 Good morning, everybody. My name is Matias Liffus from the Australian Research Data Commons. I'd like to welcome you to this morning's webinar on the Carpentries in Australia. Before I want to write into it, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are today. For me, that is the budget people of the Noongar nation. I'd like to pay my respects to their elders past and present. Today we have three speakers, me, Tracy Teal from the Carpentries and Sean Ross from Macquarie University. We will first cover what exactly the Carpentries are presented by Tracy. Following that, Sean will speak a bit about the Carpentries at Macquarie University and how they've implemented there. Finally, I'd like to cover some of the activities that the ARDC intends to take over the next 12 months to support Carpentries activities across the country. We may have time for questions after each individual speaker, but we will absolutely have time for questions at the end if we don't during the course of the webinar. So first, I would like to introduce Tracy Teal. Tracy is the Executive Director of the Carpentries organization. She's based in the US and her first start with the Carpentries was to invent data carpentry, I suppose is why I would say it. She's still an active maintainer of a lesson while still being the Executive Director. Tracy, over to you. Okay. Thank you so much for having me on this call. I'm really excited to be a part of this webinar and all the work that MTS and others at ARDC have been doing around training and digital skills and supporting the ideas and work with the Carpentries. And so I want to take this time just to talk a little bit about what the Carpentries is and our model around scaling the kinds of skills that are important in digital research. So let's move on this call. Don't need to be convinced of this, but we now have data and tools to advance progress and address questions in science and society. And we talk sometimes about bringing compute to data or data to compute, but we really need to focus on bringing people to data. We have these tools in this computation, but we need more people that have the skills and perspectives to do this work. So the question becomes, how do we scale the number of people who can work with data? And it's not just us on this call asking this question. This is actually a survey of the most useful things that Bioinformatics Resource Australia could do. And this I believe was a survey from 2016. I lost my footer here. And I use this figure all the time and it's exciting now to be using it in an Australian context. And so in this survey, more than 50% of researchers were saying that the most important thing that they could do is offer training. And this is one of the very few times in a survey I've seen that someone wants something more than funding. And this was re-emphasized in a report with the National Science Foundation in the United States where the current unmet needs of principal investigators in biology of the top three on this list you can see are around training. So there's such a demand for training in the research space. So how do we meet that demand? And so that's what the Carpentries is looking to do. So we are an open global community teaching researchers the skills and perspectives to turn data into knowledge. And we do this through curriculum and our volunteer instructors. So we collaboratively develop openly licensed materials. So we have if you're familiar with open source, we take an open source approach to open education. So we develop all of our content online in GitHub. And so these are developed by many people. So we just released a lot of our lessons and we had I believe over 700 contributors to these lessons. So these are being used and updated constantly by the community of researchers looking to teach and learn these skills. And then we have our volunteer instructors. So along with all of these lessons we train people in how to teach. We focus on teaching them educational pedagogy and effective and inclusive approaches to teaching digital skills. And these instructors teach this content in workshops all over the world. So the way that this program works in scales is that it starts with trainers. And these trainers teach an instructor training curriculum and they teach instructor training workshops. So they're teaching these volunteer instructors how to teach. And then these instructors, they go on, they use these lesson materials and they teach workshops. And these workshops are two days. So they're short format, active learning, hands-on workshops. So the learners in the workshop really get to practice the skills and not just listen to lecture. So they're getting a real opportunity to learn in the classroom. And then these workshops go to learners. And so using this mechanism we now have more than 2,100 instructors which has taught more than 53,000 learners with almost just over 2,100 workshops since 2014. And so this is a map of where we've taught workshops over time. And you actually can see Australia is one of the places where we've had the most workshops outside of North America. And that has been a really growing community of people supporting each other in teaching and building workshops. And some of the founding of some of the library carpentry started in Australia as well, which is reaching the library information programs. So what's the impact of these workshops? So these workshops, they're just two days. We're teaching the foundational skills to work with software and data. So this is teaching Python or R, some inversion control or command line, SQL data organization. Those are some of the topics you can mix and match to teach. How is it that just after two days of teaching things like these skills that it has any impact on the learners? And one of the things that we really focus on is not that people walk away knowing every line of syntax, but that they know what's possible and they have the confidence to continue learning. So one of the things that we really assess pre and post workshop is people's confidence in the ability to use these skills. So this is our results from data carpentry workshops that focus on that data side using programming practices to work with data. And so the green dots are the assessment before the workshop. So that top one is I could write a small program to answer a question in my work. I can search for answers. I know that I should use reproducible programming practices. I can overcome a problem, be efficient, know to keep my raw data raw. And so the purple dot is that same question asked again two days after the workshop. So their confidence in the ability to write a program, search for answers, overcome problems increases a full point in just two days. And this isn't a confidence that just stays just right after the workshop. In our long term survey, more than six months after a workshop, almost 100% of people say that they are more confident now than they were before they took the carpentries workshop. And they're continuing to use these skills and they're having an impact in their work. So they're improving their overall efficiency, improving ability to analyze data, manage data. And there are a few people that are saying, you know, they're not using but the majority of respondents are saying that it has an impact in how they work. And importantly, people strongly recommend the workshops to others. And so again, this is that six months. So almost 80% of people who took that workshop have gone on to recommend it to somebody else. So these are all the workshop programs. And these have been really successful in getting learners more practice with these skills, getting them started, changing their working practices over time. But what is really has the big impact is that an institution is not just running a workshop, but to build the local capacity for training. So not just that one workshop, and then you go away and you never run another one. But what institutions are looking to do, and that we want to help facilitate, is that kind of that pyramid of the trainers and the instructors is to build that at an institution. And so we do that with our membership program. And the membership program includes instructor training, so training people at the institution to be those instructors, so that they can run local workshops, continue to engage with learners after the workshop. And importantly, to build a local capacity, a local community of practice. So local community of practice around teaching these skills, so the instructors learn to teach, they share perspectives, they talk about some technology, but then also that community of learners that can learn from each other and the instructors. So it can really change, start to change at an institution, the way that the community thinks about and works with data and code. So this is a little bit of an overview of the membership model. And I think this is something that Matiusia wanted me to touch on. So this is the mechanisms that we use that around coordinated workshops, these instructor training and helping you really build that community at your institution. So we now have more than 80 members around the world with a renewal rate at about 85%. So even as people start to train instructors, they see the impact and want to train more instructors or instructors do sometimes leave, right, graduate students and their post-docs. And so they go on to other places and that's been a professional development opportunity and they want to provide that to more people. And so again, membership is something that people really are recommending and have found has had a good and positive impact at their institution. So just to finish off, we've highlighted some of the workshops and memberships, but it's a big global community. So it's maintainers and curriculum advisory on the curriculum, community roles, discussion host, regional coordinators. So it really takes a global village to bring this all together and continue to sustain and grow the community in the program. So I just thank you so much for having me on this call and I'll take questions whenever Matiusia opens it up for questions. Thank you. Thanks for that, Tracy. Yeah, Matiusia she's in Europe, I'm Matius. Sorry. So we do have some time for questions. If you have any, there is a in the sorry, I'll turn my camera on. So in the interface we go to webinar, there is a little space where you can type in your questions. I will read them out. No questions for now by the looks of it. So we'll move on. Okay, to Sean Ross. Sean Ross is the director for data science and research at Macquarie University. And oh, hang on. Sorry, Ingrid has a question here. Sorry, Tracy and Sean. So one question. Ingrid Mason from Arnett asks, Hi, what about less specialist research infrastructure? So I think I might read into Ingrid's question a little bit. So Ingrid represents an organization that provides discipline agnostic major discipline agnostic infrastructure to universities and research organizations such as networks, cloud storage, cloud compute, things like that. Got it. Okay. So yes. So I mentioned briefly kind of right at the beginning that we have software carpentry, data carpentry, and library carpentry. So those are all sets of lessons with slightly different objectives to them. So data carpentry is kind of domain specific. It's focused on researchers working with particular types of data. Library carpentry is for the library community and information professionals. And then software carpentry is agnostic. So it's domain agnostic. So it's designed to teach people maybe with some programming experience how to use better software development practices. So it is focused on Python or R better practices there with no domain perspective. And then it also has version control and command line. If you're also in the HPC space, there's also an emerging curriculum but with an introduction to HPC. So sort of HPC in a day that also would again be domain agnostic and would be designed to teach researchers how to use their local HPC resources. Okay, great. Okay, we'll move now to Sean. As I said, Sean Ross is the director for data science and research at Macquarie University. And Macquarie University has undertaken a fairly significant approach and investment in the carpentry. So Sean, could you please tell us a little bit about that? Sure. So Macquarie University a few years ago, before I took on this role, decided to decided to leave Intersect, our state-based research organization. And as a result, we needed to pick up many things ourselves internally. And the one thing that we have that I think has been reasonable success is the training program that we implemented around software carpentry. So essentially, what we did was, if you recall the membership levels, we started at a gold level and now at a platinum level. And we began running seminars, I'm sorry, workshops, those have then ramped up to be more, you know, more frequent. We run about, we run not counting resvas, which I'll talk about in a minute, but just internal to Macquarie, we've run probably eight to 10 workshops of 20 to 40 learners each. We obstruct about 250 learners each year. And now in the last year, we've gone to the platinum membership, which means that we've also begun training or having our own instructor trainers geared up so that we can build our pool of instructors here. So we have one trainer now who's already started helping, who's also started running instructor trainer workshops elsewhere, and we'll do another trainer in the next cycle. So Macquarie has essentially gone all in on software carpentry as the mechanism for our computational literacy here. So one of the things that I'd say if you compare us to other places that offer software carpentry, what we've really done is try to emphasize the building of community and the community here. And what that's essentially entailed is that first, we found that it was really important, we found it very important to run sort of normal two-day full carpentry workshops rather than chopping them up as happens sometimes into due four hours of get or four hours of shell or some Python or some R, we tend to run the full workshops. And at the same time, we charge for them, that was partly done to control attrition in that before we started charging, we had about a 40% attrition rate and planning was, and, you know, but at the same time, we'd have a, you know, we'd have a wait list with 30 people on it who want to come to the workshop and then we'd have 40% of them not show up. So we started charging a nominal fee just about enough. I have to top it up a little bit, but just about enough to cater for the workshops. And we found that that combination of two-day workshops and having catering and making it a real event for attendees, in the feedback we've gotten, we've learned that that means a lot to the learners who come to the workshops. So, and that will feed into something I'm going to talk about in just a minute, but before I do that, the other thing I would mention is that we've been trying very hard as well to push this out to all disciplines. So I'm a historian and archaeologist. I sit in the Faculty of Arts here and I'll say we've had a, it has been challenging to get researchers, staff in the Faculty of Arts and I'd say also the Faculty of Business Economics here engaged in carpentries. The vast majority of our learners have come from the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Faculty of Medicine and to a lesser extent the Faculty of Human Sciences. And we've had, it's actually been helpful that we push the data carpentry because it sounds less intimidating to staff in the Faculty of Arts. And in the Faculty of Business and we've had somewhat more success in recruiting them to data carpentry as opposed to software carpentry. So that's another thing that we've really tried to do is push it out to all disciplines and make it a genuine campus-wide initiative. Now what we're trying to do with making the workshops more of an event focus for the learners who attend them is that we're trying to set up, we're trying to do two things. First set up a pipeline where we have people come and they're learners and after they've been learners we encourage them come back and do another workshop if you want. If you've done Python come back and do the Python and SQL web scraping one or follow on one come back do the intro to HVC if you need that or if you've done data carpentry come to R. So we encourage them to come to more workshops and then we once we have them hooked we encourage them to become helpers and then we nurture the helpers and convince them to as many as we can to become instructors and then from our instructors we recruit trainers and I think we've done a reasonably good job setting up that pipeline from learner to helper to instructor to trainer. So and then as soon as people move on to being helpers or instruction especially instructors we encourage them if they're still helpers we'll have them work with an instructor encourage them to contribute to lessons you know so that they or do other things to help to keep them a part of the community. We do joint activities with other unis and get you know get our helpers and instructors to help out with those and we're a big supporter of RESVAS research bizarre here in Sydney and you know we'll probably you know instructors from Macquarie probably you know train another or are involved with workshops training another you know 150 200 learners or more at RESVAS in addition to the ones that we train internally here oh and I will say we do we do offer training to non-Macquarie people at Macquarie kind of either on a space available basis or if outside people contact us and ask can we have 10 slots that your next training or something like that we'll often do that as well. So the first goal that we have is to establish this pipeline of helpers learner to helper to instructor to trainer the other thing we do is try to foster spin-off activities in the sense that we software carpentry has been our main vehicle for launching hacky hours user groups and also we begin we've begun to offer some more spin-off workshops that aren't software carpentry workshops but that are that came about because the people in the workshops asked for them and the most recent one of those is after some of the data carpentry in our workshops we had learners who said you know this has been really great but I really need to brush up on my on my statistics could you do something that's you know still uses are but is a little bit more focused on choosing the appropriate statistical approaches and implementing them and we recently had a workshop on on that so not a formal software carpentry but something that that spun on a spun out of our software carpentry workshops so we founded a good vehicle for a lot of for developing a software carpentry community and then also for being the launch pad for these spin-off activities so the last couple of things I'll mention is as we're going forward one you know one set of opportunities and one set of challenges that that we have keeping this going so the biggest opportunity that I think we have is that we've begun to integrate software carpentry into our some of our classes at the master's level and so Macquarie unlike a lot of Australian universities doesn't do a three-year bachelor's degree and then a one-year honours we're on the european system so we have a three-year bachelor's degree and then you go on to a to an MRes a master's research and in two faculties now in the faculty of arts and in the faculty of science and engineering we've integrated data carpentry into the into an MRes methods class that's either required or one of a couple of units that's required of the MRes students and that's run once in science and engineering in in specifically in biology ecology and related disciplines and we're that brand last semester in the semester we're running it in in arts and in those cases we break it up into instead of doing it in two days we do it like one or two hours a week over six to twelve six to twelve weeks a little bit more condensed in in science engineering a little more spread out in arts but we're we really think that this is going to be a good way to promote computational thinking and the ability to learn how to learn new new software new approaches related to technology so we think that integration into MRes classes is a real opportunity and on the other hand I'd say the biggest challenge we face is running all of this with essentially an all volunteer you know workforce because it's starting to add up to a lot of hours and we recognize our in helpers and instructors as best we can everybody gets a you know a letter from the pbcr and we give them little gifts and we try to make them feel like they're part of a community which of course they're the core of the community really but this still becomes a workload issue for for a lot of staff and hdr students who are our volunteers and as a result we do have some retention problems so far our new problems our new recruitment has been able to replace the staff who've left or just said they can't do it anymore but I would like to improve our retention of instructors over the you know over the long long term so there are some challenges around workload with an all volunteer force and what I'm trying to do is get a certain number of hours recognized officially in our volunteers workloads to compensate them recognize them for what they're doing with software carpentry so that's the rundown of what we do at at Macquarie I just I wanted to give you a pretty basic overview to make sure that we had time for for questions so happy to take questions okay Sean some questions did come in while you're speaking first off Chris McAvaney from Deakin University just wanted to clarify was that 8 to 10 workshops per year or per month that you run oh yeah we run them about it's it's gear this is a moving target we may get closer to 12 this year but that's per that's per year so we train again we're on track to probably train you know in excess of 250 learners this year and you know to give you an idea that we have about 2000 research like active staff at Macquarie plus of course HDR students plus we do open a few slots to a few slots to external people we were approached by Anstow and we'll probably you know run a training workshop for for some of their staff for example but you know we that's about the scale of it and I should say my team I'm I'm half time and I've got two part-time project managers and we're you know we're we're doing a lot a number of other things aside from software carpentry and that's probably the institutional role and institutional support for organizing them is probably the bottleneck right now we're not we're not having any trouble filling then that you know sort of any number of workshops that we want to offer I mean we do of course as we offer more we increase the variety but as soon as you know R starts to seem like okay they're not filling quite as fast you know we'll run sequel instead and then it'll be full again and then the next year new HDRs and ECRs early career researchers come in and there'll be a new you know cohort of potential learners so I think we could offer you know especially if we opened some of them up a little bit more to other unis I'm sure that we could and other organizations I'm sure we could fill even more workshops we tend to run them when I said we run 10 8 to 10 will will run those it will run a couple of them simultaneously so we actually do them like two of them for simultaneously four or five times a year because we found the admin we have to really economize on our administrative overhead and it's easier to run you know two seminars at the same time sorry workshops at the same time than it is to you know run one this week and run on another one next week so now we'll we've often started doing things like we'll run a data carpentry or an intro to R and then we'll run one at the same time that is a bit smaller and more advanced like the HBC one or the sequel one or we started to get asked to run more advanced R or our Python workshops that focus on visualization or you know some other you know subset of the of the activities you can do with the languages so so yeah sorry that was a long answer but I think it helps give you an idea of what we what we do here because we are running it really on a shoestring both in terms of funding and and support staff yep okay great thanks next question is what do you charge for your courses they have considered a small fee about ten dollars so that people show up after registering yeah we charge about twenty twenty five I think you know for for hours for two days but again we make it very clear to the you know to the to the learners that you know what you know what they're what they're you know we we charge this to reduce attrition which made planning really difficult and we spend essentially all of it on on on catering in fact I have to I have to top it up a little bit to to cover teas and and lunches but the fact that everyone sort of has their tea and you know teas and lunches together and are talking to one another it I can't it sounds like a little thing but it really makes a difference in the experience that the learners have and their willingness to you know come back and do another workshop go on to become helpers you know they they meet people they make friends it makes a big difference but you know ones we've gotten you know one or two complaints about the twenty five dollar fee but out of hundreds of learners so I think you know that it's that getting up around the twenty dollar mark is probably what you need to really reduce attrition yep okay great um now we'll probably move along we do have quite a few more questions but I think we'll save those for the end and there's a comment twenty five dollars is a pretty nominal fee for two days of training okay so now it is my turn um sorry there we go so I am a research software skills specialist at the Australian Research Data Commons and I have been working with the ARDC since the beginning of the year and one of my roles is to look at the carpentries in Australia and and see what could be done to support activity around the nation so I spent some time I spent a few months talking to various people around the country looking at data doing some investigation and saw that although there is some very healthy levels of carpentries activity in some parts of the country it's not necessarily universal now as a result of that report which will be made available we will be undertaking some activities to to boost the carpentries now what we are very interested in doing is partnering with institutions around Australia who would like to host workshops but haven't necessarily had the opportunity to do so so far we'd like to get some more instructors trained around the country as Sean said the having a stable of well sorry stable it's a poor word having a group of instructors is quite important to maintain and it's not always easy to keep them together we'd also like to support the general carpentries community in Australia now when I say more workshops around the country why is that so this is a little map that of workshops that had taken place around Australia over the past seven or eight years or so it's not complete unfortunately I do know that some workshops took place in Darwin for example adjunct sorry associated events to conferences and things like that but as you can see the real core of activity has been largely Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne with a healthy number of workshops in Perth but then there probably haven't been quite so many workshops taking place elsewhere especially the regions but also Darwin Adelaide and Hobart and Canberra too so what we would like to see is more of these workshops taking place everywhere but it can be a bit of it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation I suppose where some organizations will already have champions internally who can lobby for support financial support especially to run workshops but unfortunately not all organizations are able to do that so we will assist organizations in hosting workshops and an example of that is in fact next week the ARDC is partnering with the University of Adelaide University of South Australia and Flinders University to run a workshop there and we have arranged for some instructors to come in from outside of those universities particularly the CSIRO and we are running a workshop there as a demonstrator of what the potential of these workshops are and we're inviting potential champions potential future instructors to come along experience the Carpentries methodology and see how it could be useful for them so these workshops that we would like to help run we definitely want them to engage with the local demand for Carpentries training is and certainly anecdotally I well after after running my interviews earlier this year almost every Carpentries workshop that has been scheduled in Australia is booked out very very very quickly so I've heard in some cases you know it's two hours after being announced a workshop is fully booked and that's spaces for 40 people so I'm not really worried about there being a lack of demand that's for sure we would like to identify those local champions for the Carpentries influential researchers research support professionals who can lobby to get support from other parts of the university we would absolutely like to identify potential instructors it's not always possible to rely on the goodwill of volunteers especially from other organizations who might need to be released from their day-to-day duties to assist now we do have some organizations who are quite happy to assist but unfortunately they're not everywhere in the country and finally we are very interested to see collaborations within the institutions and between institutions to run ongoing workshops for the benefit of researchers and research support professionals in that area now in order to run ongoing workshops of course we would like to see some more instructors around Australia so this is a map of currently registered instructors that is around Australia and we can see well sorry this map is a little bit out of date because I know that there are approximately three brand new instructors in Adelaide but again there are some parts of the country that aren't quite as well covered as others and we would like to bring new instructors into the fold but also support those existing instructors to help them be released to run workshops now we are absolutely interested in supporting the existing community as well now as Tracy said not everybody in the Carpentries community is an instructor there is also curriculum that can be developed lessons to be written or updated there are people who host workshops without necessarily teaching them they take care of the logistics of finding and booking a room for a two-day workshop that can be incredibly tricky sometimes and we would also like to bring the community together so we would like to see some local events in Australia similar to the Carpentry Con that takes place every year or every two years sorry Tracy you might have to correct me on that so yeah and help people who might have some kind of curriculum that they would like to develop bring that into fruition okay so if you are interested in working with the ARDC on Carpentries related activities perhaps you would like to host a Carpentries workshop but you're unsure of where to find instructors or perhaps you would like to become an instructor but you're not sure exactly who to talk to within your organization to get that kind of thing happening please do get in touch with the ARDC we do have ARDC engagement officers for each state otherwise there is the ARDC contact us page if you are unsure of exactly who your local engagement officer is or finally you can email me and I've just realized I've completely neglected to actually put my own email address on this slide so that can be emailed out afterwards now I think we absolutely have time for some questions there's probably still about 15 minutes to go what we might do is go back to Ingrid's follow-up question that was for you Tracy so Ingrid's question here she was very particularly interested in skills on moving data knowing the speed of advanced research networks and how to handle small or many or large data files yes an important skill so we don't have curriculum focused on that in particular we do talk about sharing data and downloading data a little bit about what kind of of places you can you can put data or download data from but I wouldn't say that we focus on moving like terabyte amounts of data around any of our curriculum one of the things that Matthias just mentioned around developing curriculum is something that that we're working on too so we just have started at Carpentries incubator for the development of new lessons using this community approach so that could be the type of thing that other people especially in the HPC space would be interested in developing and then would be a resource for you or for others but it is not currently content that exists okay thank you Tracy Sean Liz Stokes from the Australian research data question at research data question research data comments has a question she's interested in knowing what the rough breakdown between staff and students is in your instructor pipeline in my in the instructor pipeline so talking it through from the beginning with learners it is majority hdrs and early career research higher degree research students and early career researchers into the instructor pipeline it has tended to be so far a mix of professional staff around the university so some from the library some from it and that's both faculty it and central it and people like the data scientist for the faculty of arts you know and I would say in fact that it's probably a bit more of a majority of professional staff who are who are instructors and then the next biggest cohort of instructors are probably postdocs here and it's actually quite important that we have the professional staff up because that offers more continuity because the postdocs may or may not you know sort of stick around you know get you know stay here and so it helps us manage our attrition somewhat we have a few hdrs students and a few other ecrs who are and I wish we had more ecrs here who were not just postdocs but continuing staff in the who are instructors and I'd like to get more of them okay great thank you Sean next question how do you market your workshops and who are the the champions that promote software carpentry so the way what we've done over the years is we kind of have a hierarchy that we go down through every time a new workshop comes up the first people that we contact are everyone who didn't get into previous workshops that because we all we we always have a backlog list again so far we do not seem to have saturated the market here even running you know eight to ten edging towards 12 workshops a year so we contact anyone who was disappointed in the past then we send it out to uh there are internal macquarie uh higher degree research and early career researcher lists they get it next and and we have a research training um website uh now that the university runs and it gets announced there so um so ecrs hdrs are next if it's not full at that point then we send it out over uh the faculty mailing you know mailing lists um we also try to make regular announcements in the uh you know in the university wide um uh uh research and research training newsletter that goes out and then sometimes staff will see that contact us and say you know put me on the wait list for the next door put me on the list to contact the next one and so for the next one and so they go on the wait list with others who missed it so yeah we go people who have either contacted us with interest or missed what weren't able to fit into a previous one then ecrs hdr then uh out to faculty announcement lists and um you know then we'll uh advertise if we have any slots left at all we'll advertise to UCID and UNSW UTS uh Wollongong everyone you know everyone else around in the neighborhood here okay great thank you Sean um next question um asking Sean have you tried a remote delivery of workshops has geography or multi-campus been an issue but i think Tracy you could possibly address that too um Sean uh we haven't tried anything like that yet uh like you know delivering them online or whatever we um the one thing that we did start at when Research Bazaar was at Macquarie last year and UNSW has continued it this year is offering bursaries for uh people from out of Sydney for the regional university we've really been making a push uh at RESBAS to involve the the regional universities okay Tracy yeah so um the instructor training we do much of that online uh so for instance having trainers in Australia and working in Australian time zones um means that they can deliver the instructor training online uh remotely uh so that works really well it's still a two-day workshop um and we use zoom and breakout rooms and taking notes to make it all interactive for workshops we haven't taught them remotely as often um but we have done it in a few cases uh and what we will do is it's important that at a remote site that there are helpers um so the workshop has instructors so those are people at the front of the room teaching the workshop um but every workshop also has helpers we try to maintain a five or six to one ratio um so you can have the instructor's teaching for instance here showing their screen doing the typing um listening to the room and having the helpers there that can help people when they run into trouble it also works better if you have a good room setup where the person who's teaching can see the room so for instance like in in this way where I can't see uh the other people it's hard as an instructor to to gauge the pace of the room but if you have one of those setups uh that lets you interact with the room a little bit better uh it can work it can work uh just a little more overhead um to get it set up and you really want to make sure your internet connection is really stable and those sorts of things okay great thanks Tracy now uh next question possibly for both of you how we can measure the impact of a workshop you want to take that Tracy sure yeah so um the the results that I showed for instance for that confidence graph um was from our pre and post workshop survey so that was aggregated results um but we have those results uh from every workshop so every we share the survey results with every host um so the students would take that and we would give you the results of that survey to see the impact so far we haven't done it where we separate out the the long-term surveys by institute but then next time we do the long-term survey we are going to ask that question so that we could potentially get some information on long-term impact as well yeah and I will just we do the before and after surveys religiously and uh we we also do the longitudinal the longer term uh surveys and we the the results we get are uh are identical to of what Tracy showed earlier so okay great now I've actually got a response to the last question about remote delivery of workshops um he says that Jason Bell from Central Queensland University has delivered a few virtual software carpentry workshops he's planning to prepare a presentation on his experiences and I'm from the wrong side of the country but I understand that CQU has a lot of campuses um somewhere close to 20 so it can be difficult for one instructor to get around or even trying to find helpers at individual campuses okay back to questions uh is there a requirement of instructors to be available to teach at any institution when requested a probably possibly one for you Tracy so the way that we connect instructors with workshops is that uh people request workshops so who's requested the workshop and then we put out a call to the instructors to see who is available to teach so instructors do like to go teach at other places it gives them a chance to visit that location sometimes just because it's an interesting place so to meet new people but sometimes also for them it's a professional development I'm interested maybe thinking about a postdoc at this location or looking for a job and so we almost never have trouble getting instructors to go teach somewhere but we don't require that instructors go travel to teach somewhere some people just can't um for their job or for whatever reasons but they're usually a pool that are interested in doing that travel yep certainly and um I am actually a software inventory instructor and from my personal experience there is a mailing list for Australia and New Zealand um where the requests will occasionally go out we'd like to run a workshop here on these dates is anybody available to come and help out with that and sometimes travel support is available but unfortunately most of times it isn't but that is one of the areas where the ARDC would like to assist potentially if we do want to get workshops happening where there are absolutely no instructors I do want to say we don't ask instructors to cover their own travel so right so if you're requesting instructors you say you know I can bring in instructors and you pay for their travel or you say I need local instructors if you don't have that travel budget it is more difficult to get instructors so like what Sean's doing right they have all the instructors at their institution already um if you're building up a new program it's great that ARDC can help with this because it can help uh seed new workshops if there isn't as much of a travel budget available yeah sorry probably a poor choice of words um yeah I just want to be sure it wouldn't come across as if we made people pay for their own volunteering yeah of course of course sorry um okay now there is another question to what opportunities are there to become an instructor so I'm not sure if there is anybody present who could answer that um but certainly um being a software acupuncturist instructor is a volunteer thing and oftentimes a very personal thing so um if you are interested in becoming an instructor um I would certainly encourage you to explore the possibilities that are available to you can uh if you can I oh sorry are you sure yep I was just going to jump in to say that when we offer instructor training at McQuarrie we always reserve a few slots for non-McQuarrie people it's and that is one thing what when you if you go to platinum level you negotiate this all with the with uh the carpentries but um there's a certain obligation to make your trainers available you know a certain amount of time and that can either be uh like our our trainer went to Perth to help with the training there a few months ago but then also when we run training on the McQuarrie campus we'll usually take five slots or something and say this is available to non you know to non-McQuarrie people right thanks for that Sean now we are getting close to the end of time two minutes left and we don't have any more questions uh although Ingrid uh from Arnett did comment favorably on this incubator exercise that you mentioned Tracy um I'd like to thank uh Tracy and Sean for giving up their time and Tracy I'm not sure what time it is where you are but thanks for either getting up early or staying up late whichever one it is uh thanks so much for you all right no more questions just lots of thank yous coming on through thank you everybody