The WordPress training team creates downloadable lesson plans and related materials for instructors to use in live environments. If you enjoy teaching people how to use and build stuff for WordPress, immediately stop what you’re doing and join our team!
Regardless of your skill set, you can help! We need people to write, copyedit, test, audit, connect, and review our lesson plans. Find out how to get started.
WordCamp US is approaching and will be in Philadelphia in early December, with a contributor day on the 4th. Since this will be an opportunity for many contributors of the training team to meet in person we want to make sure we’re gathering a list of all of the items we’d like to address as a team beforehand to make the most efficient use of our time together.
We’ll chat about this subject over the next few weeks in team meetings and will use this post as a place to store our thoughts and asynchronously share our ideas.
Please add your ideas in the comments!
The topic of what process should be used for copyediting lesson plans and what tools could be used came up during the October 11 Make WordPress Training Meeting. During the Slack discussion, questions arose about how team members should handle copyediting concerns.
The Make WordPress Training Getting Started page indicates the various roles of contributors on the Training Team:
The workflow for Training Lesson Plans is tracked on a Google Apps Sheet: WP Community Training Lesson Plan Progress as in the Getting Started section. The general workflow for lessons is tracked in a Status field:
In addition there is tracking of lesson assignments with the following fields:
There is a Key tab in the Progress Sheet, but that appears to be out of date:
Make WordPress Training includes two guides for writing and editing lesson plans:
There is a set of guides and tracking documents already in place; it seems they could be reviewed for updates and documentation to clarify the copyediting process.
Plugin features would be helpful for copyediting tasks and workflow for published lesson plans. However, with editorial tracking already in place with the Progress sheet, the plugin does not need to recreate nor constrain that part of the process.
Some potential solutions:
Are there other copyediting concerns or potential solutions?
Folks in the training team have collectively provided bits of feedback about the current structure of the Make site for the team for a little while. This conversation turned into more of an in-depth evaluation of the site and it’s purpose at WordCamp NYC’s contributor day this past month. In this post, I’m summarizing some of the key pieces of that conversation (myself, @melindahelt and @Becks979 attended) and applying pieces of that conversation to the current structure of the website. Please add your thoughts as to what pieces of the website need to shift in the comments of this post.
Please add your reactions to any of these ideas, suggestions of changes we can make to improve the user experience of the website, and any other thoughts about the website in the comments!
In yesterday’s team meeting we discussed that the current meeting time (17:00 UTC on Tuesdays) may not be the best meeting time for folks anymore and decided that we should poll everyone and evaluate whether or not we should move the time. Once we have a sense of our internal availability, we’ll check these times against the times of the other WordPress team meetings to make sure those aren’t overlapping with our meeting either.
And so, a few questions for everyone:
Please comment on this post and we’ll discuss in next week’s team meeting! In your comments, make sure to specify availability either in UTC time or to specify the time zone that you’re referring to.
There was a troubleshooting workshop that was put together years ago by some awesome people in the community. In March, I reached out to @ipstenu, who shared the troubleshooting resources from the workshop held years ago. They are located at breakfix.elftest.net and we have permission to use the materials and reformulate them for our lesson plans. Per the group’s initial conversations about this subject, we thought the first step to adapt these lessons for the training team is to inventory what is there and make a list of lessons that could be made out of it and then piece together what needs to happen from there.
The original workshop that was conducted using these resources is described here: https://learn.wordpress.org/workshops/. The original workshop included the following description for potential students to make sure that folks with the skills to make use of the workshop material were the ones who attended the workshop:
For this course to make sense, students need to have the following experience:
If you have any experience with SQL (phpMyAdmin is fine), SSH, and/or manually installing WordPress, that’s a plus, but not required.
You do not not need to know PHP or JavaScript for this workshop.
I went through the whole website that @ipstenu created and have created a basic list of what resources are there and what we already have that could fit together in a workshop. A significant amount of the content on the breakfix.elftest.net site is actually individual troubleshooting exercises, so I went back to my notes from the inaugural workshop (which coincidentally I attended and thankfully still have the notes from!) to fill in some other pieces in this outline.
All of these exercises need to be done on a local install as they are dangerous to do on the real internet. We already have a lesson plan for local installs (yay!) BUT we could take a look at the breakfix version and see if there is anything from it that would be helpful to pull. In terms of lessons I outlined titles and relevant pages from the website or just bullets from my notes/thoughts.
This outline is fairly comprehensive for an initial outline of such a workshop, but begs a few questions that were raised by folks on the team in our meeting last week (thanks @melindahelt and @chanthaboune!), namely:
Next steps on this set of lessons are as follows:
Please add your thoughts/comments/feedback/etc. in the comments. All of this will be incredibly valuable as we move forward with making our first troubleshooting workshop!
In last week’s team meeting, I brought up a few common styling issues that copy editors have noticed while editing lesson plans. As promised, I’m expanding that list here. For more details on many of the items referenced in this list, please refer to the style guide.
Issues we’ve seen frequently include:
We’ll be using this list to create a checklist for lesson plan authors to go through before submitting their plans for copyediting and for copy editors to use while editing, so please list any additional items you’ve noticed in the comments!
Way back in 2014, when the make up of this team was a little different, it was suggested that we have screencasts to accompany each of the lesson plans. This was recently suggested again and it raised a lot of questions for us. Here are the big few that I saw/have been asking myself:
It would give us the chance to have a first pass at a lesson for accuracy and flow internally before it gets to testing. It will also be a good way for teachers to get an idea of the intended pacing of the lesson as they prep.
It would be a very rough run-through of any one lesson. From start to finish, a screencast would be the script and user-driven demo (that’s you, clicking through the actions described in the lesson) with no need for intro or exit language. So it would be your screen that we can see and your voice that we can hear.
No, it wouldn’t. We could use the screencasts to get screenshots (possibly), but the screenshots will still be needed.
And my biggest question:
There are a few ways this works in my mind:
I’m happy and willing to help us work through any of these options. Let’s discuss what we think is the best fit for our plans moving forward.
Group Pings: Beth, Chrissie, Christina, Courtney, Josepha, Julie, Kathy, Kim, Meaghan, Melinda, Michele, Mike, Scott, Tonia
Please also ping anyone I missed in the comments!
After quite a bit of number crunching (item 4) and testing plan outreach, I think it’s time for us to rethink how we plan which lessons to write. We started out Q1 with 45 lessons and too few hands to get them done before the end of March, so I’d like to suggest a new plan for us.
First, re: Volume of lessons. Even if we were to average about 20 minutes per lesson, 45 lessons going at a speedy pace would take 15 hours to teach. This seems too long for a Getting Started workshop and maybe a little too much information for new users regardless.
Second, re: Testing the lessons. I got some generally held feelings from Meetup organizers that each lesson isn’t necessarily long enough to allow it be tested individually. Some suggested it would be possible to use it as an intro to a larger topic, but then there was the question of how to get viable feedback from people who already know the content (a reasonable question).
I’d like to focus on groups of lessons at a time. I propose starting with:
This way, we can lump things into units for testing and offer to groups as they become available. Two birds with one stone.
I would love to hear any thoughts or concerns you have about this plan, or just a vote in favor or not if you have no thoughts in particular!
These lessons are the six we are focusing on at the moment. Let us know in the comments if you’re working on one or need to ask for it to be reassigned!
As planned by @JenMylo during Community Summit
Note: Goal: they can set up a site for a small business with the most commonly requested features and customize it using the dashboard. they become able to contribute in support forums (beginner questions) and doing subtitles
Note: Goal: they can do fancier sites, give better advice, do more in support forums, etc
Note: Goal: they can build custom themes, can answer theming questions in forums, possibly start trying their hand at theme reviews
Note: Goal: they can become a wp professional, can contribute to any of our contrib teams
