Spending 100 work hours during five weeks in an online
environment and attending 5 live online events (see A Day
at the School) can sometimes be a lonely and difficult experience.
Distracted by everyday tasks, urgent e-mails, phone calls and
family obligations online course participants are more likely
to have shorter attention span, which may result in poorer overall
results. In order to avoid problems with timing, International Winter
School for Grid Computing 2009 participants are strongly advised to
do the following:
Make sure that you leave enough time for the course.
Follow the proposed Course Structure and participate
in the course from Monday to Friday. Week-ends are designated for making
up in the cases of emergency rather than regular coursework!
Start working every day at roughly the same time.
Work from a quiet place, undisturbed from business or family obligations.
Fit the Winter School into your everyday schedule prior to the
beginning of the course.
If you encounter any problems, speak with your tutors.
Do not give up!
Important
E-Learning offers much more flexibility than face-to-face instruction. The main prerequisite for such flexibility
is that all participants in the learning process must have a strong sense of responsibility. People who developed
the International Winter School for Grid Computing 2009 invested huge amount of work into its preparation and delivery.
For this reason, it is expected that participants will invest their best efforts to complete all tasks accurately
and on time.
If you encounter any problems, speak with your tutors. The majority of delays caused by issues such as sudden
business trips or sickness of your child can be solved by explaining the reasons for your delay and agreeing a
reasonable time-line for continuing the course. Remember, we can't guess from the expressions on your faces: if
you don't tell us what the problem is, we can't solve it!
In order to ensure that our Winter School comes to the right people, you will have to complete a set of Preparatory
Exercises before its beginning. Their successful completion guarantees that you have got all the necessary
prerequisite background for attendance. However, Winter School participants are quite diverse: despite best course
design efforts, it is impossible to predict all problems you might encounter.
Once you start attending the School, discuss any difficulty with your tutors: they will provide feedback in any time
between a couple of minutes and 24 hours. Do not give up the tutorial or the whole Winter School because you got stuck:
post a message on Discussion Forums, ask your class-mates or your tutor. There are no stupid questions, only stupid
answers!
Contacts
Important