TechED Scheduling Friday and Monday
TIP/WARNING - What sessions you choose at any conference ultimately decides the value of it and how satisfied you are. If you are attending TechED, or know someone who is, I highly encourage you to:
- think about what you want to get out of the event. Are you going to learn about new stuff or to gain practical knowledge on tools you are already using. Maybe, you want to get some insight into something you know nothing about. It is generally a bad idea to attend sessions on stuff you already know.
- do some research. Learn about the sessions and the speakers. We have some top notch speakers and I would often attend a session purely due to the speaker. For example, I would personally look to attend Rafal Lukawiecki's sessions. Yet many developers might not have heard of him and on first glance might decide the session would not be interesting.
- give us feedback.
On Friday and today, Eben and I spent some time - Oh wait, lots and lots of time - working on the TechED schedule from a developer's perspective. As content owners for developer, we clearly have the most difficult task compared to the other owners. We are responsible for around 50 sessions in 4 tracks, as well as ensuring that around 20+ sessions have a home in the other tracks. Overall we have direct or indirect responsibility for approximately 80 sessions. This excludes lunch sessions and chalk and talk sessions. These add another 10 to the list.
When we looked at TechED this year from a scheduling perspective, we viewed it in a couple of ways.
Firstly we viewed it from a level perspective. We wanted to check that in each slot, there were both intro and advanced sessions available.
Secondly, we looked the technology. We wanted to ensure that there was a good mix of sessions in each slot. We also try to get at least 4 sessions in every slot so there is choice available.
Ultimately we did not want to end up with a scenario whereby you have 3 intro sessions all focused on web development in the same timeslot. Furthermore, there are other factors to look into. We need to look at the speaker schedule and logistics. Some speakers want to arrive and leave at certain times so you need to schedule the sessions correctly. You also need to see if a speaker has back to back sessions or is presenting too much on one day. Furthermore, you need to look at the flow. This means you want to ensure that an Intro session generally occurs before an advanced session.Then we need to look at room allocations - and figure out which sessions will be more or less popular. Finally, we need to integrate into the full TechED schedule.
We think we are ok and I will post a draft soon - i.e once Eben sends it to me (we worked on his machine) and I format it properly.
You might also want to review this older post on TechED.