Local breakout rooms

Some CodeRefinery courses are designed to be large scale, with distributed registration. In short, this means there is a livestream that anyone in the world can watch. Since we can’t handle a registration and personal support for everyone in the world, you can open registration to attend the course.

Principles

  • We have a livestream, open to everyone in the world. The CodeRefinery MOOC strategy strategy allows us to reach a huge audience in a decentralized manner.

    • If courses don’t have a livestream, we can still reach many people because of HackMD and teams. From the list below, steps 2b and 2c work with this option.

    ../_images/mooc-diagram.png

    Decentralized teaching allows us to reach many more people than we could otherwise.

  • Most attendees can ask from help through HackMD (Collaborative document mechanics and controls), which works very well

  • There are periodic exercise sessions, where learners and teams can work together.

Step 1: Local breakout room

  • Create your own breakout room - whether online or a physical space. That means for example ask some friends to join you to watch the stream and collaborate with the exercises.

  • Our exercise sessions are very clearly announced and communicated. During these times, the livestream goes silent, and you can work within your breakout rooms. The end of the exercise sessions and breaks are clearly communicated as well - we support your breakout room scheduling as much as possible.

  • Attendees can ask general questions via HackMD

  • You can continue your local support even after the course.

  • You may want to run local “installation help” sessions.

Step 2: Registration

  • If you have a broad audience, you may want to make your own registration form, completely separated from ours. That may help with reservations and catering if any.

  • Please have everyone to register in our form anyway to help us in reporting our impact.

  • You may (but don’t have to) create teams, where you have one team leader for 5-6 learners. The team leader guides the team and supports collaboration and community - and lets us scale much better than we could otherwise. Teams also support retention after the course, especially if they knew each other before registering. (See Team leaders / Helpers / Exercise leaders)

  • We would like to know statistics from how many people attended from your location for our impact reports. (still, the top priority is reaching as many people as possible, we’ll adjust reporting to what works)

Step 2b: Joint registration

  • You can direct people to our registration form as a matter of simplicity, but we add an option for your institution.

  • Learners join our Zoom session, and we create a breakout room for your institution and direct all learners there.

  • Since you provide help to your own learners, we can more easily scale than we could otherwise.

Step 2c: Joint registration, you provide team leaders for your teams

  • A lot like “joint registration”, but for workshops where we centrally organize teams.

  • You locally recruit team leaders for your own learners. This saves us the effort of recruiting exercise leaders and allows us to scale more.

Summary

As you can see, there are many models, from distributed and simple to centralized. It’s best to talk in chat and see what will work best for each workshop, but we are generally biased towards more decentralized approaches for large courses.