[802SEC] On-line training course administration
Colleagues,
Now that we have our first on-line course almost ready for prime time,
we need to make some decisions about how to administer it. We have 100
course seats - that is 100 people can be registered for the course at
any given time. When someone finishes someone else can take the seat.
Response for the beta test was very strong. Within 24 hours I had 20
testers signed up and I got about 20 more volunteers than I could
handle. I would like to balance the administrative burden of handling
the course with the need to sometimes give someone priority in taking
the course.
The good thing it that taking the course doesn't take long so a seat
doesn't have to be occupied for very long. But there could be cases
(someone new to 802 who will be about to chair a group or conduct a call
for interest) when priority is justified to meet 802 needs. If the
average duration of seat occupancy is 1 week, about 1600 could take the
course between the March and July plenaries.
Having talked with our vendors about the capabilities available, the
best one seems to be to divide our seats into 2 sessions. Most of the
seats (90) would be in an open session where the student can self
register. A small number of seats (10) would be in the other session
which would require administrator registration.
If someone tries to sign-up for the open session and finds it full, the
system will waitlist the student and give them a seat when it becomes
available. The open session would require a little active
administration - e.g. periodically checking for students that have been
holding a seat for excessive time and freeing the seat.
Priority seats would be handled on a similar model to tutorial slots -
if someone feels they need priority they contact any EC member to
request it. If the EC member supports the request they forward it the
the administrators who enroll the person in one of the priority seats. I
would like one or two volunteers to be co-administrators so that
someeone can be signed up for the administered session when I am not
available.
How does that plan sound?
Another alternative would be to administer all of the seats in which
case, we could create a number of administrators each with a set of
seats to assign or we could investigate having Face-2-Face administer
the course. Possibly course registration could be linked into a request
made with meeting registration.
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