FSCI Online 2021 begins in the last week of July with all of the engaging elements of FSCI: courses, plenaries, and community events. You'll want to clear as much of your schedule as you can to focus on the FSCI experience in this week!
FSCI's week 2 is mostly about completing the courses that began in week 1, with less community events and only one plenary at the closing of the institute.
For the courses, plenaries, and community events to be successful, active participation and engagement from the entire FSCI community is needed.
Please familiarize yourself fully with all the Systems and Tools we’ll use to conduct FSCI,
and be sure to consider our suggested Attendee Best Practices to make your virtual experience rich and fulfilling.
Systems and Tools
EventBrite
EventBrite is the FSCI registration system. This is where you pay tuition and select your course package.
Sched.com
This is where you’ll select your courses, as well as Plenary and Community Events. You can return to Sched.com to connect with all these events throughout FSCI, except for the courses themselves, which you’ll find in OSF.
Slack
Slack will be the central tool for communicating with fellow attendees during FSCI, and it’s vital that all attendees join the FSCI 2020 Slack workspace. Each course will have its own Slack channel, and you may use it to communicate with instructors and other students, and sometimes to complete collaborative assignments from your course. You’ll also find the most recent updates and announcements for all attendees, a “helpdesk” channel to get assistance when you encounter a problem, and much more.
If you are unfamiliar with Slack, we recommend you join today and get accustomed to its features. All participants are expected to join the FSCI Slack channel prior to the start date of July 26.
Slack workspace name: FSCI2021
Here are helpful links:
Topia
A new aspect of FSCI in 2021 will be the Topia social interaction space. Wander virtually and meet and mingle with other FSCI attendees, meet plenary speakers after their sesion to ask questions, find a FSCI organizer and give them feedback. We will open our Topia map for everyone to explore in the coming weeks.
Zoom
Be sure to update to the latest version of Zoom before FSCI begins.
Course attendees will be sent calendar invites to all the Zoom sessions associated with your course.
For all other events staged through Zoom, you will find Zoom links in the event listing in Sched.com.
OSF (Open Science Framework)
FOR COURSE INSTRUCTORS OR COURSE STUDENTS ONLY
This is where all the FSCI courses will be centralized.
Whether you’re an instructor or a student in a course, you must establish an account with the Open Science Foundation (OSF) website. All your course materials will be gathered there. Course attendees will be contacted separately and asked to provide a link to your OSF profile, so FSCI Organizers can connect you to your course(s). OSF accounts are free of charge. Please take a few moments to set up your own OSF account ahead of FSCI.
Attendee Best Practices
Everyone taking part in FORCE11 activities—whether in person or online—are expected to show respect and courtesy to others throughout their participation. FORCE11 has developed a Code of Conduct to articulate these expectations; we encourage all to familiarize yourself with the code prior to this year’s FSCI.
Time Management
If you are taking a FSCI course (or two), be sure to read the syllabus carefully to understand the time commitment this course will require of you. Each course will have a certain amount of synchronous sessions over Zoom, but FSCI courses are not passive experiences. There will be substantial additional expectations for each course – such as pre-recorded videos, readings, assignments, and collaborative opportunities to work with and learn from your fellow students.
One of the reasons the in-person institute is rewarding is that everyone is pulled from their regular routine, and gathers in one place to focus on learning from each other, fully engaged. We hope everyone attempts that same level of immersion in the Online version, but we know most of our attendees have work and family and life – commitments that will continue during the time of FSCI.
We urge everyone, to the extent possible, to try to disengage from your regular routine and turn your focus to FSCI. We urge you to take stock of how much time you’ll need to commit to FSCI courses, events and homework. You may want to clear additional time from your work schedule, if possible. You may need to set time aside outside of work hours as well.
Think (and speak up!) Asynchronously
Remember that the FSCI community is truly developed through our interactions beyond the classroom. We’ve created many community events to help foster these connections, but even these additional face-to-face opportunities will be over in a flash, and not everyone will find the chance to speak up. We urge you to reach out to colleagues on Slack to help those connections deepen and expand the conversation. These conversations can become collaborations that continue beyond the institute.
