[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

Tue Dec 29 05:00:45 UTC 2009

Acquia has been talking about setting up an "official" Drupal  
curriculum for years... they were calling it Yellow Jersey.

The "standard" seems to be one company decides what is official, but  
that's not how Drupal seems to do it.

In order to get something like this taught at a college (as a  
seminar), or to get the numerous Drupal Training companies out there  
to adopt it, I would want some sort of consensus from somewhere. Even  
if the opinion was not a popular opinion, it would still be out there.  
Education (in my opinion) needs to have a particular stance, and be  
geared toward a certain audience, etc. If you try to be everything to  
everyone, it's not very effective.

I speak on behalf of one of those Drupal Training companies. If  
someone handed us a curriculum, we would probably teach it, and be  
happy to do so. Then we would have fewer things to compete with.  
Instead of the situation we have now, it's only one question for our  
students: get it in person, or self-taught?

Peace,
Ryan Price
DrupalEasy.com
rprice at ryanpricemedia.com
@liberatr
407-484-8528

FloridaCreatives.com
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On Dec 28, 2009, at 5:10 PM, James Benstead wrote:

> 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.
>
> --
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>
>
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