The Carpentries Lab

Thank you for your interest in The Carpentries Lab! This repository is used to track the lessons that are aimed to be reviewed by our community. Our reviews are open, and their goal is to ensure that the lessons follow best practices in pedagogy and the general teaching practices used in Carpentries workshops.

Everyone participating in The Carpentries Lab agrees to follow The Carpentries Code of Conduct.

We are currently piloting our lesson review process, and are commiting only to review lessons by invitation. If you have not been invited to submit your lesson to The Carpentries Lab, you may still open an issue to request a review but should expect some delay in the processing of your submission.

Why The Carpentries Lab?

There is excitement and interest in the way The Carpentries teach and deliver workshops. We are developing tools and templates for lessons that have proven to be effective to format and deliver both in workshop settings and for self-guided learning.

There is also a need from learners who have participated in our workshops to explore further topics that can only be covered briefly in our 2-day trainings.

The goal of The Carpentries Lab is to be a repository of high-quality, community-reviewed, discoverable lessons. People already familiar with The Carpentries teaching practice can pick them up and teach them in meetups, in class, or in complement of a "standard" Carpentries 2-day workshop. The lessons can also be used by independent learners, outside of workshops.

This repository is the place where lessons can be submitted and reviewed for inclusion in The Carpentries Lab.

If you want to begin creating a new lesson, or transfer an existing lesson to a place where other members of The Carpentries community can contribute to further its development, please submit a proposal to The Carpentries Incubator.

Why should you submit your lesson to The Carpentries Lab?

As a lesson author, you value the feedback from reviewers, and you are interested in receiving feedback and contributions from members of the community.
You will receive a badge and banner for your lesson, indicating that it is undergoing/has passed the peer review process.
The Carpentries will publicize your lessons through The Carpentries Lab website.
You will have the opportunity to submit your lesson to The Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE). (See below for more details.)

The primary goal of open peer review in The Carpentries Lab is to improve the quality of the submitted lesson. Review in The Carpentries Lab focuses on three main aspects of a lesson:

Lesson design
Lesson content
Lesson accessibility

Authors submitting a lesson to The Carpentries Lab can expect to receive detailed feedback and suggestions to improve their lesson and make it more valuable as a resource for other Instructors.

What makes a lesson a good candidate for The Carpentries Lab?

Essential

A lesson is eligible for inclusion in The Carpentries Lab if:

it uses The Carpentries lesson template.
it conforms to our Code of Conduct.
it is licensed CC-BY or CC0.
it has been taught at least two times by Instructors who had not been heavily involved in the development of the lesson before that point.
it conforms to The Carpentries approach to curriculum development detailed in our Curriculum Development Handbook.

Preferred

A lesson is particularly well-suited to The Carpentries Lab if:

it teaches skills related to those covered by The Carpentries existing Lesson Programs.
it can be taught in 1.5, 3, or 6 hours.
it teaches open-source tools where possible.

What is the process for submitting a lesson to The Carpentries Lab?

To request a review, open an issue in this repository and respond to the prompts in the Review submission issue template
The editor will assess the submission for fit and overall quality, and assign reviewers.
The reviewers will use The Carpentries checklists and guidelines to provide feedback on the lesson.
Once accepted, the lesson will be transfered to The Carpentries Lab GitHub organization, updated to use The Carpentries Lab theme, given a URL under https://carpentries-lab.org/, and listed on The Carpentries Lab website.
If you choose to also submit the lesson for publication in JOSE, the accompanying paper in your lesson repository will be reviewed separately by their team (see below).

This process is inspired by the software review from rOpenSci

Joint Review with JOSE

When submitting their lesson for review in The Carpentries Lab, authors will have the option to also submit to the review process for learning modules in The Journal of Open Source Education. The JOSE review will take place after the lesson has been accepted to The Carpentries Lab and will focus on another aspect of the lesson repository.

Where review in The Carpentries Lab focuses on the pedagogical soundness of the lesson site and its content, JOSE will carry out a separate review of the accompanying paper. The paper consists of a paper.md file and associated paper.bib in the lesson repository, as described in JOSE's documentation for new submissions. The JOSE review may consider the extent to which the lesson has been tested, learner outcomes evaluated after those tests, action taken in response to these evaluations, and more. To ensure that the lesson meets JOSE’s standards for substantial scholarly effort, a paper accompanying a relatively short lesson may be required to demonstrate a more thorough and robust approach to lesson development when reviewed for the journal.

JOSE runs on the voluntary efforts of editors, authors and reviewers. If you would like to support the project by reviewing open source educational material submitted to the journal, please volunteer as a reviewer.

Example Lab Submissions

Our Example Lab Submissions document shows a few examples of how to submit single lessons, multiple lessons, or whole curricula. If you are unsure of where your submission fits into one of the example categories, feel free to reach out to an Editor.

svenvanderburg/reviews