About this project

With support from the R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee, The Carpentries is working on developing tools and resources to make it easier to create, teach, and learn programming, data analysis, and data visualization.

With this project, we aim to develop infrastructure and resources for open educational materials based on educational pedagogy, accessibility practices, and the experiences of The Carpentries. These resources will promote effective educational practices, enable collaborative development, make materials accessible to learners and teachers, and allow people developing curriculum and educational resources to focus on content rather than infrastructure.

One of the first steps of this project is to write an R package that relies on existing tools (such as knitr and rmarkdown), to make it easier to compose, render, and deliver teaching materials. This package, tentatively named lessondown, will facilitate the development of consistent teaching resources. By providing the technical framework for developing quality teaching materials, we seek to encourage collaborative lesson development by letting authors focus on the content rather than the formatting, while providing a more consistent experience for the learners.

To get more information on what we plan to work on, you can read the proposal we submitted to the R Consortium ISC.

We are in the early stages of this project. We will post updates on this website, and we welcome ideas and feedback that you can submit as GitHub issues.