There is a lot of material to teach software development, data manipulation, or statistical analysis for life science researchers. Unfortunately, much of it is disorganised, contradictory, or it assumes too much prior knowledge. The Carpentries teach researchers through Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops how to retrieve, view, manipulate, analyse and store their and other's data in an open and reproducible way.
To introduce the curriculum and training model of Software and Data Carpentry to ELIXIR, ELIXIR UK launched a pilot Software and Data Carpentry programme for ELIXIR. Throughout 2015 and 2016, the pilot organised a series of five Software and Data Carpentry workshops (UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and Slovenia) and provided support for additional six training workshops organised by individual ELIXIR Nodes. This pilot programme focused both on teaching basic computational skills to life science researchers, and on creating a pool of ELIXIR training instructors who would be able to run Software and Data Carpentry workshops independently. In total, the programme trained around 240 life science researchers and trainers from 13 ELIXIR Nodes.
In July 2018, ELIXIR and The Carpentries organisations have signed an agreement to extend this collaboration further, funded with the H2020-ELIXIR-EXCELERATE grant. As part of this agreement, at least 10 workshops will be hosted in ELIXIR nodes until August 2019, and a number of instructors will be trained in teaching the Carpentries' model in dedicated training sessions.
The outcomes of the project are published in F1000R: Developing a strategy for computational lab skills training through Software and Data Carpentry: Experiences from the ELIXIR Pilot action
For more information, please contact Allegra Via, ELIXIR IT (University of Rome, Italy).
The activities of this program are reviewed in a webinar.