Hi! I was wondering if it is appropriate to mention on our localized web sites or somewhere else any upcoming LibreOffice courses in local community colleges.
In Finland the community college system is partially state funded and the actual colleges are usually operated either by local municipalities, non- profit organizations or in some cases for-profit groups. They are open to everyone and classes are usually held during evenings and weekends, allowing even those who have regular jobs to participate. The subjects range from computer skills to archeology and pottery making. During the past years Finnish community colleges have been quite active at offering basic computer skill courses using OpenOffice.org. I believe this has been good marketing for OOo, especially among the elderly people who quite often learn their computer skills on such courses. Now I see that some community colleges here have switched to LibreOffice which is of course great. There are participation fees to these courses but thanks to government funding they are often relatively low. One community college is offering a 12 hour LibreOffice course with 120 euro fee in April 2012. Another just finished a combined OOo/LibreOffice course, 12 hours with 35 euro fee. I know that there is a certification program coming and this kind of activity would most likely fall within it. But these community colleges could have hard time finding resources to participate in the certification programs at the same level as typical IT training companies since the companies collect much higher participation fees (typically around 1000 euros for courses with similar length). Community colleges often do not even have permanent teaching staff for their courses but just contract someone who happens to be available and has the sufficient skills. Should we take the difference in business models in account when we set up the rules for the training certification program? Or should we just exclude community colleges from the certification program and assume that the government supervision is enough to guarantee sufficient quality? Harri -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
