Development of Lessons

Contribute to existing lessons

The Carpentries lessons are collaboratively developed - anyone can contribute and we receive contributions daily. All of our lessons are on GitHub and creating an account is required to contribute directly to the lessons. To fix a typo, correct an error, clarify an example, or otherwise suggest an improvement to an existing lesson, you can file an issue on the lesson’s GitHub repository. For typo fixes and error corrections, pull requests are also welcome! For suggestions, and to propose large-scale changes, please start a conversation through an issue rather than putting in a pull request. This gives the lesson Maintainers and the rest of the community an opportunity to discuss the suggestion before you’ve done all of the work. If you’re not familiar with GitHub, you can also submit a comment or question through one of our communication channels.

If you are looking for a place to start contributing to our lessons, the Help Wanted page is a good place to start. It provides a list of existing issues that are looking for help from the community.

For more details on the workflow of how to contribute via GitHub, see this community contributed tutorial.

The Carpentries Incubator and Lab

In addition to our official lesson programs, The Carpentries also hosts a thriving curriculum development community creating and improving lessons on a wide range of topics. We provide two platforms for these community-owned lessons: The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab.

The goal of The Carpentries Incubator is to be a place for Carpentries community members to share resources in early stages of development. Any lesson that uses The Carpentries lesson template, follows our Code of Conduct, and is licensed either CC-BY or CC-0 can be hosted in The Carpentries Incubator.

The Community Developed Lessons page lists all lessons currently hosted in The Carpentries Incubator. People already familiar with The Carpentries teaching practices 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. Read more about how to contribute to these lessons in The Carpentries Incubator Proposals Repository on GitHub.

We also provide a friendly, community-supported, peer-review process for lessons. Peer-reviewed lessons are hosted in The Carpentries Lab and endorsed by The Carpentries as high-quality resources. If you are interested in having a lesson in the Incubator reviewed for inclusion in the Lab, please submit an issue to the Reviews repository.

Collaborative Lesson Development Training

If you are planning to create a new lesson, our Collaborative Lesson Development Training teaches skills and good practices to help make your project a success. The training is an ideal place to start: it will guide you through the design process and initial development of a new lesson, prepare you to work with the infrastructure we use to build accessible, open source lesson websites, and provide some advice and techniques for effective collaboration on the project.

The Collaborative Lesson Development Training page provides more details about the program and how you can join a training event.