[documentation] Proposal: Drupal University

Tue Dec 29 15:17:43 UTC 2009

I'd not really thought about the curricula being used outside of people
studying on their own and teaching themselves, but I suppose it could be
used as the basis for training companies to teach from.

And yes, consensus is essential. At the moment I'm thinking that we could
maybe convince a few Drupal rockstars to advise on their areas of expertise:
so Angie Byron could help with a "contributing to Drupal" module, Larry
Garfield could help with "Databases in Drupal", etc. This wouldn't be
essential, and their word wouldn't need to be taken as gospel, but if it
worked I think it could be a great shortcut. The community could then reach
consensus based on that.

--Jim

2009/12/29 Ryan Price <liberatr at gmail.com>

> 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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>>> Yahoo! Messenger/Twitter/IRC (Freenode): jim0203
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>>> Skype: jimbenstead
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
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>>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
> --
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>
>
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