Program/event to improve and consolidate the curriculum

jurra commented 4 years ago

As we are approaching the end of our program, we started to prepare feedback interviews and questionnaires, which will allow us to learn from mentors and mentees highlights as well as things that need to be improved for the next cohort. Once we have that we would like to implement it into our program curriculum and internal documents (code of conduct, contribution guidelines, etc).

After the program

The grant would be used for a series of online meetings where small teams (composed of domain experts in open hardware, open source and online education, mentors and the organizers) would:

Work on the program curriculum, internal docs (as stated above) and prepare material (presentations slides, video recordings of presentations, etc) for online distribution.
We would like to pay people for their time while working on this, as the results of these activities will be used to refine our program, and create updated content with new videos and presentations for each week of the program (14 in total).
We would also like to use a smaller part of the grant to buy services for online convening, such as Zoom membership for the coming cohort.

jurra commented 4 years ago

General thoughts on how to approach this:

Desired outcomes doing the curriculum evaluation

Reviewed and improved curriculum
Reviewed and improve processes

Methodology and approach to the evaluation of the curriculum

We want to find out what worked, what didn't, what new things with regard to these topics we should add to the curriculum/program:

Aspects we want to evaluate in the program and the curriculum

Review and improve our value proposition
Quality of the content and knowledge base provided (How well does the content suits the expectations of the end users)
Pedagogical and learning experience design ( How well does the program suits our personas and intended users ). This might include length, ammount of hrs, etc.....
Organizational approach (How we manage the program)
Approach to engage and inspire open hardware leaders and core teams....Conversion level? will they become embassadors of the program after following it?? (Do they feel empowered by the program, do they also connect as peers with the other projects? Do they have to? Is this realistic?)
Means and resources needed to keep working on and expanding the program.
Contributing guidelines for the program

To answer and evaluate the points above here are some things we could/will do:

List of activities and interactions we want to enable with this evaluation, improvement program: (These are just proposals add more to the list)

Interview with experts (In hardware, elearning and open source)
Exchange and interview with lead users (Camilo, UC2?.. other projects)
Form for mentees addressing the specific aspects mentioned above
Form for the mentors addressing the specific aspects mentioned above

Logistics to make this happen:

Decide on the group of persons, that will participate in these activities
Define roles and responsabilities with regard to running these activities

Add things we are missing......

jurra commented 4 years ago

Proposals from: @amchagas and @thessaly

What to do with Mozilla money?

Pay for the time of a group of mentors and experts to review the curriculum and help us transform it into something better.

Organize 2 tracks: beginner and advanced, tailored to different projects’ needs.
Beginner track is similar to open leaders.

advanced is more focused on sustainability. Starting 2 weeks after the end of the program Tentative duration of 2 weeks

What do we need?

For advisors to contribute we should prepare a github-based website containing minimum structure, already existing materials and linking to some collab editing
A list of possible advisors
An idea of costs

vektorious commented 4 years ago

I think it is crucial to review the curriculum as a whole before a second round can be announced.

I really like the idea of two different tracks but I'm not sure how to combine them? Where do they overlap? Otherwise, they are basically two independent programs.

Did you think about it as an (online) event/meeting, asynchronous reviewing or a combination of both?

jurra commented 4 years ago

I agree, with @Alex, and I find we dont have to rush specially after not doing the after math of this particular round. At the beginning of this issue there are some guidelines ideas on how to do this analysis, evaluation.

I have a remark and concern: we are tending to propose solutions before understanding and formulating accurately problems. This doesnt allow us to take distance and validate our original goals and assumptions.

The first thing we should do is to evaluate how do we think the curriculum (and the program) have implemented the core goals of the program originally. That is why we made the personas, the canvas and all that.

We have already sent out the forms which are quite well formulated. Lets go step by step in this analysis and spot in concrete what are the problems, concerns, improvements.

jurra commented 4 years ago

We also need to review several things that are fundamental organizational wise:

A retrospective on what worked didnt worked while organizing and creating the content of the program. We shouldnt avoid this, as there are things I would not like to go through again in a next round, particularly the inbalance of contributions and participation from the 4 of us, but also how we have managed conflicts and frictions, which have been sometimes unpleaseant to me, I guess that can be the case for other members as well.
The second thing is: who is in the next round and will maintain the program? As far as I am concerned, those would be @Alex and @jurra, as @thessaly and @amchagas expressed they wouldnt be involved in the organization of the next round because of personal reasons. How do @thessaly and @amchagas will stay involved and how we handle this need to be clarified.

This is very important because there will come new activities that also require a lot of effort and organization, and clarifying this will give us an understanding of how are we going to work on the next tasks together, what energy we need to put, and how do we prepare to improve the program, etc...

vektorious commented 4 years ago

I think it is important to evaluate the program within two weeks after it's over because then everything is still very present.

I think your second point is especially important. Things changed a lot and for me, it really depends on when the second round will start and what my role would be. The current situation screwed up a lot of my plans for work and private projects (like finishing my dam thesis). I have to work on solving this issues first before I can dedicate the amount of time to the program it deserves. That's why I don't think I could contribute much time to a second round of the program within the next couple of months (not before 2021). However, I could imagine contributing as an expert and/or take over one week-session with a specific topic or something like this.

jurra commented 4 years ago

As we are approaching the end of our program, we started to prepare feedback interviews and questionnaires, which will allow us to learn from mentors and mentees highlights as well as things that need to be improved for the next cohort. Once we have that we would like to implement it into our program curriculum and internal documents (code of conduct, contribution guidelines, etc).

After the program

The grant would be used for a series of online meetings where small teams (composed of domain experts in open hardware, open source and online education, mentors and the organizers) would:

Work on the program curriculum, internal docs (as stated above) and prepare material (presentations slides, video recordings of presentations, etc) for online distribution.

We would like to pay people for their time while working on this, as the results of these activities will be used to refine our program, and create updated content with new videos and presentations for each week of the program (14 in total).

We would also like to use a smaller part of the grant to buy services for online convening, such as Zoom membership for the coming cohort.

Before doing anything of this, we need the feedback from the surveys.
Doing the above requires some planning and several steps, so that we effectively use the funding by designing the right activities with regard to improving our program.
We should focus not just on improving the curriculum, but improving the whole program as the curriculum might be quite good, but the program organization, as well as our channels and our Open Canvas might need some review.

Again I feel like we proposed a solution for problems that might not exist, I propose to slow down and make a careful planning/design of what would be our next steps.

Open-Hardware-Leaders / organization