curriculum

Open source has proven to produce high quality in various fields. Loyal to the principals of open source, I am sharing Linnovate's Drupal training curriculum, in order to share it with other Drupal shops who consider train people to Drupal, and of course - get some feedback, and improve the program.
The idea is not to create a unified training syllabus, but rather propose a structure of such a course. Drupal training centers may then modify the training program, to fit their needs.
We might want to publish the syllabus under GPL, and make it officially open source :-)

At Linnovate, we develop 3 training programs:
- Drupal administration - get to know all you need in order to install and administer a Drupal website, without writing code.
- Drupal Theming - From PSD to a Drupal Theme (draft)
- Drupal Development - Learn how to write modules and expand Drupal (Updated draft)

I've developed a Drupal User Guide training / documentation for site users who want to tweak things, but don’t need to code - i.e. "end users." While I could respond to the previous post, I wanted to highlight this independently. This document is licensed for anyone to modify, use (and get paid using) - and I've love to it to return to the source, so to speak, so I can hash out another version with a longer list of contributors and better content. :-)

Mor details, and downloadable files, here.

Well, I consider our first lesson event to be a total success. Victorkane has done an incredible transcript (below) complete with code, and after watching the screen capture of the session, I feel really good about how much we covered and what kind of potential there is for the future here.

My immediate thoughts are on what we should do for the next lesson. I really do want to regularize the timing, so should we change it? After Thursday's success I am willing to take time out of work or weekend to see this group go forward. I'll put up a poll.

Also, we had some good talk in the IRC channel about even better screen-sharing for the event, and next time we'll know to tell people that skype is required. I will also be better able to prepare with one lesson under my belt.

I'm excited!

Use the comments here to throw out ideas for the next lesson in terms of content and procedure. I'll start a separate poll and thread for picking a time.

After some discussion in IRC, it seems that there's definitely interest in having "lessons" here at the Dojo. Ideas range from HOWTO on specific features and topics to having creators of interesting sites lead the group in an under-the-hood tour. Really, the sky is the limit.

It is my intention to try and make lesson-time be a recurring weekly feature. To that end I will run the first few. Hopefully within a couple weeks we will have a format that works and other experts can step in/step up.

For our first lesson, we will try to cover the basics (ala Angie's lesson plan): drupal terminology and what it means, the basic module hooks, good coding style and best practices.

Since this is of high value to all dojo members -- and it's a lesson that could/should be repeated many times as new developers join -- we're also going to try and create good documentation out of this. A primer for new Drupal coders, so to speak.

(image credit: Squidster)

NOTE: Clearly this is a collaborative effort and I am totally open to adjusting/changing this as we discover what works. I am also actively looking for other experienced Drupal developers to lend time and energy to this, as well as (obviously) hustling up a good crop of apprentices.

Why Apprentices?
Everywhere you turn, people talk about the shortage of Drupal talent. There are various groups dedicated to regional meetups, drupal camps, even formal training events. This group is trying to answer the talent shortage by creating an online community dedicated to transferring knowledge from existing experts in the community to newbies who want to learn.

I was at the first Melbourne Meetup a few weeks back, where the topic of Drupal Training in Melbourne was briefly discussed. The general consensus is that it would be a "Good Idea".

I'm now wanting to follow up the idea with anybody else at all interested.

I see a role for End-User Training, as is being discussed elsewhere How do you train your Drupal end users?, as well as Developer Training.

Some discussion of Sydney training is going on: See here. I've had a little correspondence with Peter who is running the Sydney training.

Meeting to discuss the curriculum development.

The time is tentative, and we want to try and include as many people who are already tasked with developing courseware, as there
are several of us. Please comment with what time would suit you.

Todo list and agenda to come.

UPDATED: Time moved ahead 2 hours due to request from Rowan.

Here is the agenda for the weekly courseware IRC meeting.

1) Review the unit 1 outline from last week's meeting.
2) Disccus the overall scope of the course. Do we include module development? if so, to what extent? etc. etc.
3) Where/ When does install take place and what platforms are supported. (put up for vote)
4) Break up tasks for unit 1 (at least) granularly enough to be able to assign them to individuals.
5) Spec out next unit.

Any other thoughts?

Another of our weekly IRC meetings.

If you are interested in development of the courseware, please join us.

update: Please take a look at the Agenda

1) Go over decisions made at previous meeting, most notably the units as defined here : http://drupaltutorials.com/sami
2) Discuss the project goal for Unit 1 - Basic Brochureware site. Preferably by the end of the day we should be able to configure the site ourselves, and have a list of modules , with a list of subjects we need to discuss to implement those modules.
3) Go over angie's lesson plan (http://drupaltutorials.com/lessons) and choose which parts of it are applicable to Unit 1.
5) Set up courseware mailing list for public discussion, and notifications.
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