Two months ago our group ran a 4-week fellowship! We plan on writing a longer forum post about it soon, but here are some main takeaways:
I think our approach combined some of the suggestions you do: our fellowship was a 4-week sprint, we offered extra events during and after the program and went on a retreat right after the groups finished their fellowship
There’s no AB test on this, but our intuition is that people were more comfortable with committing to a 4 week rather than an 8 week program
We heightened the workload a bit, from ~2.5 hours to ~4 hours per week (1.5 hour sessions, 2.5 hours of preparation). This allowed us to still cover the majority of the content of a regular fellowship
With a shorter fellowship it becomes even more important to plan it right, so that fellows don’t miss half the sessions (due to exams for example)
In general, thanks for writing this important post! I think I would even extend your points to a general call for group organizers to be more innovative in their approaches to group organizing. Curious what you think of this :)
Thanks Joris! It sounds like your 4-week fellowship sprint went well. Would be excited to see a longer forum post on this and look at pre/post fellowship survey results (if they are available!)
I’d agree with this maybe extending to “a general call for group organizers to be more innovative in their approaches to group organizing.” I think a lot of effort has been put into making plug-and-play resources to run uni groups (which can be useful in certain situations!), but generally think established groups / experienced organizers have on-the-ground knowledge about stakeholders that the people creating plug-and-play resources often don’t. Group organizers should trust themselves more to notice problems and take actions to address them!
Two months ago our group ran a 4-week fellowship! We plan on writing a longer forum post about it soon, but here are some main takeaways:
I think our approach combined some of the suggestions you do: our fellowship was a 4-week sprint, we offered extra events during and after the program and went on a retreat right after the groups finished their fellowship
There’s no AB test on this, but our intuition is that people were more comfortable with committing to a 4 week rather than an 8 week program
We heightened the workload a bit, from ~2.5 hours to ~4 hours per week (1.5 hour sessions, 2.5 hours of preparation). This allowed us to still cover the majority of the content of a regular fellowship
With a shorter fellowship it becomes even more important to plan it right, so that fellows don’t miss half the sessions (due to exams for example)
In general, thanks for writing this important post! I think I would even extend your points to a general call for group organizers to be more innovative in their approaches to group organizing. Curious what you think of this :)
Thanks Joris! It sounds like your 4-week fellowship sprint went well. Would be excited to see a longer forum post on this and look at pre/post fellowship survey results (if they are available!)
I’d agree with this maybe extending to “a general call for group organizers to be more innovative in their approaches to group organizing.” I think a lot of effort has been put into making plug-and-play resources to run uni groups (which can be useful in certain situations!), but generally think established groups / experienced organizers have on-the-ground knowledge about stakeholders that the people creating plug-and-play resources often don’t. Group organizers should trust themselves more to notice problems and take actions to address them!