Curriculum and Platform Research: Feedback

[hedleysmith]

Hi all,
I've just finished a first draft of a write-up of some research for how we could approach a new iteration of the curriculum and build a web platform. It's up on Google Drive here: https://docs.google.com/a/agilecollective.com/document/d/1ccSSoFFokyyGpivjUyi22Gqsa9mxXeNhxMm-3SeOxa0/edit#

Would be great to hear any thoughts on this, or if anyone has any comments or suggestions for changes. I can give you edit / comment access to the doc if you'd like to comment

Next steps will be to finalise this and release it, then prototype a platform and get refactoring and building!

[jpstacey]

Nice one, Hedley. That's a really in-depth document and some really interesting points there. I'm especially interested in how the original structure was found to fail:

The overall structure - it simply wasn’t followed more and more as the course progressed during beta testing.

Maybe any learner-led training is likely to escape any structure, so it'd be good to hear more about how it did fail, so we can spot it if we're doing training ourselves.

(btw I'll be at the BoF on Wednesday, although I'm already volunteering to be a room monitor beforehand and it turns out there's zero gap in the timetable, so please start without me.)

[hedleysmith]

Yeah that was one of the big insights I gained from the training. I think a good example of the structure not being followed was after around 4 or 5 days the learners really wanted to build their own themes, so they jumped ahead and just started hacking around with themes - not really paying much attention to the learning modules at this point.

I felt like this may have been a natural progression in some ways, after learning about the flexibility of Drupal for a week they were keen to get stuck in and try their own ideas out.

I'm not sure what the answer is to this issue, it might be that defining clearer and more interesting guidelines for the learning modules works - or it might be that less prescriptive learning modules with general best practices and principles as the 'learning objectives' work.

I'm actually not at DrupalCon this year, I might try to Skype in though!

[jpstacey]

Yeah, maybe the answer is that the second week has to cope with that: maybe it could fork, and be either be: another week of structured learning; or some quite "meta" goals like you said on the call e.g. "build a commerce site" with bullet points about what they're going to have to include to keep them at least vaguely on track.

That way at least you're still able to qualitatively grade what they do, even if you can't quantitatively match their progress to a tight set of learning modules.

[hedleysmith]

Yes I think the modular approach should allow for different course structures within the same curriculum. Having a blend of both might even work for the second week. Something like structured learning in the mornings and project work in the afternoon.

Being able to measure progress is definitely really important, to give something for learners to work toward as well as providing feedback to trainers.

[hedleysmith]

Closing this now as I've actually started to build the curriculum in GitHub