What are SCs

Short Courses (SCs) are primarily aimed at providing an interactive forum for participants of the EGU General Assembly for capacity building. They are expected to focus on providing or discussing skills and abilities related to the geosciences.

Short courses on open software are encouraged, courses on operating/running commercially available equipment or software are also permitted. Commercial activities (e.g. sales) are not allowed.

The topic of a SCs should be of interest to more than one Programme Group (PG) of the EGU General Assembly

Submitting a proposal for a SC

Submission of proposals for a SC session is possible during the public call-for-session (see deadlines and milestones table).

During this period, conveners should place their proposal in the SC Programme Group and indicate which format they prefer for their short course (see below). There is no automatic roll-over of courses from one year to another.

The proposals are evaluated by the Chairs of the SC Programme Group and approved by the Programme Committee (see below). The results of the evaluation are communicated to the conveners at the end of October. The final scheduling of the accepted SCs takes place in February, during the Programme Committee meeting.

Before submitting a SC proposal, please read carefully the general convener guidelines and rules. Further SC guidelines and conditions are presented below.

Formats

The EGU General Assembly offers two different short course (SC) formats:

  1. Hybrid SCs take place in a lecture room inside the Austria Center Vienna (ACV) and are streamed live to allow attendance and contribution from virtual participants.
  2. On-site only SCs take place in a lecture room inside the ACV, without the option for virtual attendance.

When submitting a proposal, conveners should indicate which format they prefer.

Organizer/convener responsibilities

  1. Breadth: organizers are free to select the content and set-up of their short course. The content should be of interest to (a discipline-crossing subset of) the community that the EGU represents.
  2. Inclusion: for hybrid short courses, organizers should ensure that virtual participants are included in the run of the short course and able to actively participate in it (e.g. by being able to ask questions and listen to the discussions that take place on-site).
  3. Promotion: organizers are responsible for promoting their short course. The EGU will promote short courses by listing them in the online programme. Mailing lists cannot be provided for data privacy reasons.
  4. Course materials and presentations: short course materials can be uploaded to the short course session page once the programme is finalized (February). A link to an external website hosting the short course material can also be added.
  5. Presentations: to upload individual presentations from speakers, conveners should add the speakers as session contributors via the session modification tool. As soon as they are added, they will be able to use the presentation upload tool.

General conditions

  1. A SC consists of one or two oral time blocks separated by a 30-minute break. Each time block has 1 hour and 45 minutes. Rooms need to be vacated by the end of the time block.
  2. Conveners should specify in their proposal their preference for one or two time blocks.
  3. SC participants, conveners and solicited speakers should be registered participants of the EGU General Assembly. They do not receive waived registration fees or travel support.
  4. There is no formal registration to a particular SC, and no course fees can be charged.
  5. On-site participation to a SC is on a first come, first served basis, and is limited by the maximum occupancy of the room.
  6. Rooms in the ACV for on-site SCs have a maximum capacity of 65 seats. If conveners require a room with a larger capacity, they have to apply for that by justifying this in their application. The SC Programme Group Chairs will do their best to satisfy their requests but, due to room limitations, conveners should be aware that larger rooms requests might not be guaranteed.
  7. The number of short courses that can take place during the EGU General Assembly is limited by the number of rooms available.
  8. SC proposals are evaluated according to the criteria below and a ranked list is built to fill the programme in agreement with the capacity constraints:
    1. Breadth of the course's scope (impact on a wider field of science, disciplines, applications);
    2. Degree of interdisciplinarity (e.g. for how many EGU Programme Groups does the course provide valuable information);
    3. Availability of hands-on experience (e.g. interactive activities, tutorial-like courses instead of lecture-like styles);
    4. Contribution/involvement of Early Career Scientists to/in the course;
    5. Emphasis on career development, networking, and topics beyond pure science;
    6. Agreement with the EGU guidelines for short courses.
  9. SC proposals that are similar in topic may be requested to merge before scheduling.

Rooms

  1. Rooms (theater style) are equipped with a microphone, a video projector, a notebook including an Internet connection, and WiFi.
  2. Technical assistance is provided in each short course room.
  3. Organizers and speakers should be aware that it is not possible to use their own computer for the presentations, including software demonstrations. Presentations should be brought in USB sticks or uploaded in advance. Demonstrations can run on a browser opened with the available WiFi.
  4. For hybrid short courses, the notebook in the short course room runs the video conference software Zoom and the lectern provides a webcam and may not be bypassed by presenter's individual computers. Virtual attendees can then follow the presentations and ask questions through the embedded Zoom chat function.

Contact

SC Programme Group Chairs: Michael Dietze and David Fernández-Blanco (Union-wide ECS Representative), sc@egu.eu