BAMOS
Jun 2018
Research corner
with Damien Irving
Collaborative lesson development
If you’re a regular reader of this column, you’ve no doubt
heard me talk about The Carpentries—a global community
committed to teaching foundational computational and data
science skills to researchers. Hundreds of Software Carpentry
and Data Carpentry workshops are held around the world every
year, which is a monumental effort for an initiative that only got
started in earnest about five years ago.
While these workshops have had a massive impact on the
computational literacy of the research community, in my
opinion the most revolutionary thing about The Carpentries is
not what we teach, but how we teach it. More specifically, the
revolution lies in what we do in the background to develop and
maintain our lessons. When a volunteer instructor is preparing
to teach a workshop, they have an extensive collection of open
and easily accessible lesson materials to select (and edit/adapt)
from. Unlike a static textbook produced by a small group of
authors, these lessons are continually refined and updated by
a large and diverse community of contributors, which means
they are (by a wide margin) the state-of-the-art lessons in their
discipline.
This process of community lesson development is probably
best explained by reflecting on my own personal experience.
I participated in The Carpentries instructor training program
back in 2013, which among other things gave me a grounding
in various evidence-based best-practices of teaching (i.e. an
understanding of the fundamental pedagogical principles
underpinning the lessons). Upon teaching my first few
workshops, I started to contribute back to the lessons by fixing
typos and other minor issues identified by participants. As I got
more experience with teaching the materials, I started to make
more substantive contributions, proposing and participating in
re-writes of entire sections. Now with over twenty workshops
under my belt, I’m writing a whole new set of Data Carpentry
lessons specifically for atmosphere and ocean scientists (see
here for a sneak peek).
The contrast between this process and that typically followed
by university lecturers could not be starker. While contributing
back to the The Carpentries lesson materials can be tedious at
times, it is much less work (and results in a far superior product)
than if I had to develop the materials for my workshops myself.
Most lecturers get some hand-me-down materials from the
staff member that went before them (if they’re lucky), and then
they’re on their own. What’s more, anything they learn about
teaching their discipline better has little impact beyond the
four walls of their own classroom.
By following a community-based approach to lesson
development similar to that pioneered by The Carpentries, it’s
not hard to imagine that the quality of teaching at universit ies
could be improved, while at the same time saving substantial
time for lecturers. For instance, I can think of at least five
universities that teach detailed courses on the weather and
climate of Australia. It would be great to see the teachers of
these courses work together (perhaps facilitated by AMOS) to
collaboratively develop and maintain a set of lesson materials.
Of course, one critical topic I’ve skipped over here is all the
ingredients required to make community lesson development
work. What platforms are best for hosting the materials?
What do you do when people disagree on the direction of
the lessons? How do you structure the lessons for ease of use
and contribution? To try and assist people with this, a bunch
of Carpentries people (myself included) got together recently
and published Ten Simple Rules for Collaborative Lesson
Development (Devenyi et al., 2018). It distills everything we’ve
learned over the years and is hopefully a useful resource for
anyone thinking of giving it a try.
Devenyi GA, Emonet R, Harris RM, Hertweck KL, Irving D, Milligan
I, Wilson G (2018). Ten simple rules for collaborative lesson
development. PLoS Computational Biology. 14(3), e1005963.
doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005963
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