Education

Practical arrangements for System Safety courses on client sites

Materials:

Each student will receive an A4 file which contains copies of all the lecture slides, the case study material and a bibliography. We will normally duplicate these and bring them with us.

We will also bring a small collection of relevant reference material which students can borrow during the course, but which must be returned to us before we leave.

Timetable:

We usually timetable courses as 6 one-hour sessions in a day, separated by coffee breaks and lunch, for example:

09:00 - 10:00 Session 1	12:30 - 1:30 Lunch	13:30 - 14:30 Session 4
10:00 - 10:15 Coffee		14:30 - 14:45 Coffee
10:15 - 11:15 Session 2		14:45 - 15:45 Session 5
11:15 - 11:30 Coffee		15:45 - 16:00 Coffee
11:30 - 12:30 Session 3		16:00 - 17:00 Session 6

Obviously, times can be arranged to suit your needs, but we have found from experience that sessions longer than 1 and a quarter hours are too long, and people lose concentration. Similarly, people find more than 6 and a half hours in a day too much.

We normally expect to finish a five-day course around 3pm on the Friday. If your site normally works a four and a half day week, finishing around noon on Friday, we are happy to accommodate this; we will generally add an extra 45 minutes into each morning and rearrange the material appropriately.

Exact times of breaks vary a bit from day to day, so it is better if flexible arrangements can be made for tea and coffee.

On the first morning we prefer to arrive on site an hour before we are due to start teaching, as there is a lot of material for us to move, and it takes a while to set up. Please bear this in mind when arranging passes / escorts if required! We will also need to be able to bring (at least) one car close to the course venue for unloading on the first morning / loading at the end of the final day, so please arrange car passes if necessary.

Venue:

Our experience shows that, if at all possible, it is preferable to run the course at a convenient location (e.g. hotel or conference centre) close to your site, rather than actually on site. This really helps to prevent people trying to pop back to the office during breaks (which inevitably leads to unacceptably long breaks); it also helps to prevent line managers dragging people off the course when problems arise.

If the course is to be presented on site, a similar argument applies; a training centre or set of conference rooms away from the normal workplace is definitely preferable to presenting in rooms very close to attendees' own offices.

The venue needs to provide the following facilities:

Lecture room:

• Seating at desks / tables for all participants. There is too much material for notes to be balanced on people's knees. Ideally, the room should be arranged “classroom style” (i.e. in rows, forward facing) – boardroom style around a central table means people are constantly twisting to get a good view of the screen.
• Good-sized projection screen and overhead projector. We will bring our own laptop computers and data projector, which we will use for most sessions, but the OHP is useful for extra material and student presentations. If we are using video material as part of your course, we will also bring our own video player and speakers.
• Reasonable size whiteboard or a flipchart (with spare pads) and somewhere to display completed sheets.

Lecturers’ Room:

As there will be up to four lecturers from York helping out on the course, we need somewhere for those who are not teaching in a session to get on with other work. Obviously, this needs to be close to the main lecture room. Any quiet room with a couple of desks and power sockets will do – although if mobile phones are prohibited on your site, it would be helpful if we could have access to a phone line.

If you are able to provide syndicate rooms for the practical sessions (see below), we are happy to use one of these as a lecturers’ room, since we will all be involved in every practical session. Sitting at the back of the lecture room is not acceptable!

Please note that it is also important that the lecturers’ room is NOT in a secure area where lecturers constantly have to ask people to swipe them in and out to use the toilet / coffee machines etc.

Practical sessions (small groups):

For practical sessions and case studies, we will need to split the course attendees into small groups of 6 or 7. Each group will need to be able to gather around a table. Exact accommodation is not important, but groups should be able to discuss their work without disturbing each other too much. Small syndicate rooms are best, but several groups working in the same room is acceptable provided the room is sufficiently large.

Group sessions alternate with lecture sessions, so if the lecture room is to be used for group work as well, then it must be big enough to have the group areas set out permanently. Furniture moving between sessions is not acceptable - the attendees end up really resenting it, and it becomes very hard to get the groups to actually get together properly.

Each group also needs either a flipchart (with somewhere to display completed sheets) or a reasonable sized white board.

Security note:

We will bring a laptop computer with the presentation materials on; each lecturer will also bring their own personal laptop to work on when not actually presenting. Please ensure that, if required, appropriate arrangements are made to bring these onto and off site each day.

Accommodation for presenters:

We will normally make our own arrangements for travel and hotel accommodation for the duration of the course, but if your company has preferential rate arrangements with local hotels, this will help to keep our costs down.