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Training roundup - February 2022

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Training roundup - February 2022

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Aleksandra Nenadic

Aleksandra Nenadic

Training Team Lead

Posted on 18 February 2022

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Training roundup - February 2022

Posted by j.laird on 18 February 2022 - 4:00pm Coloured pencils in a circlePhoto by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

Updated 18 February - *new updates.

SSI Training Lead Aleksandra Nenadic has rounded up our training updates and upcoming events. If you’d like to see an upcoming workshop or an important training-related update included here, get in touch!

Upcoming training events/workshops

*The Alan Turing Institute is organising a "Data science education interest group: launch event”, 2 March 2022, 14:00 - 15:00 GMT. This interest group is aimed at addressing the skills challenges in data science and AI, and identifying good practices for education and skills provision.

*JISC Digifest 2022, 8-9 March, Birmingham and online. Bringing together the UK’s learning and teaching community to consider the next stage in the evolution of learning.

We will pilot an Intermediate Research Software Skills workshop for AstraZeneca staff over four weeks in February and March 2022. The first of the two pilot workshops will be delivered to AstraZeneca’s Research & Development department. The course follows the lesson material on “Intermediate Research Software Development in Python” from the Carpentries Incubator, developed by the SSI over the last year

Our next Research Software Camp will run from 16 - 27 May 2022 covering the topic ‘next steps in coding’. This will focus on improving computational and training skills in research software and academia. 

If you want to learn how to develop lessons collaboratively and have an idea for developing a new lesson from scratch with a group of collaborators (at least one which should be a certified Carpentries Instructor) you can learn about The Carpentries Lesson Development Pilots and apply to join. Two pilots are expected to run between March - September 2022 (see below for more information on the Lesson Development Programme). 

Updates

Below are some updates of developments in the last couple of months and what our training team is currently working on.

Collaborative Lesson Development Training is a new program being piloted by The Carpentries in 2022. It teaches the skills required to collaboratively create open source lessons using the Carpentries lesson infrastructure. The training will focus on three main topics:

  • Good practice in lesson design
  • Creating lesson websites with The Carpentries lesson infrastructure
  • Collaboration skills

This is a follow-up to the "book club" style round of study groups that the SSI was helping The Carpentries run in 2021 - which was the first attempt to support collaborative lesson development in the community. This time, the SSI are helping The Carpentries to develop a training programme similar to the Instructor Training. As part of the programme two pilot workshops will be run to train people in lesson development pedagogy (between March - September 2022) and after that (later in autumn 2022) the first trainer cohort will be trained for scaled-up delivery of the programme in the future.

Working with DiRAC, we are revising their Essentials HPC training course for new DiRAC users, and have begun assembling training materials in subjects ranging from accessing and using HPC resources to software engineering and development fundamentals.

SSI Fellow Matthew Bluteau recently ran the Intermediate Research Software Skills workshop for the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). The course taught participants how to restructure existing and design more robust software code, automate the process of testing and verifying software correctness and support collaborations with others in a way that mimics a typical collaborative software development process.

UK Carpentry community calls

Join us every fourth Monday of the month for the monthly UK Carpentry community calls where UK Carpentry instructors, helpers and workshop coordinators (or anyone involved in training tech to researchers in general and outside of the UK) get together to hear from each other and collaborate. 

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