2021 Report. Another year together, and we go for more!

Nicolás Palopoli, Paola Corrales, Violeta Roizman
15/02/2022 13 min read Institutional

MetaDocencia was born in March 2020 to support teachers and students who needed to take education to virtual environments urgently and with few tools. After travelling a long path, we reach the end of 2021 as a mature and expanding community. It has been the year in which our initial proposal was consolidated with the invaluable contribution of each person in our team and the love from everyone who was touched by our initiative. Our intention is still to accompany each person that is dedicated to teaching, understanding that contexts of isolation intensified limitations in accessibility and inclusion both for students and teachers alike. We keep our mission and vision as aguide in the search for socializing practical tools for online teaching that are also useful in the traditional classroom. Facing an uncertain reality, this 2021 taught us not to give up and later rewarded MetaDocencia with the necessary backup to keep trusting in our proposal and securing its continuity for the next two years.

All of us in MetaDocencia want to thank everyone in our team and each person that received and amplified our initiative. While we take advantage of summer in the Southern hemisphere to complete planning of what’s next, let’s review here everything that happened to our wonderful community during 2021.

Summary of the 2021 Report as slides presentation:

We consolidated a large and active community

We started the year with our periodic group meetings. Core team members, contributors and advisory team members discussed planning and task distribution, improvementes to governance and infrastructure. Towards the end of the year we renewed the commitment of our team, with many people still participating in 2022 and new members among our collaborators and advisors.

Like in 2020, teachers embraced our project in 2021. More than 2000 teachers from 30 countries in all continents except Antarctica showed interest. In 2021, more than 370 educators took our courses, which allowed us to exceed 1000 students that learned with MetaDocencia since our first days. Participants come from diverse disciplines with a larger proportion of STEM teachers in 2021. Taken together, those who took part in our courses teach more than 65,000 students!.

We received support to secure our continuity

During our meetings in January we celebrated receiving the first big grant to our activities, after being selected in the first cohort of the Code for Science and Society Event Fund. CS&S is a public charity in the United States of America with global reach, that provides services and support to technology-oriented communities dedicated to open and sustainable initiatives of public interest. Its support, with funds provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, allowed us to recognize some of the tasks that our team volunteered to do. This support extended through the year and in September we were selected in the second cohort of the CS&S Event Fund, which will help us to offer our courses and improve their accessibility during 2022.

The support from CS&S extended beyond their grants. In September, MetaDocencia was accepted into the CS&S fiscal sponsorship program which opened the door to new relationships, resources and funding opportunities from other organizations. This sponsorship was essential to apply and, in November 2021, receive a new grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. This is a major step in our history. We’ll have funds available to offer new editions of our traditional courses, generate more courses and resources, improve accessibility to our contents, work on our internal procedures and organization, etc. We’ll have the freedom to keep our values and decide how to work towards the fulfillment of our objectives, with the confidence to dispose of the necessary means to keep it for the next two years. We further describe this process in this post in our website, also published on the CS&S blog.

Since 2021 we have an account in Donorbox that allows us to receive donations. Among the contributions we received are funds collected by Greg Wilson, programmer, author and educator, through his web seminar Managing Research Software Projects. Many thanks to Greg and all the people and institutions who gave us their support!

We met in many courses, old and new

Since March 2020, withouth counting ‘a la carte’ editions, MetaDocencia has offered more than 70 editions of its courses.

On February 26th we had the first edition in 2021 of our renewed course Introduction to Online Teaching Essentials. We held 20 editions of our hallmark course, with 397 people attending over the year. Besides, in 2021 we offered new courses centred in more concrete concepts and tools. We started March with the course How to teach programming online, which presents techniques and good practices to design and implement programming courses, including useful tips to get feedback and evaluate students. Its 6 editions in 2021 gathered 97 participants. Also in March, we had the first edition of the Zoom Workshop. Its 5 editions were attended by 63 people who became familiar with the options and tools offered by Zoom to provide a comfortable and friendly spacein an online synchronous event. We also offered 1 edition of our course Creating interactive tutorials with {learnr} package for 26 people and organized in May 2021 together with the R in Buenos Aires community. We taught how to use the {learnr} R package to build interactive tutorials, answer questions and get feedback.

For the second year in a row, during four days from August 14th to 21st 2021, four members of the Core Team offered The Carpentries Instructor Training course organized by MetaDocencia, dedicated to ‘train the trainers’. As a result, 19 participants were certified as Instructors in the international initiative The Carpentries, which seeks to teach programming and data science skills to researchers. We presented our experience in the article Teaching to teach between communities in Spanish, also available in the Carpentries blog.

Moreover, in November 2021 Yanina Bellini and Paola Corrales offered the workshop From Spreadsheet to R at the Research Software Camp: Beyond the Spreadsheet of the Software Sustainability Institute. Materials from this course are available on github with a CC-BY license.

We had a constant online presence

Social networks are the main global channel of communication for MetaDocencia. We are still very active on Twitter, where we added 795 followers who reacted to 269 tweets in 2021. We are about to reach 2,000 followers! Our YouTube channel had 105 new subscribers for a total of 176. Among the 10 public videos uploaded in 2021, the Intro al ABC para enseñar online 2021 (like most videos, in Spanish), with 196 views, take the spotlight (the top video is still tje 2020 version of this course, with 695 total views). You can also review, among others, the video from our course Cómo enseñar a programar online, with many useful tips even as a pre-recorded course. Our Slack space remains as the meeting point for the community and facilitates the internal organization. It has been joined by 611 participants (239 joined in 2021) who collectively sent 16384 messages between last January and December. In 2021 we opened accounts in almost all widely adopted social networks. We are present in Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. During 2022 we’ll make better use of these ways to keep in touch.

Our team added to the website 9 original articles (6 originally in Spanish and 3 also translated to English, with simultaneous publication in blogs of other organizations). The articles gather advice, tutorials and some experiences from our community.

We were part of many virtual events

As part of our communication efforts, during 2021 we aimed at being present in different conferences, events and meetings linked to technology, software and education. While we wait for 2022 to bring new opportunities to meet in person, below we provide some highlights from our participation in virtual events during 2021.

We received beautiful messages

MetaDocencia is a beloved community from its very first day. The post-course surveys and our social networks reward us with constant demonstration of affection and appreciation for our work. Some people recognized our activities during their online presentations (for example, Dario Taraborelli and Malvika Sharan). We are grateful for your love and support!

Below are some nice messages we received in English on Twitter. Many more are highlighted in the Spanish version of this post.

Many partner communities

We at MetaDocencia highly value the interaction with other communities. In 2021 we bonded with the community of Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science Latin America to amplify our activities and jointly organize two editions of our courses for participants within their community. We also communicated the work offers from the Mumuki project that teaches programming skills and discussed the possibility of organizing courses together. We gave a {learnr} workshop for the community of R Users of Buenos Aires (Argentina). With this community and the R Users Group of Accra (Ghana) we shared our videoconference resources. We organized special editions of our course ‘Introduction to Online Teaching Essentials’ for staff of the Ministry of Tourism of Argentina and for educators in the Chamber of Commerce of Rosario (Argentina).

These communities join others that remain close to MetaDocencia in 2021. INTA Anguil has provided us with support and resources since the start of MetaDocencia. Part of our team actively participates in R-Ladies Buenos Aires and in the organization of the conferences LatinR and useR!. It was also the second year of partnership with NerdearLA. And we are always supported by the wonderful open educational materials shared by Greg Wilson, R-Studio Education and The Carpentries.

We have plans for 2022 – and beyond!

The renewed commitment of our team together with the funding received allow us to sustain the infrastructure and activities of MetaDocencia for the next two years. The main achievement of MetaDocencia is the group of people that it nurtures: we will keep caring for the existing community throughout our future initiatives. Just like 2021 was a year of settlement, in 2022 we will reach for improving our working procedures to go along the expansion and amplification of our proposal towards the community. The Core Team is already working in improving our governance, defining roles and taks, enlarging our work team, building the 5-year strategic plan, and more. We will collect our expertise in a series of guidelines to allow others to replicate our experience. We will keep the efforts started during 2021 to clarify the implementation of the Code of Conduct, secure the accessibility to our class materials and forms and give more attention to diversity, equity and inclusion, with a local flavor. In 2022 we will present new courses, with specialized reach and the typical objective of learning and improving our way of teaching. We will have new Open Science resources available, not only in Spanish but also in Portuguese. We will still take part in congresses, meetings and events of interest, connecting with more communities and iniciatives with shared values in the region.

Shared joy is doubled; shared pain is halved.

MetaDocencia grew with your participation during 2021. See you also in 2022, to keep building in community!

informe reporte MetaDocencia
Nicolás Palopoli
Nicolás Palopoli
Co-Executive Director and Advisory Committee
Paola Corrales
Paola Corrales
Coordination
Violeta Roizman
Violeta Roizman
Impact Measurement
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