Education and Training: A Drupal Learning Track

[This is a wiki - please don't hesitate to update, revise, and contribute your ideas!]

Goals and Objectives

• Develop an open training and certification program;
• Create a more effective platform to provide free online training, mentoring, and a showcase for Drupal;
• Discover and recruit new talent;
• Help end-users to evaluate a specialist by providing standard "levels of expertise";
• Reach out to make new audiences aware of Drupal who might not be currently aware;
• Attract peripheral Drupal types to become more closely involved and active;
• Raise awareness of Drupal among some key target groups;
• Develop open source curriculum ready to use by anyone for delivery of hands-on training;

Projects, Tasks and Initiatives

The Drupal Open Learning Initiative - There are many great Drupal learning resources, groups, and tools but they can be somewhat disconnected and spread out. Our goal is to unify and bring these efforts together to provide a complimentary program and platform that serves all Drupal learning initiatives needs and efforts.

Resources

Learning, Mentoring, Training, and Education groups

• Drupal Kata - The Drupal Kata is a program that provides training in a wide range of areas ranging from site planning, drafting proposals, project management, information architecture, development, design, infrastructure, to Drupal workflows and community. It does this by pairing apprentices with a mentor or mentors, thus gaining exposure to real-world scenarios and connections with the local and global community.
• Curriculum and Training - This is a group to organize and discuss the development of Drupal courseware to be used for training students at Drupal Camp and other training events.
• Drupal Dojo - The Drupal Dojo was created for apprentice/journeyman developers who want to increase proficiency, and for experts looking to grow the pool of Drupal talent.
• DROP - DROP is a program dedicated to helping people find easy, short-term ways of making valuable contributions to Drupal, as well as helping them become a part of the Drupal community.
• Drupal in Education - This group is an umbrella group for supporting and discussing the various uses of Drupal in educational settings.
• Google Summer of Code, 2009 - 2009 edition of the program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.

Other groups, projects, and discussions

• Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) - initiative to get pre-university students involved in open source software development. The contest brought together more than 350 students from around the world to help ten Open Source projects make improvements to their code base, marketing materials, documentation and user experience research.
• Training Drupal professionals: Towards an open Drupal training curriculum and certification
• Training: Boosting our raw capacity to provide Drupal training (DrupalConDC)
• Training and certifications session@ szeged2008.drupalcon
• Drupal Essential Training (Lynda.com)
• Lullabot Workshops and seminars
• Drupal resource repository that doubles as an online Drupal course
• How about teaching Drupal/OS in the classroom?
• Making the case for using drupal as a university-wide content management system
• Specs for a learning exercise module

Program Leads

• Aaron Winborn (aaron)
• Kristof Van Tomme (kvantomme)
• [add your name if interested]