Hello all,

The organizers have settled several open questions related to BCC2020 going online, many of which affect training.

Please read this email through and respond as soon by the end of Monday to the linked form.  Please treat this as semi-confidential.  We won’t announce this information until next week.

Training Days Shifted

First, training has been shifted from

• Saturday, July 18: 3 x 5 sessions, Training Day

• Sunday, July 19:   1 x 3 sessions, First day of meeting

• Monday, July 20:  1 x 3 sessions, 2nd day of meeting

• Friday, July 17:      Content originally on Saturday July 18

• Saturday, July 18:  Content originally on Sunday and Monday, July 19-20

BCC West and East, and your Time Zones

With the help of the Galaxy Australia we will be offering BCC online twice each day:

• West / Toronto: Americas, Europe, and Africa 

• East / Australia: Asia, Australia, and Oceania

These windows will start exactly 12 hours apart, thus allowing us to cover the world.  

We do not expect that the same instructors will be available for both windows.  However, we still want to offer training in the East. Some possibilities:

1. Offer same content with (mostly) different instructors:

We may be able to find instructors for existing topics in the Eastern half of the world.  Instructors in the East may be able to help with sessions late in the Western window. Instructors in Western North America may be able to help in early Eastern sessions.  

2. Offer Different (or no) Content

However, those options aren’t going to work for every topic on the current schedule.  We could fill openings with other content, or just have holes in the training schedules

Online is just harder

Galaxy Australia has done extensive online training across their region, and they learned that online training can only cover ⅓ of the content as in person.  Scale back training goals and content accordingly.

We are investigating how best to support online learning.  We will provide and pay for online platforms (not sure which ones yet), and we will run practice sessions before BCC.

Registration

We will likely set up registration to enable people to sign up for individual sessions, and registration will be darn cheap. You will also need more TAs for online, and we will expand the number of conference supported instructors for each session.

What we need (hopefully by Monday)

Everything has changed, and we need to know if you are still interested, and what your requirements are.  We also need suggestions for instructors for BCC East (and topics too).

Please provide your input by

1. Taking a look at the proposed training schedule.  Are you still willing to present these topics? Do these date / times work for you?  Are you available to help in the other hemisphere? (Simon, I made some guesses on you.)  Do you have ideas who could?

2. Then tell us what you think.  You can have one instructor per instructor group fill it out, or each instructor in your group can submit a separate response.

Thank you for reading this far,

Dave C