TL-DR – Tutorials are incredibly daunting work–at least, they can be if you’ve never done it before. I would like to demystify the tutorial creation process for interested training team contributors, both for those who attend in-person and with a follow-up remote session for team members who will not be in attendance at WCUS.
Objectives for this workshop:
Contributors will be able to…
Part One:
-Write strong learning objectives and descriptions
-Write tutorial scripts either on their own or through utilizing (and spot-checking) AI
-Revise each other’s work for accuracy and voice
Part Two:
-Utilize technology to record strong screencasts and visuals
-Create video tutorials for learn.wordpress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/
-Review tutorials for learn.wordpress.org in public (in person and online)
1. Generate or identify a list of potential easy (and high value) tutorials people could write, add to the Github 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. Tag Tag is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories. However, while a category may cover a broad range of topics, tags are smaller in scope and focused to specific topics. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. them explicitly with “Contributor Day” to allow us to follow up on these topics at a later date.
2. Create a sample website that can be downloaded from our Github repo and installed (using Local or WordPress playground) to save time on people creating sample sites of their own.
3. Create a community repo / Google Drive (for simplicity) to create folders for the resources created for each in-progress tutorial, which will be linked to in each Github issue.
4. Create a dedicated tools list from the handbook page with the specific tech we will be using.
5. Optionally: We could see who might be interested in doing this ahead of time– who may plan to attend contributor day.
On Contributor Day:
Morning Session
1. Building Background Knowledge – Onboarding Session: Welcome to the team, how we use the Github board for tutorials, join the team for the day (or longer!)
2. Topic selection! Contributors will pick a topic from the list and/or suggest a topic [and get it approved]. We will go over expectations for what and how to write on Github.
2. I Do / We Do / You Do: Once topics have been chosen, we will start by writing our learning objectives and topic descriptions on the Github issues. As an ID, I will walk around and ensure topics are bite-sized and that the objectives are measurable. We will discuss the importance of strong learning objectives and how they help learners and educators alike.
3. Collaborative Script-Writing: Contributors will write scripts about their chosen topics, potentially using AI to help generate content. They will collaborate with each other and spot-check their work for accuracy. They will add their scripts to their Github pages.
Afternoon Session
4. Tool time! Contributors will download pre-selected screen recording technology (Descript and Openshot most likely), the pre-created sample website (so that work can continue on their tutorial with or without them in the future), install Local (or utilize WordPress Playground), make a copy of the team’s Google Slides, learn where to find visuals, and get started making screen recordings.
5. Direct Instruction: I will teach contributors one process for recording tutorials. As people work, they can upload their work to whatever repository / Google Drive folder, and update their Github comments as they work.
6. Screen Recording Time: Contributors work on recording screencasts to match the scripts for their tutorials. They will upload and link their screen recordings so they can be utilized at a later date and potentially polished if we run out of time.
7. Review time: Contributors who finish will review each other’s work and add reviews to Github.
If they finish entirely, we will have them write quizzes for tutorials.
For Remote Contributors
These same sessions will be adapted for and offered in shorter, recorded online workshops the week after contributor day, and posted on the Learn Online Workshops Calendar. They will also be recorded and added to Learn’s recorded online workshops.
The Ultimate Goal:
Have contributors record rough drafts of tutorials–and potentially finish them! Since we are in person, we may be able to review work as soon as it is finished (in public on Github, but also in-person)
At any point, a contributor can walk away from the table, leaving a note in their Github issue of where they finished their day, suggestions for next steps, and if they plan to continue working on the tutorial. We will explicitly let people know a deadline for when we may open their tutorial up to others to work on to ensure their lovely content makes it to learn.wordpress.org. They can let us know if they plan to come back and work on it async over WCUS or later, but we will let them know that if they do not come back, another contributor may pick up their work to finish it.
While I know that in the past, people haven’t followed up on finishing their content, I believe we can tag it and leave topics better than we started, complete with strong learning objectives, instructor-approved descriptions, a well-written and spot-checked script, potentially strong materials for recording, or even totally finished tutorials.
Post-Contributor Day
1. Sort content into finished / in progress work, create publishing calendar.
2. Follow-up: For contributors who noted they would like to continue to work on tutorials, we will check to see that they have done so. If they have not completed their work by a certain deadline, we will aggregate their work and allow general content creators to continue working on their topics.
What I need from you:
- We need ideas! What are some learning topics that you think might be great for first-time contributors to make a video about? A topic that we can learn about WordPress in 3-5 minutes or less. These can come from the Ready to Create – You Can Help section of our Github or be entirely new–as long as they’re not on learn.wordpress.org at the moment.
- Are you interested? Let me know here! If you’d be interested in attending these sessions either in-person or in a workshop, please let me know in a comment below. This doesn’t mean you’re locked into attending, it will just give me a good idea of how many people I might expect so I can plan efficiently.
Thank you, team!
#contributor-days, #learn-wordpress
Sessions will be recorded for folks to watch later and anyone can add feedback in the session threads in Slack
