International Tele-course: design

We will make intensive use of the course's discussion board. All participants who have registered at the course will receive an invitation to log in at the start of the course. This discussion forum allows you to discuss asynchronously, make chatting appointments with fellow participants, interact with the course leadership, and pose problems in the field of energetics that have your special scientific interest.

Aim

We will aim at

• an active use of the theory
• exchange across disciplines and nationalities among participants
• solving practical problems by collaboration with group members
• stimulation of creativity

The setup will be as follows.

Group-participation

The co-organizers will chair weekly local meetings in parallel to the one in Tromsø, where participants discuss problems and topics related to DEB theory.

If you know local co-participants who would like to come together to supplement their discussion via the black board, please consider joining the organisation team. We believe that such local meetings are very helpful in addition to off-line exchange of ideas via blackboard. We suggest that once the groups are formed they already organize time slots to meet for each week of the course. Everyone has busy schedules - experience teaches that setting up the meeting times in advance is effective.

Each meeting should have:

• A secretary: he/she takes notes during the meeting and posts a summary of the meeting on the blackboard as soon as possible after the meeting.
• A time-keeper: he/she makes sure that tempo is respected. Thus is it useful to give warning when half the meeting is up and then give 5 minutes notice before the end of the meeting. He/she should gently but firmly say: time up when X hours have passed.
• A summarizer: he/she summarizes the discussion on the blackboard that took place before the meeting

Partipants should organize in advance who take on which responsibility for each meeting. This will make the meetings very effective. 1.5 hours is a reasonable time - but of course meeting can be as long as the participants choose. Experience teaches it is most effective to decide before the meeting what the meeting duration should be.

People will be able to post questions and comments at any time on the discussion forum and the co-organizers are there to help.

See an example of a discussion group meeting from 2015.

Individual-participation

We will assemble groups of 8 till 10 persons by asking individuals to link to a particular group in the same time zone. (For group-participation, see above.) You will be asked to specify your background and your research interests in the registration procedure. In this way we hope to maximize fruitfull exchange, which hopefully results in collaboration in future post-course research.

The number of participants tends to increase and this year we expect some 100, based on the expression of interest that we received. The Norwegian participants will meet each thursday afternoon at the Fram center in Tromsø, where they discuss weeks' problems of their group. As a group, you will be asked to formulate one or two questions (see Description) before each tuesday evening (17:00 local time), to organize these discussions and set priorities. This scheme allows to think 1.5 day about answers to the questions, to maximize the efficiency during the discussions.

At the end of that afternoon, the Secretary communicate the results of the discussions to their group fellows (via the course communication software). The results will be visible for other groups as well.

See the Description and the Activity check list for further details of the setup of the course, especially about essays and exercizes.