Proposal: Merging Lesson Plans, Video Tutorials, and Slides

As a team, we’ve spoken about merging our content types, and even making it easier to create one of our long-requested content types.

Based upon our UX audit, we know we’ve got some site design work to be done.

Where are we now with Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site. design?

  • For the landing page design, move forward with the first option shared.
  • For the archives page, the team landed on this design with containers around the lessons and filters in the right sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.. Much of this piece has been done.
  • Finally, for the single lesson plan page, all looks good. The only two concerns raised were around whether or not the accordions could be made accessible and if it’s possible to add some sort of breadcrumb navigation.

These options have been sitting in the GitHub issue for some time. It seems now would be a good time to revisit this.

Where are we with Slides?

The team has been requesting support for Slides relatively as long as we’ve been a team. Our last real look had us considering a WordPress plugin that would create a Slides custom post type. Our 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/ issue is still open as well.

The advantage of doing this on Learn would more easily allow contributors to access the source file that may be used in recording videos from inside WordPress, vs access to the paid Canva account or tracking down Google Slides previously used.

Next steps:

  1. Implement lesson plan landing page and archives page designs.
  2. Consider single lesson plan layout. We’re most of the way there now. When improved, embed Video Tutorials into Lesson Plans, rename Lesson Plans to Tutorials.

Discussion needed:

  • The drop-downs on single lesson plan page are great. As a team, we’ve talked about keeping the example walkthrough fully displayed upon page load with a table of contents, while collapsing the sections like Objective Statements, Prerequisites, Materials needed, and other teacher bits behind those v dropdowns.

    What do we envision in current lesson plans being collapsed upon load?

  • If we bring videos in, and if that lesson plan has a video prominently at the top, would we envision the transcript being collapsed as well, or remain in sidebar as a button? We do require captions on WPTV before embedding on Learn.

    Example Video Tutorial.

    Are the outcomes and objectives here in unison with Lesson Plans objectives and descriptions?

    How will we show the transcript? How will this work with translations?

    Why do videos have a print layout option but lesson plans do not? What do we want displayed if someone wishes to print the lesson plan?

    What considerations do we have for this in merging?

  • Both content types have versions shown publicly, and any other publicly viewable taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies..

    Any additional considerations for combining these?

  • Slides: As a team, several contributors over the years have come forward expressing interest in getting this request passed. Currently there is a Slides pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party that has been forked from the one tested above. It would still need to be submitted to the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team for review/approval to use on LearnWP.

    We can currently store reveal.js slides in GitHub, as shown on High Level Overview. However, making slides these way was a barrier to entry for many WordPress-familiar contributors.

    If/when the Slides plugin is available, do we want to embed the player in the single lesson plan OR do we want to link to it from the button in the right sidebar?

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

#slides