Nordic Research School in Library and Information Science

Course/workshop guide

Budget for travel and accomodation
Travel and accommodation costs should not exceed 100.000NOK for a 5 day course and not more than 90.000NOK for a 3 day workshop. Based on experience, we expect that maximum 20 students can participate during a 5 day course week, and about max 15 can get travel support. Lecturers that need travel support should not exceed more than 3 persons. Of course, it is up to the course organizers to find a balanced mix between the number of students and lectures, including the costs for travel and accommodation.

Budget for honoraries
Honoraries only applies to visiting lectures, that is persons not employed by the NORSLIS departments. The cost for one hour of teaching is 1200NOK(inkluding social costs) and the lecturer will be paid 800NOK. For a 5CTS course honoraries could not exceed 24.000NOK which corresponds to 20 hours of teaching (lectures, seminars, supervision, and examination). Honoraries will be paid using forms (one for honorary and one for tax reduction) that the research school leader will send to the lecturers for them to fill in and return.

Honoraries should not be tranferred to cover travel and accommodation, since the aim is to engage lecturers from outside the NORSLIS network. If a NORSLIS visiting professor teaches in a course or at a workshop, honoraries as well as costs for travel and accommodation will not be paid using the budget for the course/workshop, but from the visiting professor budget.

Questions regarding budget issues and other practical considerations should be addressed to the research school leader. Organizers are also recommended to make use of earlier experiences by asking other organizers in the NORSLIS network and to study their course layouts.

Layout
The dedicated course homepage should contain a detailed schedule for lectures, seminars, discussion groups and other events. Type and volume of student's preparatory work, pedagogical methods, examination and form of assessment should be described. Participating students and lecturers should be listed. Required and suggested reading should be specified well in advance of the course start and if possible be made available as downloads form the course site. Details about accommodation, meals and travel must be specified.

Students selected should write up a 1-2 page presentation of their current project status. During the 5 days there should be allocated enough time for student presentations of their projects (outlining their problems in relation (as far as possible) to the aspects of the course topic, and be given some feedback and floor discussion among students and with the panel of lecturers at the course, like at doctoral fora at conferences. Lecturers are therefore supposed to stay as long as possible during the course, not just for their "day". Further, one can extend the programme to after 4 PM of course, e.g. in connection with a social event (say at 7 PM) to have some group work going. One could also use scheduled time to make discussion groups on selected issues concerned with the course topic and/or based on selected reading (to be read beforehand of course) during the normal day hours.

After the course the students must fill in a student evaluation form and submit it to the research school leader.

Assessment
A 5 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) course normally corresponds to 5 weeks of study. In a typical NORSLIS course, teaching, seminars and discussions are concentrated to one intensive course meeting, normally for 5 days. This means that students need to work on the course both in advance of and after the course meeting. They are usually asked to study the suggested literature and to prepare a presentation in advance of the course. In order for the students to obtain all 5 ECTS they are supposed to write a conference-like paper 1-2 month later, to be send to the course management, evaluated, and to be accepted by the course management (with the course teachers as reviewers). If they do not do that or the submission is really unacceptable, we suggest that they can obtain a reduced number of ECTS. The main responsible person for the course should sign a certificate per participant stating that they actually participated and also give a recommendation about the number of ECTS that the student has achieved (see example here). Of course, it is up to the responsible persons of the local Ph.D. programme to finally decide how credits should be assigned.

Activity report
The main responsible person must send an activity report of the course/workshop to the research school leader. The details of what should go into the report is specified in a activity reporting form to be filled in and submitted to the research school leader.