Before the live training

Communication with participants

• Coordinate with the country/region Facebook representative to reach out to the prospective participants with an introductory email to introduce the training programme as well as the trainers (who should be copied in the email).This introductory email should include the commitments expected from participants—i.e. they are expected to commit 1 day per week during the mentoring phase to complete a simple project.
• After the introductory email, the trainers should send a follow up email to all the participants that include the links to the training website and/or the pre-event surveys and ask them to complete these surveys within a week.

General email protocols

• Have a main email thread that includes all the participants, trainers, and Facebook coordinators for general communication and announcements that affect all the participants—e.g. links to materials, reminders, booking of mentoring calls. This could be the first email sent by the trainers to the participants.
• Prior to the training, send an email at least once a week to the main thread to remind participants to answer the pre-event survey (if they haven’t yet), download and install QGIS, download the datasets needed, save the training schedules and Zoom links to their calendars, etc.
• For individual reminders and communications with participants/teams, you can use a separate email thread. For example, you may create individual email threads for the teams during the mentoring phase.

The training slack channel

• The Slack channel may be used for communications before, during, and after the training.
• You can invite the participants to join the slack channel as soon as they have confirmed attendance of the training.
• Encourage the use of the Slack channel for asking questions so that everyone may benefit from the answers.
• You can also use the slack channel for sending screenshots during the training.

Pre-event surveys

The pre-event surveys are designed to get the background information of the participants and an overview of their skills as to data literacy/GIS in general and QGIS + OSM in particular.

Knowing the skill levels of the participants is important to allow us:

1. To divide the participants into two groups if needed.
   1. Use the surveys to identify if the participants have different skill levels. For example some participants might have no experience working with structured, geographical data, or QGIS while some participants have more extensive experience working with QGIS, OSM, etc. In such a case, to make it so that the training isn’t too fast for the beginners but also not too boring for the intermediate / advanced users, it might be good to divide the participants into two groups—a beginner group and an intermediate / advanced group and have the groups do different tasks during the breakout / off-cam sessions.
2. To create a training agenda that is tailored to the needs and skills of the participants.

Pre-event background survey

• The pre-event background survey is used to get background information about the participants such as their names, contact details, organizations and roles, self-assessment of their data literacy skills, how they work with data and how they think the training can help them, and information about their video-conferencing tools and experience.
• A sample of the background survey: https://forms.gle/VQVhNbeijJUwgdsn9
• Access to the template will be provided.

Pre-event skills assessment survey

• The pre-event skills assessment survey is designed to have a better understanding of the skills of the participants which will be used to divide them into groups based on their skill levels if needed. The survey includes questions related to working with structured data (CSV), basic geographic concepts, as well as QGIS and OSM-specific questions.
• A sample of the skills assessment survey: https://forms.gle/YbZtw3WnHXHxojpQ8
• Access to the templates will be provided.
• The skills assessment survey document:

Training agenda

The pre-event surveys and the agenda

Use the pre-event surveys to identify the topics that the participants want to focus on during the training since we only have around 9-12 training hours. Ask participants about specific topics or use case studies that they want discussed in the training. The results of the pre-event surveys should define the training agenda. Try to identify these things during the pre-event surveys:

1. The skill level of the participants
   1. Are the participants the same skill level?
      1. Are all beginners or experienced users?
   2. Is there a significant difference in the skill level of the participants and can they be divided into groups based on their skill level? 2. If this is the case, we can divide the participants into groups based on their skill level during the breakout / hands-on sessions and have different activities for them.
2. The interests of the participants 3. Are the participants more interested in doing analysis? 3. We can focus on analysis tools, processing algorithms, etc. during the training. 4. Are the participants more interested in creating visualizations and maps? 4. We can focus on visualization techniques, map-making and cartography options in QGIS, data presentation do’s and don’ts.

Training Agenda

• The training agenda includes the schedule of activities during the two-day live training sessions and should be based on the results of the pre-event surveys. Because the training curriculum covers a lot of topics, not everything can and should be discussed during the live training. It would be close to impossible to try to fit all the contents of the training curriculum into just 12 hours of training. As such, the training agenda should be tailored to the needs and skills of the participants.
• Include breakout sessions and off-cam / show-and-tell sessions in the agenda so that it doesn’t become simply a lecture. Try to make the agenda as interactive as possible.
• Include as part of the agenda for the first day a short introduction about the training programme by the Facebook coordinator. Make sure to inform and invite the Facebook coordinator beforehand.
• Depending on the results of the pre-event survey, there are several kinds of training agenda that we can create:

1. **An agenda built around the Data Pipeline **that includes both conceptual and practical applications. The conceptual part will include an introduction to geographic and QGIS concepts while the practical part highlights how to use the Data Pipeline to solve geospatial problems using QGIS.
   1. Example agenda:
2. An agenda that introduces the capabilities of QGIS and the HRSL to the participants. The training would then be similar to an introductory course in QGIS. This approach is useful if all or a majority of the participants are beginners or have no specific preference when it comes to learning how to do analysis or visualizations in QGIS. 2. Example agenda:
3. A “thematic” agenda that focuses on either the analysis capabilities or visualization capabilities of QGIS. This approach is useful if all or a majority of the participants prefer learning about how to do analysis or visualizations in QGIS. Depending on the skill level of the participants, this agenda can cover topics from basic analysis/visualization to advanced analysis/visualization. The topics could be a “combination of heavy in analysis + light on visualization” or “light in analysis + heavy on visualization” 3. Example: Analysis-focused agenda (topics) 1. Sources of data 2. When to use vectors and rasters 3. QGIS expression engine 4. Discussion of the QGIS processing framework 5. Processing scripts and plugins 6. Graphical modeler 7. Vector and raster processing and analysis 4. Example: Visualization-focused agenda (topics) 8. Best practices for data presentation 9. Styling and symbology in QGIS 10. QGIS Style Manager 11. Data-define overrides, geometry generators, blending modes, draw effects 12. Plugins for styling, sharing resources, etc. 13. The Print Layout 14. The QGIS Atlas

Training slides and materials

Training Slides / Presentations

• Template:
• Examples:
  • Data Pipeline approach (MRC):
  • Modular approach (Philippines): Day 1 | Day 2
• Utilize already existing materials outside of the training curriculum to use as a resource or supplement during the live training. This could include the QGIS documentation, blog posts and articles, and YouTube videos showing basic to advanced QGIS functionalities. This is especially useful when the resource is in the local language.
  • There are countless posts on the internet about how to do stuff in QGIS, utilize these resources together with the curriculum.
  • There are also countless videos about QGIS. Share these with the participants as well and, whenever applicable, show a video during a training if it can help the participants understand a topic better.
  • Examples:
    • https://bnhr.xyz/blog/tags.html#qgis
    • https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/
    • https://courses.spatialthoughts.com/
    • https://courses.gisopencourseware.org/
    • https://www.youtube.com/c/BNHRdotXYZ
    • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGS162t4hkOA0b35ucf1yng/about

Training event page

• An event page for the training should be set up in the Open Knowledge Training Website prior to the training.
• The training website is currently found here: https://school-of-data.github.io/okf-events-a/
• Instructions for adding events to the training website are here: https://github.com/school-of-data/okf-events-a
• The event page will hold information about the training such as links to the pre-event surveys, the training agenda and schedule, the trainers, training materials, training outcomes/outputs, and post-event surveys.
• A good site for generating HTML tables from the training agenda: https://www.tablesgenerator.com/html_tables
• To maintain consistency of design, you may choose to uncheck Do not generate CSS or if you decide to generate the CSS, remove all instances of “font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;” in the generated HTML. This can easily be done by opening the generated HTML in a text editor and doing a simple search and replace.

Scheduling the live training sessions

• Zoom will be used for the live training sessions unless otherwise requested by the participants. A licensed Zoom account will be provided for the trainers.
• When scheduling the live training sessions:
  • Create a scheduled meeting on Zoom
  • Copy the link/invite the the scheduled Zoom meeting
  • Send an email to the main email thread that includes the Zoom meeting links.
  • Create a calendar invite (e.g. Google) for the live training sessions to each of the participants and include the Zoom link in the description of the calendar invite.

Dry run and technical testing

• Have a short dry run and technical testing a few days before the actual training.
• Trainers should familiarize themselves with how the Zoom platform works—how to record the meeting, how to share screens, how to create breakout rooms, polls, etc.
• The trainers should also test that their audio and video are working fine.
• Participants may be invited to the dry run in order to test their audio, video, etc.
• You can also use the dry run and technical test meeting to help participants troubleshoot their machines if they are having trouble installing and running QGIS.

Checklist before the training

1. Pre-training background survey
2. Pre-training skills assessment survey
3. Training agenda
4. Participants added to the Slack channel
5. Participants have installed QGIS 3.16 (at least)
6. Participants have downloaded the data
7. Participants invited and confirmed attendance to the live training (Zoom, etc.)
8. Training event page
9. Dry run and technical testing