Bring your own classroom to a CodeRefinery workshop
Join a CodeRefinery workshop with your own classroom and help us scale
August 19, 2024 - Samantha Wittke
CodeRefinery, supported by the Nordic e-infrastructure collaboration (NeiC), is dedicated to enhancing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) research software development practices. Our workshops aim to provide essential training in research software development, and we’re continually exploring new methods to make this learning process effective and inclusive.
A Collaborative Effort Across Borders
CodeRefinery hosts two workshops annually, supported by a wide network of Nordic universities and organizations. This collaboration helps us make Research Software Engineering (RSE) practices widely accessible and inclusive, reaching learners from varied academic backgrounds and levels. While the current network is concentrated on the Nordics, we welcome learners, instructors and organizations from all over the world to join us.
Open Source Learning Materials and Inclusive Workshops
At CodeRefinery, we believe in open access to education. Our workshop materials are freely available online (https://coderefinery.org/lessons/), and sessions are streamed live and recorded for on-demand access on the CodeRefinery YouTube channel. This supports that anyone, regardless of their location, can benefit from high-quality training.
During the workshops, we use a collaborative document that allows participants to interact with instructors in real-time. For us, the collaborative document bridges the gap between traditional in-person instruction and the virtual environment, fostering an interactive learning experience for everyone.
Scaling with Community Support: Bring your own classroom
An innovative aspect of CodeRefinery's approach to online workshops is the collaboration with local partners to scale the workshop experience while maintaining a sense of community. Local partners organize viewing rooms, either online or in-person, where learners can gather to watch the live stream, discuss the material, and collaborate on exercises. A local team leader facilitates discussions and provides learners with support and encouragement.
This setup not only scales the workshops to accommodate a larger number of learners but also preserves the interactive and community-centric atmosphere of smaller workshops. It encourages learners to learn from each other, share their experiences, and apply the skills they are acquiring in a supportive group environment. Through the support from a local team lead from the same organization, possibly even the same domain, discussions can be more comfortable and targeted on learners own work.
Local partners have the flexibility to engage in the workshop preparation and organization as much as they wish, though it is not required. This also means that a local partner can provide their learners with a full workshop experience, with possible tailored discussions, without the need for local instructors or the organizational burden of organizing a full workshop. This way, "bringing your own classroom" to a CodeRefinery workshop can also serve as a testbed for offering this type of course; if a community responds well to certain topics of the workshop, an organization could expand their own course offering based on the experiences collected with us, e.g. by adapting CodeRefinery lesson materials to their own need. We offer a one-hour onboarding session prior to the workshop to orient you on the workshop proceedings and share insights on managing a local team. This session also provides ample opportunity for questions and discussions. Following the workshop, we actively seek feedback from both learners and local hosts, including team leads. This iterative process has been invaluable in refining and enhancing the workshop experience over time.
Bring Your Own Classroom Experiences from Previous Workshops
Paula Martinez Lavanchy, TU Delft:
Our collaboration with the CodeRefinery initiative started in 2020, when we collaboratively organised a Train-the-Trainer activity and co-organizing a CodeRefinery online workshop where TU Delft researchers joined as participants and our data stewards and research software engineers joined as helpers. Since then, we have been ‘bringing our own class’ to the CodeRefinery workshops by joining the streaming of the lessons from the classroom with our participants and helpers.
The CodeRefinery initiative has helped us and benefit TU Delft researchers in several ways:
- The possibility of joining the workshops allowed us to advance with the implementation of our Vision for Research Data & Software management training and the implementation of TU Delft Research Software Policy by providing high quality and well-received training on FAIR software practices.
- The involvement of our data stewards, software engineers and trainers as helpers in the CodeRefinery workshops have also provided them with a great opportunity to continuously improve their skills and learn from this great community.
- The CodeRefinery learning materials are openly available and of excellent quality. We often refer our researchers to use them as consultation materials on our websites and/or guides.
Lisanna Paladin, EMBL:
We represent an established training entity within our institute (EMBL), and decided to present your workshop in the same way we present ours: adding your event to our calendars, having an internal registration to sort out rooms, and explaining that we will have the only role of helpers during your streamed lessons. I think that this worked well in advertising the opportunity and providing locally the essential pre-workshop installation assistance, but it posed a significant challenge: those that didn’t read carefully the workshop description on our website expected us to be the instructors and higher levels of interactivity with them. Besides this point on expectations management, I think your format really allows to reach the biggest possible audience, while also fostering the creation of local communities. We had in-room discussions during the breaks and created a local chat channel for the participants. That was used also in the following days while they were testing the skills learned on their setups. We were inspired by your format in designing ours for the BioNT project.
Candy Eugenie Charlotte Anquetil Ep Deck, NTNU:
First of all, I personally think that CodeRefinery is an excellent way to get familiar with Git. I am myself an engineer working in academia and helping other in everyday task. I took this course in 2021 and at first, I did not really know what to think about it ... I thought it was a lot of informations and I was a bit scared that I would have missed something. However, because all the materials are available online, I knew it was possible to go back and redo things if needed. As a person taking the course from home during the pandemic I thought it was a bit difficult to motivate myself all along the 6 half days. This is probably why I thought it could be interesting to organize rooms here at NTNU in order to have people sitting, talking, sharing and helping each other, ... One of the biggest challenge is to keep the whole classroom from first to last day ... I think it's impossible 🙂 I think different reasons can be cited here :
- some people are going to conferences (I had the case where someone took the 2 first days and left afterwards)
- some have teaching duties
- some are taking other mandatory courses (This might be relevant to PhDs)
- some people think they are too good and do not need to take the course and drop it (which I think is a mistake)
- some people think they are not good enough (same remark here) ... they find the path too fast but they can easily catch up during the breaks when we help onsite.
- some people here register and do not bother showing up (This is one of of the free workshop) ... or come the first day and leave then.
6 half days is time demanding. I would assume the impact would be better if we sort of organise something like what is coming up in Gothenburg (August 27-29, 2024) People taking the workshop here at NTNU ... from beginning to end (more or less) are usually super happy and enthusiastic when it ends [...] I really think people taking the course learned a lot. I would assume that in person course would definitely be more successful ... However, I understand the difficulty when the instructors come from different countries and when you want to offer the workshop for free !
Jakob Sauer Jørgensen, DTU:
I am a Senior Researcher at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). On two occasions I have participated in multi-day online CodeRefinery workshops as the local facilitator: In Oct. 2020 with a learner group of six and in Mar. 2024 with a learner group of seven, in both cases a mix of postdocs, PhD, MSc and BSc students. (I have also participated in two other CodeRefinery focused workshops on unit testing in 2021 and “Train the Trainer” in 2024.)
Both workshops were a great success. We organized a physical room with everyone around one big table attending together in a kind of hackathon style, with our employer kindly sponsoring lunch and coffee to keep us going. Through the CodeRefinery online training, my participants were taken from no or very basic knowledge of scientific coding tools and practices to using version control, unit tests and collaborative workflows in the scientific work. I can tell it has helped them in their individual projects and have also been instrumental for a joint effort of a python library we are developing together. The online lecture format with plenty of hands-on exercises worked really well. I had not tried the format with being a local facilitator before and on the first run was a bit nervous if I would be able to “answer everything” and make it a productive event. But it worked really well, there was a prep meeting before the event and lots of support throughout in the form of expert helpers checking in on us in our online breakout room as well as the ingenious collaborative document for asking questions and receiving answers live (I have adopted this technique in online workshops I have run since myself). This made my job as local facilitator very straightforward and it was my impression that participants also felt very well supported through the combination of the local facilitator as a first contact and then further online support. On the second run in 2024, there wasn’t a breakout room and no expert helper coming to see us due to a change in the teaching setup, but it wasn’t a problem as still the format with the collaborative document plus the local facilitator provided plenty of support.
I think the most challenging part for me was perhaps on the second run to facilitate the second of the two weeks, where the format had just been changed to less hands-on exercise based and more discussion based. I didn’t feel so well prepared for what was coming (to be fair I hadn’t had much time to prepare) and I think engagement from my team was a bit less that week. I think the material had perhaps just been reworked and there were some suggestions given and I could probably have prepared more – perhaps there is a way to facilitate this a bit more centrally.
In general, I believe attending these workshops as a group helped tremendously compared to attending individually (and compared to my fall back solution of teaching people individually which is always less effective due to other commitments, distractions etc.) due to being able to learn together and discuss in person with team mates.
If YOU have hosted your own classroom or have attended a local classroom at a CodeRefinery workshop, please share your feedback with us via support@coderefinery.org. We will continuously add it to this blogpost.
Many Ways to Join the Experience
CodeRefinery’s workshops are more than just educational events — they are a step towards more open and collaborative research practices. You can get involved as a learner, team leader, or local partner. We welcome your participation!
If you can’t join us directly but want to support our mission, consider becoming a CodeRefinery ambassador.
To stay updated on upcoming workshops and opportunities, visit the CodeRefinery website and/or subscribe to the CodeRefinery newsletter. Let’s work together to advance FAIR research software practices!
If you’re interested in bringing your own classroom to our next workshop, contact us at support@coderefinery.org .
References to previous blog posts discussing the approach: