OpenEd20

With the COVID-19 pandemic limiting travel and in-person workshops, The Carpentries systems used to deliver two-day in-person workshops no longer met the needs of our community. As early as March 2020, our community members had begun informally sharing their strategies and tips for teaching workshops online, and it had become clear that online instruction was likely to be the norm for some months to come. Subsequently, a COVID-19 Response Task Force (https://carpentries.org/blog/2020/04/taking-your-carpentries-workshop-online/) was formed to devise a plan to pilot online instruction of The Carpentries Curriculum to be implemented by The Carpentries Core Team. The plan took into account how the shift to online instruction impacted already existing processes and initiatives and resulted in a first version of “Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online”.

Over the last couple of months, The Carpentries response to online instruction expanded and resulted in, among others a second version of recommendations for online instruction. You can find the up-to-date version here: https://carpentries.org/online-workshop-recommendations/

In this talk, we aim to expound on this work and highlight various strategies we employed to support our community in the shift from in-person to online instruction. We will discuss, among other things, matters relating to:
- Community involvement, including summaries of tips for teaching online as shared by The Carpentries community;
- Infrastructure use and tips for Zoom room management, use of online software instances, developing instructions for use of new software and tools specific to online instruction;
- Instructor Training in The Carpentries and work done to develop a bonus module for instructor training and assess progress;
- how we continue to write recommendations for teaching Carpentries workshops online in a collaborative process with our community;
- how workshops are organised and run in The Carpentries, and how our support for community members varies for in-person and online workshops, including how instructors are selected to run online workshops
-Existing initiatives like the Regional Coordinators program that are key in supporting online instruction efforts in specific geographical contexts
We also hope to use this forum to invite attendees to share ideas and ask questions related to The Carpentries approach to online instruction.

Learning Outcomes:
- understand The Carpentries model for in-person workshops that has been used around the world to teach foundational computational and data science skills over the years and how this has translated in an online environment
- learn about The Carpentries' work to support our community in teaching and learning online from March 2020
- know where to find documentation and resources relevant to online instruction, including how-to guides & community forums to interact with and hear from community