[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

Mon Dec 28 22:10:49 UTC 2009

Hi Ariane,

I like the w3schools tutorials, but my focus here is really to provide
courses which brings together material which may already exist. What I've
found most useful in my formal education is not lectures or tuition per se,
but having access to professors who you can go to and say "I know X, Y and Z
- I think I want to get to work in specialism A - what should I learn next?
How is best to learn it?" This saves a lot of time and I think some
unassessed courses, possibly put together by Drupal rockstars, could fill
this gap.

It wouldn't be as good as having access to a real human being, but it would
provide a framework for people to learn in.

Maybe Drupalversity is the way to go in terms of the name?

And yes, Drupalversity would do a different job to that done by the
handbook. In my view, any handbook should be a point of reference for people
who already broadly know what they are doing but want to clarify something.
It shouldn't be used for "from scratch" education.

The Curriculum and Training group certainly sounds like a good place for
this - will leave it a day or so on this list to see who else "bites", then
transfer to there.

The way I'm seeing this is that it's a set of course types - 100 courses for
beginners (101 Beginning Drupal, 102 Drupal Modules, 103 Input Filters,
etc), 200 courses for themers, 300 courses for site builders, 400 courses
for module developers, 500 courses for core developers, etc. Each course
type is made up of courses. Each course could be as simple as a textual
narrative with links, like the Drupal Cookbook at
http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook. In
this sense it is different to tutorials and the handbook, but I would have
links on relevant handbook pages saying "you may like to look at course 403
in Drupalversity", or similar.

-J.

2009/12/28 Ariane Khachatourians <arianekhachatourians at gmail.com>

> Hi James -
>
> Are you thinking more specifically like online tutorials, something like
> what they have at http://w3schools.com/ ?
>
> I do have to say, I think using the term "University" is probably not going
> to sit quite right, but you could always make it a play on that like UDrupal
> or Drupalversity or something...
>
> Overall, I think it would be useful to have some kind of more structured
> "courses" online. That would also relieve some pressure off the handbook to
> fill every how-to need that exists.  But the IA for it would really have to
> be well thought out so that it's not just duplicating efforts.
>
> Also, be sure you have a large enough interested group to actually sustain
> that amount of documentation, as it would be quite significant.  I'd highly
> suggest that you post this to the Curriculum and Training g.d.o group
> http://groups.drupal.org/curriculum so that others who would be interested
> in maintaining such a thing will catch wind of it.  (It's one of these
> situations where it's unfortunate that we can't post to the docs group and
> cross-post the discussion there.)
>
> One question to discuss though: would it necessarily be better to have this
> sort of content divided from the rest of the handbook? Or would it be
> useful/feasible for each section to contain tutorials? For instance, the
> theming section to have as a top level section "Tutorials" and then a list
> of various ones.
>
> Interesting ideas...
>
> Ariane
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 8:20 AM, James Benstead <james.benstead at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I've been errantly discussing the idea of setting up a structured set of
>> Drupal courses on the dev list for a little while. Hopefully my most recent
>> post to their will make sense out of context. Thoughts?
>>
>>  Drupal Dojo is great, when it's running - but it does seem to me that it
>>> lacks a little organisation. What I am suggesting doesn't necessarily need
>>> to be new documentation, per se, but instead *the organisation of
>>> existing documentation under a useful structure*.
>>>
>>> Perhaps calling it Drupal University is a bit misleading as I don't
>>> forsee there being any formal assessment or accreditation, but there would
>>> be structured courses to work through. For example, "Drupal 101: Beginning
>>> Drupal" which could teach complete newbies how to set up a core installation
>>> on a local or remote server; or "Drupal 201: Basic Theming" which could
>>> explain how .tpl.php files worked and how CSS works in Drupal.
>>>
>>> The Packt books are great, but they are short and sweet and they don't
>>> offer an overall structure. Pro Drupal Development is superb and offers a
>>> great structure, but it has its limitations: in short, *it's a book*.
>>> First off, you have to buy it, for real money. I have no problem with people
>>> making money out of open source software (especially when their work is as
>>> brilliant as in the case of PDD), but I do think there should be a free,
>>> "open source" alternative. If for no other reason, the cover price of PDD is
>>> huge for developers in 2nd or 3rd world countries (i.e., the majority of the
>>> population of the planet) and they should have an alternative. Secondly, you
>>> can't interact with a book: having a structured set of web resources would
>>> mean people could comment on and discuss the resources, kind of like
>>> students do on a real university campus.
>>>
>>> I suppose the resource that gets closest to what I'm thinking is the
>>> Drupal Cookbook - this could be Drupal 101. It fits my proposal because it
>>> doesn't provide new documentation, but just organises what's already out
>>> there. But more importantly, it answers the question, "I am at stage X in
>>> learning Drupal, what should I do next?". Granted, it answers the simplest
>>> version of this question, and for more advanced developers the answer well
>>> may be multi-faceted - "if you want to specialise in X, go and learn Y" -
>>> but it does crystallise what I'm proposing.
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Google Talk/Windows Live Messenger/AIM: james.benstead at gmail.com
>> Yahoo! Messenger/Twitter/IRC (Freenode): jim0203
>> Jabber: jim0203 at jabber.org // ICQ: 7088050
>> Skype: jimbenstead
>>
>>
>> --
>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
>> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>>
>
>
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>
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