Hi Bodo (and Roger),
I have viewed all the questions and presentations at once, so I am just responding to all in a single post. Sorry if it becomes jumbled and overly long.
First, to both of you, have you developed any similar remote training approaches to teach radar techniques for nowcasting applications? If so, would you ever be interested in offering such training to RTCs in your neighbouring regions? (We can talk separately on this, but I suspect there is a great need)
Bodo, I am impressed with the work you have done on this. I can't remember the question numbers, but first, I think you were right in evolving toward the approach you used to teach to remote participants (keeping the instructor in the classroom). First, if you or the students or their organizations already made the significant investment to come to a common location, you might as well take full advantage of being collocated with the instructor. You are right however that this requires some uncommon skills from a teacher to not become too focused only on the local students. There is a great danger here, but with establish processes and tactics for regular engagement of the remote students, it can be overcome as you seem to have done.
Due to travel costs and the wide distribution of the meteorological workforce internationally, I think we are in even greater need for establishing good point-multi-point (without a classroom) or asynchronous strategies, but when a critical mass of students can gather in one place and there is an instructor available, what you are learning from experience and proposing needs to be shared as a best practice. Thanks for starting that process with this session. I see your approaches and more specifically the one Roger described earlier about presenting to Eumetcal as perfect examples of a distance approach to the "roving seminar" strategy for reaching more students around the world. I think we and you should develop these techniques further.
Some specifics answers to questions:
- I liked the opening slide interaction. It sets the stage for deeper learning and involvement and establishes what can be learned in the session. I hope that you continue to use such interactive techniques throughout the lesson. You did not share examples of that, but it might be good to see sometime (next CALMet :)
- I like that you force a pause for students to reflect and ask questions. If you meet with silence, are you prepared with questions of your own to stimulate useful reflection. As was pointed out in another CALMet Online session, sometimes students are hesitant to ask their own questions due to shyness or concerns about looking unintelligent. I suspect that instructors should be prepare to get students to think more deeply and reflect by asking questions they probably know students already have. Questions can stimulate more questions sometimes as well.
- Your opening slide is a multiple choice that already provides the answers about the advantages. At first, I thought that maybe it would work better as an open ended question like: "What advantages do you see for rapid scan loops in this loop? (or circle specific regions for hints). But I do think this multiple choice question is complicated enough to encourage deep thinking (and careful analysis of the imagery), so kudos to you. As a completely open question it may have taken much more time to get to the point. Other openings might be better as open-answer, but that needs to be judged on a case by case basis I guess.
- As for evaluating the Regional Focus Group meetings, the statistics are a good start, but it would also be good to get some qualitative data about impacts on participants forecasting practice. How many of them have developed new forecasting techniques as a result of attending a RFG? Questions like this would demonstrate the long term value even more, but numbers of participation certainly demonstrate perceived value.
Thanks again for a great session, both of you. I know this kind of session takes time to facilitate. We appreciate your inviting us to be a part.
Patrick