The Carpentries is preparing to retire this handbook at the end of 2023. Existing content that has not already been replicated elsewhere will be relocated. See the relevant issue on the source repository for more details.

Chapter 2 Our curriculum structure

Lesson Program	Lesson	Episode
Data Carpentry	Data Organization in Spreadsheets for Ecologists	Exporting data
	Data Wrangling and Processing for Genomics	Assessing Read Quality
Library Carpentry	Open Refine	Faceting and filtering
	The Unix Shell	Automating the tedious with loops
Software Carpentry	Plotting and Programming in Python	Writing Functions
	R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles	Guardando datos

Data Carpentry lessons are domain-specific, and lessons that are taught together form a “curriculum”.

2.1 Episodes

An episode is a single block of content and renders as a single page of a lesson website. Each episode teaches a set of related concepts (for example, navigating files and directories or indexing and subsetting data). It lists measurable learning objectives related to those concepts and contains a number of challenges to assess learners’ ability to perform those learning objectives. Episodes within a lesson can be dependent on earlier episodes and are generally taught in sequence.

2.2 Lessons

A lesson is a collection of episodes that together help the learner to develop a particular set of competencies (for example, version control or data organization). Each lesson has a landing page that lists all its episodes as well as the overall learning objectives. The overall learning objectives for the lesson should be met by its episodes. Assessment of lesson-level learning outcomes is summative and can be addressed with a post-workshop survey. Lessons can be used independently and should not rely on concepts from other lessons. Lessons may have optional episodes, but lesson designers should provide a recommended structure or structures for what episodes should be taught together and in what order.

2.3 Curricula

A curriculum is a set of lessons that together teach skills needed in a particular domain (for example, genomics or geospatial research). A curriculum has a landing page listing its component lessons and overall learning objectives, and describing the data used in the curriculum. Carpentries curricula often have a narrative structure, where lessons are explicitly linked in a sequence, for example, as steps in a data handling workflow.

2.4 Lesson Collections

A lesson collection is the full set of lessons housed within a specific Lesson Program (for example, all Software Carpentry lessons), or within The Carpentries organization (including our Instructor Training and Trainer Training lessons). Lessons within a collection should match the target audience of the Lesson Program or the broader Carpentries community.