The social side of summer schooling
For our usual summer school, the first day sees after work drinks and snacks to help break the ice, and get participants introduced to each other and to tutors. Without this opportunity, we agreed that some kind of social event was needed.
Initially, in May we agreed on a quiz, but by July, Zoom middle east rcs data Quiz Fatigue had definitely set in. Julia cleverly suggested instead, a Scavenger Hunt, where the aim was to go and find a listed item in a short space of time (or example, a shiny object within 30 seconds). With five remaining post-first day attendees and six tutors, the Hunt turned out to be a rather good ice breaker! For the shiny object, CDs werea popular choice!
Challenges of Zoom intensive courses
While on balance, the course worked better than expected, there were some obvious and unavoidable challenges.
The biggest was the time zone factor; participants from locations that are geographically far away from the course time zone, may well suffer from time zone incompatibility. Two of our group came from opposite sides of the world; Singapore and Western USA, with a time lag of 8-10 hours. This meant they would need to stay up all night, both only lasted 1-2 days then had to stop attending in real time, but did continue to download and follow the course materials. They were grateful that we were so well organised, by publishing our slides, demo videos and exercises the night before for the following day, on the shared course Box area.