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Courses

Course submissions are now closed

Co-Chairs:

Jean Scholtz, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA
Susan Palmiter, Design Technologies, Inc., USA

Message from Jean and Susan

Susan Palmiter Jean Scholtz

CHI 2007 will again offer courses from 1.5 to 6 hours as begun at CHI 2006. We will work to encourage a wide variety of courses from members of all our CHI communities. If you are interested in developing a course, but are unsure of its suitability for a CHI audience, we would gladly discuss possibilities with you. Please contact us as early as possible if you want any assistance at chi2007-courses@acm.org.

Overview

CHI 2007 will again offer courses as part of the technical program. We encourage experts in their field to propose courses in design, education, engineering, management, research, and usability. Courses will be offered in one to four 1.5 hours blocks and will be run in parallel with the technical program, with the exception of plenary talks.

The goal of these courses is to allow those taking a course to reach beyond...beyond their community and beyond their current areas of expertise. We encourage experts in the various community areas of CHI to propose courses that:

  • Provide professional development for practitioners
  • Introduce researchers to new, emerging areas that will benefit from HCI research
  • Provide a state of the art overview of research or technology areas
  • Create opportunities to learn new techniques for use in research or practice
  • Help educate CHI communities about other CHI communities
  • Provide master level classes for experienced CHI attendees

Courses can be aimed at a particular community or can be cross-community. They can be designed for novices or experts in a specific field or novices and experts in other fields.

Course participants will include members of all CHI communities, including user interface designers and users, software developers, managers of human-computer interface projects, human factors practitioners, interface evaluators and testers, industrial designers, teachers of HCI, researchers in human-computer interaction, and professionals in other areas seeking to gain an understanding of how some aspect of HCI relates to their specialties.

Topics

Courses can cover a wide range of HCI-related topics. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Research: overviews of the current state-of-the-art in areas such as the semantic web, information visualization, cognitive modeling, interfaces and interactions for emerging fields such as robotics, biometrics, ubiquitous computing, ethnography.
  • Design: design methodologies, processes and other aspects of design practice.
  • Usability: usability methods, usability process, advancing usability in organizations, usability for localized products and web sites
  • Engineering: identifying and developing functional requirements, making design trade-offs, product development and deployment.
  • Management: cost-benefit analysis, managing HCI in an Agile/UX environment, managing HCI in product development and deployment.
  • Education: effective teaching of HCI and usability, developing presentation skills, curricula in HCI.

Interestered instructors are advised to consult the CHI 2007 community pages for additional information on possible topics.

Duration

Each course should be designed to be presented in one or more 90 minute blocks of time. Quarter-day courses are 90 minutes long, half-day courses will consist of two 90 minute blocks of instruction separated by a break. Full-day courses are six hours long (not including breaks). We strongly encourage instructors to submit courses of one or two blocks. These courses are most easily integrated into the CHI conference schedule and allow participants to engage fully. Instructors can also consider whether they would be willing to present the course more than once during the conference. Full day courses (four blocks) can be proposed but only a limited number of these courses will be offered during the conference. Instructors must justify why full day courses cannot be broken into smaller, independent units.

Coordinated blocks of instruction can be proposed. These courses could either be taken independently or as a sequence of 90 minute blocks of instruction, depending upon attendee needs. For example, a half day on the theoretical base for and design examples of some special purpose system (for example, Geographical Information Systems, Problem Solving Environments, Networked Design Environments, and so on), coordinated with a 90 minute block on the business case, lessons learned, and/or the management of such systems. Proposers of coordinated professional development courses should clearly indicate this in their submission materials. Depending upon the overall conference schedule it may be desirable to schedule multi-time block courses (e.g., a 2, 3, or 4 time blocks) on consecutive days rather than all within a single day.

Review Process and Criteria

Process

Proposals will be submitted electronically and will be reviewed by members of the community or communities they are addressing. Acceptances will be based on evaluations by reviewers. Courses will then be scheduled and integrated into the conference program. Course notes must be received prior to the opening of CHI online registration, because this is the point at which attendees will begin registering for courses. If course notes are not received by this time, the course will be cancelled.

Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated on the basis of their value to some segment of the community. Some factors that will play a role in evaluation are relevance, suitability, timeliness, importance, audience appeal, attendance limits, presentation methods, previous presentations of the course, and past experiences and qualifications of instructors. Proposals will also be considered for their fit within the overall CHI experience, considering such factors as overall distribution of topics, approaches, audience experience levels, and specialties of the intended audiences.

Compensation

The course instructor will receive one complementary registration for the first 90 minute block of instruction and a $700 honorarium for each additional 90 minute block of instruction. If there are multiple course instructors, they must decide who will get the complementary registration and how any additional honorarium will be divided.

Preparing Your Submission

The proposal describes the learning objectives, the material covered to justify the professional development course for a CHI audience, and explains how the professional development course will be conducted. The proposal also needs to provide samples of materials that will be included in the course notes. Professional development courses will be accepted contingent upon receipt of high-quality course notes. The notes should serve as reference materials for attendees and support the presentation of material during the course in such a way that the attendee can concentrate more on the course material than on taking handwritten notes.

A course proposal submission must include two documents, described in detail below:

  1. A proposal document as PDF or RTF.
  2. A description for the CHI 2006 Advance Program as plaintext.

Submissions must be received by 1 September, 2006, 5PM (1700) PST. If you do not receive confirmation of delivery, please contact the Courses Co-chairs. If you anticipate difficulties with electronic submission, then contact the Courses Co-chairs as early as possible to see if alternate arrangements are possible.

Document names should contain the lead proposer's last name as the first word and be named nameN_proposal and nameN_advanceprogram (where N is 1 for the first proposal, 2 for the second, etc.). Documents should be sent as either PDF or RTF files, except for the Advance Program document, which should be sent as plain text. Submissions will be accepted in electronic form only.

Proposal Document

Prepare a PDF format or Word RTF format document of the proposal, no longer than 10 pages, for review purposes. It must have the following, distinct sections:

  • Indicate the duration of your course (total duration and number of 90 minute units).
  • Describe any scheduling constraints such as the order of the course blocks, whether participants need to take all course blocks, and whether you would be willing to present more than one session of the course.
  • Specify if this course is being submitted as part of a coordinated block of courses, as described in the Duration section above. List the other course(s) that are part of that coordinated block and the justification for why they belong together.
  • Describe the learning objectives of the course.
  • Describe, in detail, the material that will be covered in the course.
  • Describe the assumed background and expected skills of attendees. Include who should not take the course. Include any prerequisites such as knowledge of HCI content, processes, and procedures. State any skills that are needed to understand course content or to complete the exercises. Also, specify whether the course is intended to introduce participants to an area, or to further develop the expertise of knowledgeable participants.
  • Justify the course for a CHI audience.
  • Explain how the course will be conducted.
  • Give a schedule of events with time allocations.
  • Discuss audience limitations or expectations - how many participants can you support in the course? The average number of participants in courses integrated with the conference in CHI 2006 was 76, with 10 courses having over 100 participants. As part of this consider two more specific questions:
    • Is there a minimum number of participants for your course?
    • If the course is very popular, would you consider teaching it more than once? We will contact instructors of courses that have significant enrollments by the end of the second week of registration.
  • If the proposed course has been given previously, the proposal should include where the course or tutorial has been given and how it will be modified for CHI 2007. If the course has been given at a previous CHI conference, (either as a tutorial or course) describe how any changes will address comments from previous attendees. Additional materials may be submitted, but will not necessarily be included in the review process.
  • Indicate the number of Student Volunteers that you need to help with your course.
  • CHI will provide typical Audio Visual aids: projectors; flip charts; post-it notes. Please indicate your requirements for audio visual aids.

CHI 2007 Advance Program Description

The Advance Program Description is your opportunity to market your course. You should be concise yet provide enough information so that prospective attendees can make informed decisions about the course(s) they want to attend. We strongly encourage instructors to provide more content on a website. This will help potential attendees determine if the content meets their need. Please provide a URL for your website. Websites need to be active by mid-January when early registration begins. If you have problems providing a web site, please contact the course co-chairs. To achieve consistency in course descriptions, we ask you to include the following material in a plain text file. Please limit the description to 500 words.

  • Title of the course (please make this short but descriptive)
  • Names and affiliations of the instructors.
  • Benefits: The benefit statement should contain a summary of what skills and knowledge the attendees will gain as a result of attending this course. This should include the reasons that CHI attendees would want to take your course.
  • Origins: The origins should state the history of this course (for example, whether it was given as a tutorial at past CHI conferences or related venues).
  • Features: The features should consist of a bulleted list. The items in this list should include the educational goals and/or major elements of the course content.
  • Audience: The audience should be described in terms that include any background required to understand the professional development course. State the disciplines and/or organizational roles of attendees who would be interested in your course (see Overview for a list of roles).
  • Presentation: List the various presentation forms used in the course, for example, lectures, demonstration, exercises, videos, group discussions, and/or case studies.
  • Instructor background: List the background for each instructor, including current employment and activities, previous professional activities, and relevant publications.
  • A web site or another reference that might be accessed to provide more information about the course or instructor(s).

Examples of CHI2006 Advance Program descriptions can be found at the CHI2006 web site.

Upon Acceptance

Instructors will be notified of acceptance or non-acceptance on or about 15 October, 2006. Course notes must be submitted by mid-January 2007 when early registration opens. If the course notes are not received before the opening of registration the course will be cancelled.

Instructors will receive more information about logistics (student volunteers, audio visual, evaluations, payments, etc.) closer to the actual conference.

Course notes are intended to provide the attendees with carry-away materials that will enable them to concentrate their attention on the presentation rather than on hastily taking handwritten notes. The notes should include such useful learning support materials as:

  • an introduction to the topic
  • copies of all overhead transparencies and or slides
  • an annotated bibliography pointing the attendee towards recommended reading
  • copies of relevant background material or scholarly papers (for which the instructors have obtained any necessary reprint permission)
  • course exercises, as appropriate

Instructors must sign a release form giving CHI 2007 one-time-only permission to utilize the notes for professional development course participants and to sell notes at the conference.

Course Submission Checklist

Please review the following checklist to help ensure completeness of your course proposal submission.

  • Prepare the course submission proposal document for review in the appropriate format
  • Prepare the Advance Program description document, as described above, in plain-text format.
  • Be sure the document names contain the lead proposer’s last name as the first word in the document name, as described above.

Submitting Course Proposals

Course submissions will be made through email. To submit a Course for consideration, send an email with the two required documents (proposal, and the description for the CHI 2006 Advance Program.) The proposal should be submitted as PDF or RTF, the description as plaintext.

Send this email to chi2007-courses@acm.org. When you send the email, you will receive a verification response from ACM that your message was sent. Please keep this response as verification of your submission. You should receive a verification of submission from the Workshop co-chairs within two business days of your original email. If you don't receive this email within two business days, please forward the ACM verification to chi2007-courses@acm.org. Please save the submission verification email from the co-chairs.