This post marks the kickoff of a new WordPress contributor group, aimed at the creation of standardized WordPress training courses. The idea is that we should have curriculums on wordpress.org that meetups or individuals can download and use to run local trainings (like new user workshops), and/or that can be used with online courseware to help people self-teach.
This group’s work will overlap somewhat with the Support group (especially where documentation is concerned) and the Events group (especially around training events), but the creation of curriculums is specific enough that it deserves to be a standalone project — especially since we’ve been talking about it for years!
Here’s the mission:
- Reach out to the community and find out what kind of training is going on already (workshops, college courses, etc), and who among these teachers is willing to share their curriculum/teaching materials.
- Collect and collate donated curriculums.
- Identify the first round of courses that should be created. This should be a list with short descriptions including experience level/prerequisite knowledge. Eventually, we’ll ideally have beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses (plus additional special topics) around each of the areas of WordPress knowledge: using the application, administering a site, managing a multisite installation, theme development, plugin development, core contribution, translation, etc. Basically every topic that gets a handbook should probably have a round of courses for hands-on learning in that area. For the first phase, let’s start with one.
- Use the best material from the donated curriculums as a starting point for officially approved courses, and create the first course (a new user workshop will probably have the most to work with and allow all contributors to participate).
- Do some testing of the curriculum with live audiences, revise as needed.
- Publish the curriculum on wordpress.org!
- Post-mortem to identify ways of improving the process.
- Branch out and tackle additional courses.
This is a starting point, so once there’s an active group of contributors working on the project, if this plan needs to be revised, that’s fine, of course. It is important, however, to start with a small scope for the sake of getting something completed that can be used as a case study before taking on bigger projects in this area.
Christine Rondeau and Lisa Sabin-Wilson have both had experience providing WordPress training and have both offered to help get this project started, so I’m making them both admins on this blog. They can give people posting privileges as it becomes clear who is going to be involved with this group as an active contributor.
To get started, if you have conducted WordPress training or classes and would be willing to contribute your existing curriculum, or if you have experience in Instructional Design and want to help with the design of courses, or if you just want to be part of this and are willing to do grunt work like following up on emails and taking care of spreadsheets and the like, introduce yourself in a comment on this post! Helpful info to include in your comment: Your level of experience with WordPress in general, training specifically, local WP events (meetups/WordCamps/workshops), and what you are interested in helping with.
In December, all the contributor groups will be voting for team reps, and this group will be included in that. In the meantime, Christine and Lisa will take care of posting updates to the rest of the contributor groups to keep people up to date with your efforts here.
I’m so excited to see what you all create! I can’t wait to be able to point people to wordpress.org for courses they can teach in their communities. This is going to be huge. Thank you in advance to everyone who’s about to pitch in. 
Mumtaz, 
Anonymous are discussing. 
nofearinc 11:08 am on December 10, 2012 Permalink |
There weren’t enough ‘show off’ on the group compared to the other major ones, especially right before a new version release. I believe in the importance of Training and it’s future influence on the community, the new members and improving the skills of existing WordPress users and developers according to standards and docs.
Jane Wells 1:59 pm on December 10, 2012 Permalink |
I’m not sure what you mean by “show off” but my suggestion wasn’t intended to imply that training isn’t important, more that it may be easier to get it going if it’s in conjunction with the community outreach group, since we’ll be doing mentorship programs etc that will rely heavily on training materials, and that it would be less pressure on the people who had offered to lead this group.
nofearinc 2:17 pm on December 10, 2012 Permalink |
it’s your call, I’m referring to your statement that there’s been no activity for the past 3 weeks which is hardly a factor with the current effort on popularization of the group around the holidays and right before a new version.
The amount of work for both Community and Training would be large and separation would lead to easier delegation of responsibilities and focusing on different targets.
Marko Heijnen 9:12 pm on April 27, 2013 Permalink |
I would love to pick things up on this one. Training should be separate and the outreach group should benefit from this group and not the other way around.
Another reason is that the outreach group has currently a focus on women only and to me that is something that the trainings program should not have. It should not enforce people to think in boxes but yeah that is my opinion.
I would love to work with Mario on a plan to make this work and I believe when there is something setup that more people we help out. Since I do agree with him about the “bad timing” of this whole. I totally forgot about it since I was to busy with checking code and testing everything for 3.5.