Scottish Orienteering online Planning Workshops
Credit: Mark Nixon
Clare takes us through her experiences regarding learning more about planning through online workshops.
Over the past couple of months I've been taking part in two of the planning workshops Lynne, in her role as "Planner Advocate", has been organising on behalf of SOA.
The first course was "Getting started in Planning" and involved 4 hour long zoom workshops. Lynne enrolled Dave Robertson from CLYDE and Lindsey Knox from Roxburgh Reivers to act as trainers for the course - and there was about 12 of us "students". The first session concentrated on white and yellow courses - and subsequent sessions went through orange, light green and full TD5. After each session our home work was to plan a course at the level of that evening's workshop - and then our courses were peer reviewed at the next session.
The second course was "Long vs Middle distance planning" and involved two sessions led by Mark Nixon. This workshop was aimed at planners with a bit more experience and went through the differences between middle & long distance courses and the different skills being tested. Mark's opinion is that middle courses are often just short versions of long courses - and that planners are often too timid in planning decent long legs. Our homework was to have a go at planning a middle or long course using the Deshar map.
Both workshops were very well organised, making use of all the zoom functions to allow lots of participation - but never getting unruly.
I'd certainly encourage anyone to sign up next time the courses are run - I enjoyed myself and learned a lot too.