Training Team Meeting Recap – June 14 & 16

Slack Log for EMEA/Americas Meeting (Tuesday, June 14, 2022)
Slack Log for APAC Meeting (Thursday, June 16, 2022)

(Logs require a SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account.)

The agenda for both meetings can be found here.

Introductions and Welcome

Attendance EMEA/Americas Meeting: @courane01, @azhiyadev, @webtechpooja, @caraya, @leogopal, @arasae, @ndiego, @webcommsat, @courtneypk, and @samanthaxmunoz

Attendance APAC Meeting: @webtechpooja, @kartiks16, @chaion07, @sabbir16, @meher, @bsanevans, @wpscholar, @shusei, and @Kk

Welcoming the newcomers joining the Training team in the last week (Slack usernames): @Víctor Sáenz@Rendani@Nox Dineen-Porter, @Chandler Weiner@Daniel Grossfeld@Asfandyar, @Sadman Sakib Nadvi@Dom, and @Danish Naseer

Meeting Note Takers

News

Independent Learner Survey

This Independent Learner Survey was worked on by the team at WCEU. The hope is to open this up for any individual in the WordPress space to share how they’ve learned WordPress, what areas they’d like more support with learning, and more.

While this is not a full “needs analysis”, the goal is to make LearnWP a resource to really serves the community, from hobbyists to large scale organizations and many roles within. This survey is a first step in identifying the types of content that WordPress users are looking for.

Training Needs Analysis

Following the Learner Survey, a more official “needs analysis” should be conducted. There is a bit of an industry standard for these. @Robbie and @abhanonstopnewsuk have volunteered to help the team move further along with this. Both are seasoned professionals who conduct frequent needs analysis. A working session to begin this process will hopefully be scheduled by next week.

Naming Content Types

On LearnWP, we have:

  • lesson plans
  • workshops
  • social learning spaces
  • courses

Workshops were originally a term the Training Team used/intended to mean a series of lesson plans presented together, much like the workshops during WCEU.

The term was then applied to mean videos on LearnWP that people watched before attending discussion groups (later named Social Learning Spaces). In conjunction with the feedback from #polyglots that “Social Learning Spaces” often doesn’t translate well, the team is rethinking how things are named.

Merging Lesson Plan and Workshops

Related to the naming of content types mentioned above, workshops are now videos, roughly in parity with lesson plans. Previous effort/work has been done around what the merge could look like, including the landing pages for lesson plans.

The idea tentatively is to have the video and slides near the top, the text walk-throughs after, and tuck the teacher bits like objective statements behind a tab dropdown or something of the sort. Here are a couple proposed ideas:

The team is also thinking that adding several lesson plans together essentially become a course. The individual versions would be stand-alone, and could still be presented by a MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organizer and used by instructors, or direct learners.

There is still a lot of work to be done, and further progress depends on finalizing content type naming.

Monthly Retrospective

Each month, the Training team works in Sprints. These are goals we hope to accomplish for that month. At the end of the month, we conduct a retrospective by asking ourselves a few questions. The feedback is then posted, here is an example from April 2022. May’s retrospective was delayed due to WCEU.

May Sprint 2022

  • 2 Lesson Plans were published including one in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 6 Workshops were published including one in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 1 Course was published
  • 23 items in Drafts in Progress
  • 13 items in Review in Progress (of which 4 are ready to publish)

Training Team Goals

Carried over from Q1:

  • Implement a Faculty program (like Community Deputies, name to be determined). 
  • Brainstorm and discovery for the creation of a Needs Analysis. Still in progress and a Learner Survey has been created in the interim. 
  • Create Instructor/Facilitator resources portion on LearnWP

Goals for Q2

  • Conduct Needs Analysis
  • Create content useful for WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe
  • Release roadmap of new content (that isn’t tied to WP releases/features)
  • Assess content that has the largest impact
  • Overhaul the “Submit an Idea” form. Build in conditional logic for workshop, lesson plan, and course.
  • Ongoing promotions collaborations with other Make teams such as Marketing, Polyglots, Docs, AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), and Community

Team Comment on the Retrospective

Each month, team members have an opportunity to share what they think what went well? What could the team improve? What will the team do differently in the future? The responses from each meeting are below.

EMEA/Americas Meeting Responses
APAC Meeting Responses

June/July Sprint

For the June/July Sprint, the proposal was to simply continue working through the backlog of existing tasks.

Open Discussions

@caraya prompted a good discussion about where to put “auxiliary content” for lesson plans. This type of content could include sample code files that could traditionally not be uploaded to the lesson itself. Some proposed options included a GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repo or Gists. The full discussion is available here.

@webtechpooja shared WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in India (Sept 24 & 25) and that WordCamp Kathmandu has been officially announced and will be held on 3rd & 4th September 2022.


Upcoming Meetings

You are welcome to join the team at any time! If you are new to the Training Team, please introduce yourself in the #training channel before the meeting (or anytime!) and feel free to join us in the meeting and participate as you are able.


Training Team Mission

The WordPress training team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments, via learn.wordpress.org.

Getting Involved

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join in, comment on posts, and participate in meetings and on projects.

  1. Learn.WordPress.org
    1. Lesson Plans
    2. Workshops
    3. Courses
    4. Social Learning Spaces
    5. Pathways to Learn WordPress
  2. Getting Involved
    1. GitHub Website Development
    2. GitHub Content Development
    3. What We Are Currently Working On This Month
  3. About The Team
  4. Our Team Blog

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