First Pilots Have Taught. Here Is What Came Back.

The first community pilots of the open science lessons are done. Feedback is coming in, lessons are getting better, and we need more instructors this summer.

In January we called for pilots. In April we reported 16 signed up. Now some of those pilots have taught, and we’re starting to see what the feedback loop actually produces.

Who Has Taught

Thank you to the instructors who ran sessions and took the time to report back:

Eight external community pilots across four lessons. Institutions in Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Virginia, California, and the UK.

None of this happens without lesson authors willing to hand their material to someone else and let it get picked apart: thanks to Fernando Rios, Jeffrey Oliver, Aditya Ranganath, Nathaniel Porter, Sebastian Karcher, Lena Bohman, Marla Hertz, and Daria Orlowska for opening their lessons to outside testing.

What the Feedback Looks Like

Nathaniel Porter’s post-pilot notes on Data Dashboards with R ran to 20 specific items: timing estimates that were off, accessibility language to fix, screenshot quality issues, a code block with a logic error. The kind of review that doesn’t come from the people who wrote the lesson. Lesson author Aditya Ranganath is working through the list.

Jennifer Stubbs taught DMP 101 on May 19 at Bradley University through CARLI. During prep she flagged two live funder policy changes the lesson needs to address: NSF 26-202 (a new required DMP template with 8 defined subsections, effective April 27, 2026) and an updated NIH Data Management and Sharing form. In the session, episode 1 ran 40 minutes and episode 2 ran 45. She barely reached episode 3 in two hours. The discussion ran long. She didn’t follow the script closely, but a notetaker said it sounded natural throughout.

Sebastian Karcher took QualCoder to IASSIST 2025 in Bristol. The lesson has now been taught in the US and the UK, by two different instructors, to different audience types. That range is what moves a lesson from Alpha to Beta.

A Few Things We Have Learned

Lessons run longer than stated. Build in buffer, especially for technical setup. The stated durations are targets, not guarantees.

Funder policy changes fast. If you’re teaching anything DMP-related, check for recent NSF or NIH updates before your session. What was accurate six months ago may not be now.

Specific feedback is the useful kind. The pilots who filed GitHub issues with concrete, line-level notes gave the authors something to act on. General impressions are harder to turn into improvements.

Who Is Teaching This Summer

Sixteen pilots are still scheduled across the summer and fall. Several lessons are getting multiple instructors at different institutions, which is exactly what the curriculum needs. If you’re one of those instructors, now is a good time to connect with the lesson authors before your session. Check the issue in the lesson repo for your pilot, or reach out here.

We Are Still Looking for Instructors

The lessons most in need of pilots right now:

• A Path to Open, Inclusive, and Collaborative Science for Librarians
• Authoring Open Science
• Reproducible Research Workflows
• Open Science Hardware
• Multilingual Search and Discovery
• NASA SciX for Librarians

All run 1.5 to 4 hours. You don’t need to be an expert in the topic. If you want to pilot one this summer, open a pilot interest issue or email tdennis@library.ucla.edu.

Instructors who pilot and provide feedback are credited on the lesson page and in any future publications that reference the curriculum.