can be found here on The Carpentries website.
- Announcing a New Series of Online Workshop Themed Discussions. Learn more here
- Carpentries Handbook: How to use Zoom Rooms
Carpentries community members have written many blog posts and facilitated several webinars on this topic and they are listed below. If you are looking to write a blog post on your experiences from online workshops, check out the blog post prompts section.
- Elizabeth Wickes on March 12, Tips for Live Teaching Tech Online, Deeply Informed by The Carpentries
- Collaborative blog posts by Carpentries community in March 2020 as a result of this call for contributions
- Radovan Bast et al April 20, Lessons Learned from Running Code Refinery's First Online Workshop
- David Perez-Suarez on April 21, Running University College London's First Online Git Workshop
- Darya Vanichkina on April 23, Mapping & Planning a Live Coding Workshop for Digital Delivery
- Darya Vanichkina on April 24, Having a Great Online Learning Experience: A Guide for Students
- Radovan Bast, Flavio Calvo, Richard Darst, Anne Fouilloux, Pavlin Mitev, Hasti Narimanzadeh, Pedro Ojeda May, João M. da Silva and Thor Wikfeldt on 14 April, Lessons learned from running our first online workshop
- Sarah Stevens on 12 May, Running a Virtual Social Carpentries Meetup in UW-Madison
- Charles Guan, Rachel Lombardi, Akshay Paropkari, Donny Winston on 14 May, Learnings from the First Centrally-Organised Online Workshop of 2020
- Samar Elsheikh, Caroline Fadeke Ajilogba, Martin Dreyer, Angelique van Rensburg on 28 May, Learners' Experiences from South Africa's Online Workshop
- Jane Koh on 15 June, Outlining a Successful Virtual Software Carpentry Workshop on Zoom
- Ibraheem Ali, Jamie Jamison, Kristian Allen, Leigh Phan and Tim Dennis on 16 Jun, Lessons Learned - Teaching Carpentries Workshop Online UCLA Spring 2020
- Daniel Chen on 26 June, Online Workshop Logistics and Screen Layouts
- Rosa Lönneborg, Omar Khan, and Serah Rono on 2 July, Lessons Learned - Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online in Sweden, May 2020
- Shoaib Sufi, Aleksandra Nenadic, Rachael Ainsworth, Lucia Michielin, Steve Crouch, Mario Antonioletti, Giacomo Peru on 10 July, The Software Sustainability Institute's Guidance for Running Online Training
- Richard Darst and Naoe Tatara on 26 August, Report from the Mega-CodeRefinery Workshop
- Jannetta Steyn on 24 September, Running Newcastle University's First Online Software Carpentries Workshop
- Jannetta Steyn, Benson Muite, Marissa Griesel, Maggi Mars, Lactatia Motsuku, Varshita Sher, Marissa Griesel, SamuelLe Lelièvre, Angelique van Rensburg on 7 October, Lessons Learned - Data Carpentries Workshop for SADiLaR (August 31, 2020)
- Selorm Tamakloe on 13 October, Reflections on my First Data Carpentry Workshop
- Ariel Deardorff, Reid Otsuji, Stephanie Labou, Tim Dennis, Khue Duong, Elizabeth McAulay, Leigh Phan on 22 October, Teaching a Library Carpentry Workshop in Southern California (and the Virtual Yonder)
Review these if you are looking to write about your teaching experiences:
- How many learners were in the workshop and were they distributed locally (if locally, where?) or globally?
- What other important contextual information can you give about the workshop?
- When was it held, over what period of time?
- Which lessons were taught?
- Were there asynchronous portions or was it all live
- If there was an asynchronous element to your workshop, did you create any resources that you can link to / share with the broader Carpentries community?
- How many instructors and helpers were there? What were the roles?
- What worked well for this workshop? Were there specific technologies or tools that you used that you would recommend? Please describe how the tools were used and what you would recommend in terms of their usage.
- What challenges came up during the workshop. These can be challenges in teaching online or general challenges (It is important to know what aspects of the workshop experience remains the same regardless of online or in-person)
- In migrating the content of the workshop online, what did you learn? Were there portions of the curriculum that were easier to modify for hosting online?
- What do you wish you had known or considered before the workshop? What preparation would have been helpful in delivering the workshop?
- Which resources (e.g. blog posts, carpentries recommendations) did you use prior to the workshop
- Were they helpful?
- How would you adapt the resources post workshop.
- Would you be willing to share your experience briefly in a Themed Discussion session around running online workshops in the future? If yes, we would afford you a 5-15 minute slot to share your experiences. How much time would you need?
- Jason Bell on February 27, Virtual Software Carpentry Workshops - key learnings to make it a success
- Darya Vanichkina on April 7, Jumping into digital: Lessons learned while moving live-coding workshops online
- Themed Discussions: Online Workshop Series
- Session One, 1 June 2020
- Planning/registering your online workshop - Led by Deputy Director of Workshops and Meetings, Sher! Hurt: Link to Recording
- How to fill out the workshop template to set up your website correctly for online workshops - Led by Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer, Zhian Kamvar, PhD: Link to Recording
- How to use Zoom for online workshops - Led by Quality Assurance Manager, Maneesha Sane: Link to Recording Discussions on Discourse by The Carpentries Instructor Trainer community.
- Session One, 1 June 2020
- CarpentryCon @ Home sessions
- on July 15 by Angelique van Rensburg and Serah Rono - Carpentries Instructors' Experiences from Teaching Online - Session One
- on July 23 by Kelly Barnes and Sher! Hurt - Carpentries Instructors' Experiences from Teaching Online - Session Two
- UK Software Sustainbility Institute's guidance for running online training events
- Laura Czerniewicz on March 15, What we learnt from “going online” during university shutdowns in South Africa
- Greg Wilson on March 24, Teaching Online at Short Notice
- Strategies for addressing unequal technological access from the University of Cape Town
- Lex Nederbragt on April 2, Scaling participatory live coding in an undergraduate computational biology course
- Detailed guide from the University of Cape Town on low-tech online teaching resources
- MetaDocencia, an educational community for teaching Spanish-speaking teachers to teach online. If you know Spanish-speaking teachers that could be interested in this new community of practice, share this report with them.
- Daniel Stanford on March 16, Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All
- CodeRefinery's manual on using Zoom for online teaching
- March 17, Is COVID-19 virus demanding alternative software carpentry workshop delivery options? discussion on TopicBox
- April 6, Post-workshop eval questions related to online delivery? discussion on TopicBox
- April 16, Discussion under David Perez-Suarez' post in the #general Slack on his experiences from running an online workshop
- April 22, Discussion under Lex Nederbragt's post in the #instructors Slack channel over tips for participatory live coding online
- May 14, Discussion on using online sticky notes for feedback in the #general Slack channel.
- May 25, Discussion on using HackMD when teaching online workshops
- May 28, Discussion on using Zoom Breakout Rooms during online workshops