Tutors (payments)
At the last meeting Andy Laurence suggested that if tutors were going to be paid for the courses being run at ECC (which has not been confirmed yet) , it might be a good idea if the payments were paid back into the Bristol Wireless "pot" to fund other projects and development work.
On a theoretical level this is probably a good idea, however on a practical level it may be difficult to get professional tutors (which ECC and Bristol Community Education insist on) to give up time on a regular basis to prepare and deliver the courses as volunteers.
Personally as someone who does quite of lot of work for the project it would be nice to receive a bit of cash doing something I would normally get paid for in my "day job" . However if there is anybody who would like to lead the sessions and donate the money back to BW, then I’m more than happy to forego any financial recompense in return for having my evenings free. I’ll even come along as a volunteer helper on one or two sessions if required. 🙂
I mentioned sustainability as an issue in the meeting with resepect to running large scale donation days vs. a smaller scale flow of computers out into the community. The same issue is relevant here.
Teaching is time consuming. Teaching well, very so. Time is money (like it or not). Teachers need to be paid, is my view.
If there is evidence that similar courses will run several times (over the years) then there is an incentive to put effort into developing course materials. If this is done wiki-style, then voluntary contributions can be made as time allows, but when it comes to it, the person who has agreed to teach on the night is the one it falls to to make sure decent materials are ready in time.
If people can and will donate the sort of sustained effort that goes into teaching (you can easily double the teaching hours in preparation) then all power to them. I don’t think they will for long. Being able to offer paid time to people able and willing to teach spreads load, too.
Oh, and Sean deserves some paid time out of this project if it is there and he wants it.
Just a thought:
Why not run an ECDL course using Open Office. OO 1.1 has very good db integration, & Presenter is. v. good too.
If you could get some funding to deliver an open-source ECDL, then you may well be able to scrape some of the £20biliion that the EU sucks out of the UK every year (VBG)
..then you could pay the teachers to deliver the course out of the funding mebbe…?
..just my 0.0EU’s worth
Dez.