Signups on etherpad are hard to navigate

[brownsarahm]

4. Visual noise and Task Switching (Etherpads)

I found the Etherpad useful during the lesson exercises, when participants were populating content into the page shared between the group. However, the instructor checkout process requires signing up for a community discussion and a teaching demo using the pads at https://pad.carpentries.org/community-discussions and https://pad.carpentries.org/teaching-demos.

The information density of these two pages can be stressful when just five minutes is allocated for signing up within the training schedule. Being presented with this page (with no indexes or hyperlinks to find specific sections within it!) is a high amount of visual noise and it is difficult to navigate, especially when attention is also split with the Zoom call. Philipp handled this really well and clarified that I could come back to these later, but this could be emphasised within the teaching material, or perhaps a more streamlined way could be found to track sign ups to these sessions.

This could also be due to difficulties task switching: changing from a lecture-based learning approach to having to interpret large amounts of data.

Originally posted by @sjmf in carpentries/instructor-training#1395 (comment)

I also received this feedback separately from another trainee.

[acrall]

@klbarnes20 Can you respond to this issue with relevant information from the checkout project?

[klbarnes20]

Thanks @acrall. Yes, as part of the recommendations to come out of the checkout project, we are committed to exploring alternatives to using Etherpad for Community Discussion and Teaching Demo sign ups. We will be working on an implementation plan in the coming days. However, the timeline on this is uncertain as there are logistical and technical challenges as we consider alternatives.