Continuing Education Courses - EAHIL

Helou my CEC colleagues: What if we all write some important things to be taken into account, and then we put all together.

Planning (by Tiina)

Think about subjects & teachers: hints: previous EAHIL CEC-courses, other conferences' courses. We contacted teachers, and they also have a suggestions about subjects. We tried to have courses covering different themes; the discussions with previous CEC organizers was very productive (Eva Alopaeus in EAHIL in Cluj).

What are the locations: how many PC-classes; how many lecture rooms/group study rooms available; how many participants fit in them. See the schedule_template. The schedule gives you a big picture how to 'match' subjects with locations so that it would be also logical. On the first day (Monday) there might not be so many participants yet while most people arrive closer to the conference. We had 11 courses, 12 teachers, and 163 participants.

Here is CEC schedule in Helsinki

We started the planning after EAHIL in Cluj-Napoca. The working team: Tiina (Helsinki), Tuulevi (Kuopio) and Ann (Gothenburg). It was a lot emailing and talking on the telephone. Tuulevi was also working in LOC, which was good because she knew how the things went also in general and could inform us, and also LOC. LOC had its meetings in Helsinki so I could meet with Tuulevi face to face and we had an opportunity to plan the practical things. While Ann was in Gothenburg we needed to document our doings to keep Ann up with us. And she could comment and suggest which was very valuable to have a view from not so close.

 Budgeting

First we were told that the teachers were not paid in previous conferences. Well, they were not exactly paid, but e.g. part of their accomodation and travel expenses were covered. It's also easier to ask them to come if you can offer them at least something. We have in Helsinki a University guest house where a single room costs 55€/night.The Finlandia Hall was very expensive so LOC wanted to be sure that some income was coming from the courses in case the costs for the whole conference would have got too high.

The principle is that the costs of CEC had to be covered by CEC income. CEC had its own separate budget.

When we started to ask the teachers, we figured out how much we could pay. We could divide different categories (made afterwards):

Why we didn't pay 'direct' money to the teachers: in Finland you need to pay taxes for foreigners, too.

Some "dos and don'ts" by Tuulevi 

You cannot start too early. It takes time to plan, to decide the subjects, the find and contact the possible teachers. Yet, you should have current topics - kind of what's hot at the moment. And also more traditional CECs.

Choose a very easily maintainable tool (e.g. a wiki or a blog) for distributing the information about the CECs. Things tend to change and the information must always be uptodate.

Cooperation within the CEC working group should be easy and not cause any additional stress. The members of the group should be 3-4 (if 4 there's still 3 left if one gets ill or whatever) and preferably know at least one of the others already. They can - and actually should - be from different countries as modern tools overcome distances. All members of the working group should have enough time allocated for the CEC planning and tasks during them (boss's blessing). [Unless they want to do it on their own time.]

Share tasks according to working group members abilities:

• Who's good in budgeting?
• Who's got networks and can ask around for teachers?
• Who's good in organising rooms, IT stuff, coffees...?
• Who's got the skills to maintain the timetable and other information on web?
• etc.
  

Keep it simple:

• Have the same rules, practices and arrangements for all teachers and all courses - unless there's a special reason for an exeption.
• Have all the courses in the same building or at least very near to each other. The best would perhaps be the same venue as the conference but that's not often possible.
  

Be prepared to answer all kinds of questions when people arrive to the CECs. They want to know about the conference, the city, the tours, the social programme, the money, the transport - you name it. Have city maps, bus/tram timetables etc. available.

Cooperate closely with both IPC and LOC. It would be good if one member of the CEC working group was also a member of the LOC (or could at least attend the meetings) and another one a member of the IPC (or could at least attend the meetings and or be closley in touch with the chair or secretary of the IPC).