TDCC-NES project initiative meeting: Building digital skills training and lesson development capacity

Date and time: 31 October 2024, 15.00-17.00 h
Location:  in-person at the Netherlands eScience Center
Register here

Project working title: Building digital skills training and lesson development capacity in the Netherlands NES domain

This project idea was approved for further development by the TDCC-NES Governing Board via the Bottleneck Project funding stream. The Project initiative meeting is a chance for the broader NES community to learn more about it and offer their input. 

Tentative program:
15:00 welcome + presentation about the current proposal
15:30 work in groups on the 3 work packages
16:00 return to the main room and share insights
16:30 borrel & networking

Project idea description:
Data and computational skills are essential for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. There is a need to increase digital literacy amongst researchers, but too few instructors can teach these skills. The Carpentries is an international initiative dedicated to training foundational coding and data science skills, providing well-developed open-access materials and featuring a robust instructor certification program. The Carpentries network in The Netherlands trains and fosters an active community of instructors that promote the importance of software and data in research. We propose to address the shortage of instructors in the NES domain by training 50 new Carpentries instructors, irrespective of their institutional affiliation. With these instructors we will organize 4 workshops on NES domain specific content across the Netherlands, to increase digital skills of researchers and to connect people and new instructors in local hubs. We will team-up with local coding cafés (TDCC-NES Bottleneck project) to recruit instructors, offer a platform to practice their teaching skills and to build local training hubs.

Besides training capacity, there is in the NES domain also a need to develop new training materials on digital skills. We will collaborate with coding cafes to identify current bottlenecks and gaps in the digital skills training. We will have a call for a collaborative lesson development program and pitch this at the coding cafes. Three teams of 2-3 people can join the Carpentries collaborative lesson development training to develop their own open access and reproducible lesson materials. This is a new training and will be delivered as a collaboration between the Carpentries organization and the Netherlands eScience Center. Materials from the newly developed lessons can be trialed for example at the coding cafes for feedback and fine-tuning.

Together, this program addresses both the need for improvement of digital competencies within the domain and increases training capacity.

Help us build a national network of carpentries instructors, connected in local teaching hubs, combined with more lesson programs in the NES domain.

Register to join the meeting, learn more about the project idea, contribute with your insight, and offer input for developing a full project proposal. In case you prefer to join the meeting online, please register as well and we will see if we can make the meeting available online too.