Workshop Instructor Guidelines

Guidelines For a Good Workshop at HackRVA

• Workshops should usually be a hands-on or practical outcome driven event (lecture-only style doesn't work well - if you want to give a talk, cool - that's different thing though and should be presented as a talk).
• Workshops should have something started (preferably completed) by the end or at least a skill transfer.
• Workshops seem to do best around 2-3 hours.
• Workshops tend to be on Saturday or Sunday from/between 10am-1pm (they can start earlier or later, but can't go beyond 1pm on weekends - those are freehack times). Weeknights can also work.
• Limit the number of attendees to a reasonable amount. About 10 seems to be an upper limit for most things.
• Consider tool limitations as well - wood working tends to only be 5 people because we don't have duplicates of most wood tools.
• HackRVA will cover the cost of materials and experienced people can help decide a price on the class.
• A more experience member can help you get started on meetup.com. It's not hard, but doesn't hurt.
• Be clear and bounded on what you're going to do in your description on meetup as well as the workshop itself.
• Drop some good links in your meetup.com event for people to get a little pre-workshop knowledge.
• Specify clearly on Meetup any software that needs to be pre-loaded on the students' computers, with links, to save time on installations (unless installing is tricky or part of the class.)
• Free is a great price for a workshop at hackrva. But we also offer 70/30 split with teacher/space on a case-by-case basis. If you're interested in this teaching option, let someone at hack know and we'll talk about that.

These are all just guidelines - some we pretty much always follow, but we're open to experimentation. If you have a unique idea, let someone at HackRVA know, and we can probably work out something.