2020 Report

· Nicolás Palopoli, Paola Corrales, Romina Pendino, Violeta Roizman · 6 min

2020 is over, a year of many challenges, uncertainties and changes. MetaDocencia was born in this context as a response to the need and urgency imposed by the pandemic, to offer tools for making a quick and effective switch to online classes. The proposal was embraced and amplified from its very beginnings by many educators in Argentina and abroad. MetaDocencia has established itself as a collaborative and inclusive community to support Spanish-speaking teachers, that shares evidence-based educational methods and provides open resources to foster effective teaching practices.

Those of us who make MetaDocencia are happy and thankful for the time shared during this difficult time. We renew our commitment in 2021, a year that welcomes us to more and better offers to learn and teach in community.

While we work on what’s next, we invite you to review all the good things that 2020 brought in MetaDocencia.

Summary of the 2020 Report as slides:

A lot has happened

MetaDocencia was born on March 16th, 2020 as an initiative of four people, early joined by another one to constitute the current Core Team. More volunteers joined later and we now have 10 Contributors and 5 Advisory Team members. Their participation in daily activities and monthly meetings is essential to sustain the activities of MetaDocencia.

More than 1200 teachers from 20 countries showed interest in our courses. Most came from the city of Buenos Aires and its surroundings, but we have shared the classroom with teachers from all provinces in Argentina. As we deal with content in Spanish, and thanks to the presence of Spanish-speaking individuals throughout the world, our reach exceeds Latin America. Our courses have been taken by more than 700 educators from Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, and also in the United States of America, France, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Those teachers who took part in MetaDocencia deliver courses for all educational levels in different disciplines: from the classic subjects of Biology, Literature and Maths, to Robotics, Traumatology, Marketing and Architecture. Most of the participants teach STEM disciplines, followed by teachers in Social Sciences. Considering the size of their classes, MetaDocencia could be reaching more than 19,000 students!.

We met at many courses

Already present on the web, on Twitter and with an active pre-registration form, on March 27th, 2020 we delivered the first edition of our flagship course Introduction to online teaching essentials. We had 41 editions of this course up to October 26th: 34 standard workshops (494 participants) and 7 “à la carte” (137 participants).

Moreover, we gave 8 short courses How to teach (and do other stuff) online for 88 participants from the National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA). We also piloted two new courses, the Zoom Workshop and Generating interactive tutorials with the {learnr} package (the latter delivered as part of the LatinR conference).

Over four days in August 2020, three Core Team members delivered the first The Carpentries Instructor Training course by MetaDocencia to “train the trainers”. As a result, 19 participants were certified as Instructors in the international project The Carpentries that aims to teach computational and data science skills to researchers.

We had an online presence

Our website hosts 25 original articles (5 of those in English) written during 2020 by the MetaDocencia community. The first post was published along with the beginning of our workshops in March 2020 to present the Learner profiles for our Introductory courses (in Spanish).

These articles gather advice, tutorials, experiences and opinions. Some are cross-published in other websites; for example, the Spanish article on our website MetaDocencia in RStudio Education is the version of our post Building capacities to teach data science in Latin America for the RStudio Education blog.

Social networks were essential to amplify our initiative. In November 2020 we reached 1000 followers on Twitter. We ended 2020 with 1100 followers and over 500 tweets. 71 people subscribed to our YouTube channel where we published 6 videos that got 1032 views. With 593 views, our most popular video is Introduction to online teaching essentials (in Spanish).

Our Slack workspace is the virtual and open meeting room for 376 participants in MetaDocencia. It is the place to share resources, experiences, support and questions, built by the communitary effort through 18,295 messages sent in 2020. The channel is kept active from the beginnings of MetaDocencia, peaking at 78 active members on the week of April 27th, 2020 and 40 active members on a day in July 21st, with almost 1000 messages sent in December. The workspace is open to anyone wishing to take part (37% of the messages were seen on open channels) but also allows the organization of community activities in closed channels (40% of the messages sent on those and 17% as direct messages between individuals).

We actively promote the use of Creative Commons licenses, and we have written a blogpost on how to share educational material and maintain authorship.

We participated in many events

Following is the timeline of the many and diverse events in which MetaDocencia was present during 2020.

Thank you for joining us in 2020. We look forward to seeing you in 2021 too!