Dear all Participants, Presenters, and Facilitators,
We would like to welcome you to the WMO Global Campus Event, Responding to Challenges Beyond the New Normal. This messages is to explain about the meeting website, developed in Moodle. Information about joining instructions for the three live events will be sent in a separate message, and more formal welcomes will occur on Day 1 of the event.
However, we do not want you to wait until Wednesday, 20 January to begin looking over the contents of the meeting and even starting discussions using the site discussion forums, if you can make time to do so. The preliminary and post-event interactions through this site will enrichen the outcomes of our meeting.
The site, at https://etrp.wmo.int/course/view.php?id=201, contains an opening section followed by six numbered sections. Some contents will be updated in the coming days, but we encourage you to look them over now. Each section contains a discussion forum for questions and comments from you. Much of our communication can take place in these forums for contributing at your convenience.
In the opening section, you will find the Announcements, such as this one, the Registration Form you have already completed, a Provisional Agenda, the list of Intended Event Outcomes, and a folder that will contain presentations prepared for Day 1.
Section 1 contains Pre-Readings, including:
- The WMO Strategic Plan, which will be discussed on Day 1, including your roles in achieving it.
- The planned WMO Global Campus Thematic Areas from the Road Map approved by Congress-18. This will orient you to the general goals of the Global Campus initiative, which include holding collaborative events like this one.
- The Terms of Reference of EC Capacity Development Panel Expert Teams and Task Team, who will be advising EC on all matters related to capacity development. A presentation from the Expert Team on Human Resources Development, Education and Training will take place on Day 1. The work of this Panel will benefit from greatly from your inputs during this event, and will be a key advocacy group for your work.
Section 2 contains a list of the key Challenges related to education and training that you submitted in your registration form. These have been distilled to form the final set of themes that will be the topics of the Breakout Discussions on Day 3.
Section 3 contains folders that hold the presentations on responses of education and training providers to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting quarantines, as requested from RTCs and Partners, as well as Posters or Reports from participants on many key aspects of these responses.
Section 4 contains several resources related to responses made by the WMO Education, Training and Fellowships Division.
Section 5 will be a core section for the event. It contains the template for the Action Plans to be developed by the Breakout Groups when they discuss the key challenges identified. The developed Action Plans will be shared in this section as well when they are submitted by the groups. Here you can also find outcomes from previous Global Campus events that might serve as inspiration for discussions and offer additional ideas that might be useful to consider.
Section 6 contains many recent publications of the ETFD Division that we believe you will find useful in meeting the challenges we face. This includes a new publication on Chemical Weather/Air Quality Forecasting, one of the service areas of growing importance, the publicaton on Education and Training Innovations which shares experiences from many Members, an overview of the importance of education and training in WMO areas of concern, a Compendium of Topics to Support Management Development, and the most recent assessment of WMO Members' education and training needs.
In summary, there is a lot of material that can serve to stimulate thoughts already available on the meeting site, and this will persist after the event as well for your use. In addition, there are many themed Discussion Fora that are now ready for your use to begin engaging with your colleagues on the challenges that are the topic of this important event. We look forward to hearing more about your concerns and your suggestions for resolving the challenges of education and training in an evolving, complex world.
Sincerely,
Patrick Parrish,
for the WMO Education, Training and Fellowships Division,
Member Services Department