[wellylug] community education

[Rob Giltrap]

Damon Lynch wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-05-18 at 20:58, Jamie Baddeley wrote:
>  
>
>>so if an up for it wellylug member was paid to run a course, yet give
>>away the OOo - then this would work?
>>    
>>
>
>Technically I guess it would.  However to be blunt the people I have
>seen doing this kind of work (which to be honest is not many) are very
>patient middle aged women, who can easily work with other women.  So if
>wellylug is going to do something similar, my suggestion would be to
>contact such people and ask them to consider joining wellylug so we
>could work with them to provide such training.
>

A couple of points on this discussion.

1) There is plenty of base material which can be used for community 
education courses at http://support.openoffice.org/index.html 
particularly under the tutorials link.

2) The people who do the training do it for the money... no people sign 
up and the lecturer makes no money. So unless there is a demand there 
will be no course.

3) I agree with Damons point above but also these people may feel very 
comfortable with MS office and may be resistant to changing to 
OpenOffice. I think it's the best approach, but also expect to get some 
straight up NOs.

4) I will be assisting with teaching MS Office at my daughters school 
this year. My intention is to learn the ropes so I can convert all of 
their courses to Star/OpenOffice next year and provide all student 
families (about 150 families) and faculty with a copy of Star/OpenOffice 
2.0 to install at home.

5) All the schools have Office XP on their computers due to the MoEd 
deal which lasts until 2006. Schools may be resistent to having 
OpenOffice also loaded onto their machines.