The Carpentries Partnership

The Challenge

Support for digital research skills trainers is often unreliable and insecure. To solidify this support and help create deep and broad skills programs, organisations must understand the specific and measurable benefits their training brings. This project will provide objective and reliable information on the net positive value and impact of competent trainers to institutions and research in general.

The Response

The ARDC Carpentries Partnership brings together a range of people from across the research community who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.

The Carpentries’ Instructor Training is a globally recognised train-the-trainer program. Facilitating access to the program has been part of the ARDC’s larger effort to uplift digital research skills for Australian researchers. 

The ARDC has taken out a Carpentries membership on behalf of partner organisations across the country. This cuts red tape for organisations in providing access to trainer certification.

The Carpentries offers not only top-quality material but a top-quality experience. It is so easy to get involved! And for the same reason, in my opinion, there is so much willingness to improve it, every day. I believe this is their differentiating factor: they will welcome you, regardless of how (or if) you want to contribute.

Dr Valentina Hurtado-McCormick, certified Carpentries Instructor and community member

Who Will Benefit

With access to best-practice training expertise, Australian researchers will gain a competitive advantage through support from flourishing national eResearch and infrastructure trainer communities. Smart collaborative strategies to provide training virtually and on a greater scale will give more Australian researchers the support they need to use and benefit from digital research and data infrastructure.

A long-term survey has shown that researchers who have taken a Carpentries workshop became more productive. They have also used skills learned at the workshop to advance their career. Read the full analysis of the survey.

The Partners

In 2022, the ARDC took out a Platinum Carpentries membership. Through the membership, there were 104 enrolments in The Carpentries’ Instructor Training program from 13 organisational partners. 

We’ve signed on for the 2023 Platinum membership with 5 trainers, 2 from the ARDC, and one each from AARNET, QCIF and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.

Our partners include 2 major training service providers (QCIF and Intersect), NCRIS infrastructure (AARNet), significant HPC centres (Pawsey and NCI) and universities from across Australia. We have recently had success bringing in smaller research institutes including AIMS and the Burnet Institute. 

Our current priority is to have more NCRIS facilities join the partnership.

Target Outcomes

For trainers and researchers

• Instructors certified in internationally recognised Carpentries pedagogy
• Refresh of active Carpentries Instructors participating in a vibrant local community
• Shared language of trainer efficacy across the trainer community
• Access to international collaborative open-science networks

For organisations hosting training

• Scalable skills delivery to the researchers who need it
• Strengthened regional relationships across Australia and New Zealand
• Host and participant onboarding and support for establishing workshop programs

Key Resources

For interested participants, view the Instructor Training workshops calendar and curriculum.

For organisations hosting training, read The Carpentries’ checklists for hosting workshops.

Learn more about The Carpentries. Read a tipsheet for those getting started in The Carpentries community.