Make Progress on The Carpentries Incubator Program

[kariljordan]

Goal 4 of our strategic plan is to "Facilitate the creation and maintenance of relevant, high-quality, Community-curated curricula." One of the objectives under this goal is to:

Improve the overall experience for contributors by developing accessible templates and documentation, revising existing processes and documentation for novices, and curating contribution opportunities for new contributors.

Under our current grant funding, we have specific obligations on developing The Carpentries Incubator. This includes:

• [x] Editorial process for adapting existing curriculum for compliance with guidelines and inclusion
• [x] At least 3 lessons for biologists (image analysis, machine learning and/or single cell analysis)
• [x] Demonstrated interest from the broader community in developing / contributing lessons
• [x] Minimum viable product platform, consisting of: a stable repository for lessons; an indexing system for locating relevant materials; and a clear pathway for users to submit content.
• [x] User testing of lesson template prototype.
• [x] Checklists for lesson approval
• [x] Metadata schema for lessons (consistent with TeSS)
• [x] Demonstrated engagement by the community in lesson maintenance
• [x] A plan defining a strategy to scale up the results of the pilot

(Note that our obligation is to facilitate development of at least 3 lessons for biologists (#30). The goal for the tagged quarter is one of those.)

[Edited on 2021-04-21 by @tobyhodges to merge this issue with #30] [Edited on 2021-05-06 by @tobyhodges to merge this issue with #19]

[tobyhodges]

Editorial process for adapting existing curriculum for compliance with guidelines and inclusion

We have been working on a guide for individuals with pre-exisiting lessons in other formats, summarising how to convert that material to (R)Markdown and incorporate it into The Carpentries lesson template. A pull request is currently under review to add this material as an appendix to the Curriculum Development Handbook.

At least 3 lessons for biologists (image analysis, machine learning and/or single cell analysis)

A list of lessons currently in development in The Carpentries Incubator, which are aimed at life scientists:

1. FAIR in (biological) practice
2. Workflows with Nextflow and nfcore
3. Metagenomics (shotgun) (alpha)
4. Introduction to Snakemake for bioinformatics
5. Single-cell RNA Sequencing Data Analysis
6. Statistical Inference for Biology
7. Introduction to QFeatures
8. Microbial Amplicon Analysis
9. Analysis and Interpretation of Bulk RNA-Seq Data using Bioconductor
10. Life Sciences Workshop (alpha)
11. Introduction to Bioconductor projects
12. Bioconductor data science introduction
13. EukRef PR2

(all in pre-alpha phase unless otherwise stated)

In addition, the Data Carpentry Image Processing lesson has been piloted in multiple workshops and is under further development to polish it before release.

Demonstrated interest from the broader community in developing / contributing lessons

The Carpentries Incubator currently has 83 lesson repositories, with a further 35 lesson proposals outstanding from the community. The first round of a Lesson Development Study Groups program, which finished recently, incldued 27 participants working on 18 lessons (included in the number above).

Demonstrated engagement by the community in lesson maintenance

We have been developing methods to collect information on external engagement with/contributions to lessons in the Incubator: Issues and Pull Requests opened, etc.

A plan defining a strategy to scale up the results of the pilot

A scale-up plan, combining support for lesson development, community building activity, and mechanisms to provide credit to lesson authors and maintainers, is being formalised this month and will be communicated on the appropriate channels when available.

[tobyhodges]

Editorial process for adapting existing curriculum for compliance with guidelines and inclusion

Marking this one complete now that the Adapting Existing Lessons for The Carpentries appendix to the Curriculum Development Handbook has been published.

[ErinBecker]

• [ ] User testing of lesson template prototype.

@zkamvar is leading development of the new template, which is currently going into beta testing.

• [ ] Checklists for lesson approval
• [ ] Metadata schema for lessons (consistent with TeSS)
• [ ] Demonstrated engagement by the community in lesson maintenance

Before going on leave, Toby developed a landing page for The Carpentries Incubator, and established a recurring "Incubator spotlight" feature for the blog. He also created a script for pulling engagement metrics for all Incubator repos.

• [ ] A plan defining a strategy to scale up the results of the pilot

[tobyhodges]

• [x] User testing of lesson template prototype.

@zkamvar ran alpha tests with members of the community and recently announced the first draft of The Carpentries Workbench. Testing will continue in the beta phase, but I believe we have made enough progress to mark this task completed: the prototype was alpha tested and modified according to feedback received; beta testing will be a relatively long process.

• [x] Checklists for lesson approval

We have a publicly-visible list of requirements for lessons to be accepted to The Carpentries Incubator and are piloting lesson peer review for acceptance to The Carpentries Lab. Our documentation for the peer review process includes checklists for authors, editors, and reviewers, which detail the requirements we will have for lessons to be added to the Lab.

• [x] Metadata schema for lessons (consistent with TeSS)

@zkamvar sought and received feedback from the maintainer of TeSS, and addressed that feedback in https://github.com/carpentries/sandpaper/releases/tag/0.1.1, to ensure that lessons using The Carpentries Workbench will include metadata required for inclusion in TeSS.

• [x] Demonstrated engagement by the community in lesson maintenance

We have more than 100 lessons in The Carpentries Incubator, with many having entered or completed beta testing. These beta tests involve the lesson being taught by groups who were not involved in its initial development. Incubator lessons have also received spontaneous contributions from the wider community, e.g. as "homework" in the Instructor Training checkout process, and/or in response to a lesson being featured in the Incubator Lesson Spotlight series.

• [x] A plan defining a strategy to scale up the results of the pilot

A plan has been developed within the Curriculum Team, and steps are being taken to scale up the Incubator community (Lesson Development Study Groups and the upcoming Collaborative Lesson Development Training pilots) and to ensure this growth is sustainable (lesson development co-working sessions have been scheduled in the community calendar, and we plan to introduce skill-ups for the lesson development community and automate steps of the lesson proposal and review processes).

Closing this one out. Thank you @ErinBecker @fmichonneau @MCMaurer and @zkamvar for your work on this.