Improving Deputy Training – Volunteers Needed!

Action required: If you’re an existing deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. and would like to help out with improving the deputy training materials, please read on and comment at the end.

One of the goals that has been set for the Deputy Program for this year is to improve our training materials:

Our current training process takes the form of an online course – this works well for disseminating information and making sure that new deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. have all the information they need. The issue is that it takes a long time to go through the answers submitted by each new deputy to make sure they understood everything correctly. It feels like the best way to improve the deputy training course is to edit all the quizzes to be multiple choice questions (so that they can be graded automatically and a 100% pass is required to move on to the next one), but then have a single quiz at the end that includes a number of long-form questions that require longer answers. This means that grading the course would only require manually doing it for a single quiz for each deputy – this would drastically cut down the time it would take to check these answers.

With that goal in mind, I have done an audit of the questions we ask in the deputy training course, the results of which you can see here. As a high-level summary, I noted the following info:

  • The training course consists of 21 lessons/quizzes.
  • There are 70 questions in total across all of the quizzes.
  • Only 20 of those questions can be auto-graded (i.e. they are mlutiple choice questions).
  • The other 50 questions are all open-ended and need to be manually checked in order to be graded.

With that in mind, the next step here is to update the quizzes to create new questions in each one that can be auto-graded. The original content was written predominantly by @andreamiddleton and it is still incredibly valuable, so we don’t want to edit that anywhere at this stage (unless you find areas where things need to be updated as our practices have changed).

As a general goal, it would be great to have 3-6 multiple choice questions for each lesson and then a set of 5-10 long-form questions for the final quiz that help to show how well folks understand the content. We should be able to use some of the existing long-form questions for that and only write a few more if required.

If you are an existing deputy and would like to help with this, please comment on this post to let me know that you’re keen and we can start working on it.