CALMet Commons

CALMet Online 2014 – a quarter year after…

With the support of CALMet Working Group, the CALMet Online 2014 was successfully conducted from 6 October to 30 November 2014, with Vesa Nietosvaara (EUMETSAT) and Roro Yuliana Purwanti (BMKG) as the co-chairs. Attended by 185 participants including facilitators, represented organizations from 62 countries and 5 continents, we gathered together old colleagues and welcomed new ones into the community.

What happened during the event…

We worked together, posted questions, provided answers, discussed issues, problems, challenges and alternative solutions, formed team and playing games, collecting materials, sharing resources, practiced forecasting skills using simulators, designed and produced some useful outputs. Those handy outputs vary from a series of learning solution and activities, a webinar checklist, material and resources of Conceptual Models, practical guidance for preparing the new satellite generation to lessons-learned from distance learning and online activities.

What the statistic evaluation result said…

In the frame of region, Europe had the largest number of participants of 63, Latin America in the second place with 45 participants and Africa was in the third rank with 39 participants as shown in figure.

A big number of participants from Argentina probably was thanks to two bilingual sessions in English and Spanish during the event, which made it comfortable to participate the discussion.

Participants from Africa participated actively especially in the synchronous session. In the session, Sarah Kimani, a trainer from IMTR Kenya, introduced weather chat as a tool for training or weather briefing, that can support very low bandwidth webinars. Some African participants actively participated not only because of the weather briefing topic on African weather that week, but also because of a low bandwidth solution for joining the chat. It was was possible to attend this activity while doing the usual daily tasks, as this session had a slower pace than a usual synchronous session. This solution is a good opportunity for countries with have challenges with access to internet to participate in online activities.
 
A big number of interaction during the session of “Webinar Checklist” was probably caused by the topic that was familiar to most of the participants, who have their own experiences of attending the webinar sessions. Participants from novice to the expert joined the, sharing their own experiences.

The session “Teaching with the Conceptual Model” also had the big number of interaction. This was a new topic - but as Conceptual Models are applied and developed in many regions, the topic proved to be interesting.

What we learned as co-chairs and what to suggest for the next CALMet Online of 2016…

Technically we managed really well, there was really a minimum amount of technical challenges, and we thank Maja Kuna for her great assistance before and during the event. The topics were various, as co-chairs we were also happy to see many kinds of training activities presented. On participatory side we really would like to find ways to engage the audience more. However, keeping in mind this is effectively an online conference, we were not expecting everyone participate the same way they would do on an online course.

We also see how this event could be a way to enhance the community. Newcomers have a better opportunity to be recognized by their active participation. Some new resource persons and experts can be identified, this in turn makes it possible to establish new cooperation among experts in the field.
 
To consider for the next CALMet Online: we would suggest the next co-chairs to find out how to best deliver the activities with a maximum input from everyone. We saw excitement that was high during some group activities; maybe study groups could be established in the future event? We think some smaller size communication could be useful also for CALMet Online, and to shift it towards an online workshop rather than an online conference. We also think that the wide spectrum of topics helps to get wider participation and potentially help participants to get what they need.
 
As the event was in a conference format, the certificate provided in the conference was a prove for the attendance and not for measuring competency. We expect that the knowledge, insight and networks the participants gained during the event, can inspire them to develop their training activities in their institution and community.