QCIF has upgraded its membership of The Carpentries from silver to platinum level, resulting in more instructor training places for 2021.
QCIF will have 19 instructor training spots this year, up from only six last year. This will provide a lot more opportunity to upskill our team of trainers and expand our training courses for researchers.
All QCIF eResearch Analysts (eRAs) will be trained if they are not already qualified — almost all are, but a new JCU-based eRA has recently joined the team and QCIF expects a new USC-based eRA to be joining soon. Many of QCIF’s casual instructors and some QCIF Bioinformatics staff will also be trained.
A number of instructor training places will also be made available to staff from QCIF Member institutions to further support their university’s digital skills training capacity.
Last year, QCIF ran 21 Carpentries workshops attended by nearly 600 people. This included our two most popular workshops of 2020: R for Reproducible Scientific Research, and Plotting and Programming with Python.
As part of the platinum membership (the highest Carpentries membership level), QCIF is providing two Carpentries instructor trainers to support the global organisation. QCIF Skills Development Manager Dr Mark Crowe and Masami Yamaguchi, a Griffith University librarian, are able to train and assess new instructors in Carpentries’ teaching methods.
As well as training 19 QCIF instructors this year, Mark and Masami will collaborate with other Australasian instructor trainers to run workshops and post-workshop qualifying activities for new instructors across the region.
Masami was recently elected to The Carpentries’ Executive Council, its top governance body.
The Carpentries is a non-profit organisation teaching foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.