Education/StatusMeetings/2009-04-20

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Mozilla Education Status Meeting - April 20, 2009

Agenda

  1. Update on planned Mozilla summer course at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. (Gregorio Robles)
  2. Follow-up on changing the Mozilla Education planning pages
  3. Check-in on the online educator's course
  4. Assessment of weekly status calls thus far

Notes

Attendees:

  • Frank Hecker
  • Dave Humphrey
  • Gregorio Robles
  • Mark Surman

Almost all of the call concerned the proposed Mozilla course at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (the "summer course"). Major topics discussed were

  • budget
  • schedule
  • location
  • resources needed to teach the course

The main driver of the proposed budget is the extent to which Mozilla might subsidize tuition, travel, and other costs for class participants. Options include providing full scholarships to all participants (up to a certain number of attendees), providing a mix of full and partial scholarships, or providing limited or no scholarships. Concerns included potential class size, setting a precedent for future courses, and scalability of the funding to encompass such courses.

In the end we reached consensus on the following plan:

  • Maximum class size should be in the range of 20-25 students. Larger class sizes could be accommodated from a pedagogical point of view, but for the face-to-face part of the course would likely force the use of two classrooms and having parallel sessions. (There's also a potential problem with wifi capacity in the facility.)
  • At a minimum funding would be provided to compensate URJC for the associated staff and administrative time.
  • We would then accept applications from participants who wanted or needed to have their costs subsidized, and would award full or partial scholarships depending on the student in question and on the funding available.

The original proposal was to have the initial face-to-face portion of the course in July, with the online portion extending into August and September. The schedule would require announcing the course fairly soon (by mid-May at the latest).

We are still waiting for some actions on the part of the URJC administration; for example, there is no commitment for the facility yet. If for some reason the course needs to be postponed, then the alternative would be to postpone it to September/October/November. (Starting in August is not possible due to people's vacations.)

Starting the course in September would allow the course to be done in parallel with a Dave Humphrey-taught Mozilla course in which other institutions will be participating. However the consensus was that having the course earlier rather than later was preferable, particular in order to provide early lessons useful for determining the impact of Mozilla Education initiatives.

Part of the issue with the July schedule is securing a proper facility for the face-to-face sessions. The original plan was to have these sessions at a URJC facility in central Madrid, as opposed to at the URJC main campus 20km away from the city center. "Plan B" is to use the main campus instead in order to make it easier to find a suitable facility in time for a July start of the course.

We reached consensus on the following plan:

  • Continue with the original July/August/September timeframe.
  • Move the face-to-face sessions to the main URJC campus if needed.

The final discussion relating to the URJC course was regarding course content, particular for the face-to-face portion. The f2f portion of the course is scheduled for 4.5 days, of which 3 days would require instructors and material beyond what URJC can provide. Mozilla Europe has discussed providing instructors (e.g., Pascal Chevrel and/or Paul Rouget), and Dave Humphrey committed to help with course msterial where needed.

At this point the allotted hour was almost up and Mark had to drop off the call, so we decided to postpone the remaining (non-URJC) agenda items to the April 27 meeting.

Action items

  • Gregorio will continue to work with the URJC administration to resolve any outstanding issues affecting the course schedule.
  • Frank will draft a letter of support and assistance from the Mozilla Foundation to URJC.
  • Dave and Frank will work with Gregorio to draft an announcement for the course.
  • Dave and Gregorio will work to schedule an in-person meeting in May to discuss the course and related activities.