On August 17th and 24th, @piyopiyofox and I co-hosted the Training Team’s first Japanese Online Workshops. These were also the team’s first non-English Online Workshops! The workshops received positive feedback, and we’re already seeing people sign up to the third and fourth workshops happening in September!

This post documents the process we took to plan, publicize, and execute the first non-English Online Workshops. We hope this will give others some ideas as to how they can host Online Workshops in their locales, too!

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Preparation

Destiny and I had both previously been vetted as Online Workshop facilitators. Anyone interested in hosting Online Workshops can submit an application here: Applying to facilitate (handbook page). We had also conducted Online Workshops in English, so we were familiar with the general processes behind Planning an Online Workshop.

The process of scheduling the workshop was mostly the same as scheduling English workshops (Scheduling an Online Workshop). A few things we did differently were:

• Created the 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. event in Japanese: ブロックエディターでホームページを作ろう！(English: Let’s make a homepage with the BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor.)
• Included information in English that the event would be hosted in Japanese.
  • We added this information to the event thumbnail on Meetup.com, and in the event description itself.
• We published the event a few weeks in advance so that we had enough time to publicize the event to the Japanese community.

Publicity

People can find out about upcoming Online Workshops in a few different ways:

• Those who are already members of the Learn WordPress Online Workshop Meetup group are notified of new events.
• Those with their location set in or around San Francisco will see upcoming events in their wp-admin dashboard.
• Events are published on https://learn.wordpress.org/online-workshops/.

None of these would get the word to the Japanese community about the workshops, though. So, we took some time to spread the word through other means.

• We published a blog post on the Japanese team blog to inform the community about what Online Workshops are, and announce the planned workshops: Learn WordPress のオンラインワークショップを紹介します.
• We announced the workshops in the Japanese WordSlack instance.
• We worked with the Marketing team to tweet the workshops on the WordPress Twitter account in Japanese.
  • The tweet received 18 retweets, 8 quote tweets, and 44 likes
  • Our second Tweet about the workshops received 13 retweets, 1 quote tweet, and 24 likes

We were particularly excited to see the organic publicity the tweets generated!

Results

We were interested in finding out when the best time to host workshops would be for the Japanese community, so we hosted the workshop twice spaced out over two weeks; both on a Wednesday, but one at 2 PM and another at 5 PM JST. We had a total of 14 people attend the two sessions, with a slightly higher number at the session hosted in the evening over that hosted early afternoon.

The feedback submitted in the Zoom chat was greatly positive with many mentioning they learned something new from the session! We also noticed some attendees tweeted that they had a positive experience in the session.

At the end of the second session, we took time to announce the next Japanese Online Workshops we’ve scheduled for September. This seems to be a success, as one participant mentioned in the session that they would be back, and we see a couple have already signed up to attend! These next sessions are being planned and tracked on the Training Team’s GitHub repository.

• Session title: 10 種類のテキストブロック　〜使い分けのコツ〜  (English: The 10 Text blocks ~tips to choosing the best block~)
  • Hosted on September 7th, 5pm JST and September 17th, 10am JST

Post-session Processes

In English sessions, we generally turn Live Captions on in Zoom, and use these to generate subtitles for the video recording we submit to WordPress.tv. Unfortunately, Zoom does not yet have live caption capabilities in Japanese. While we weren’t able to turn live captions on during the session, we were able to generate good quality subtitles through Sonix.ai after the session concluded. You can now find a recording of the workshop on WordPress.tv: ブロックエディターでホームページを作ろう！

Conclusion

As a team, we are excited about growing the non-English resources we provide on Learn. The experience documented above shows it is possible to host Online Workshops in other languages, too! 

The biggest hurdle we had to cross was publicizing the event to the Japanese community. If you have any ideas as to how we could do this better, we’d love to know!

The Training Team Faculty members are ready to help launch Online Workshops in other locales also. If you are interested in hosting an Online Workshop, come apply to become a facilitator! Faculty members are ready to help you facilitate in your locale, too.

#localization, #online-workshops, #social-learning