Seeking easy-to-implement Drupal curriculum for youth

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valnelson's picture
Posted by valnelson on April 6, 2009 at 2:36pm

Does anyone know of an existing curriculum package that a teacher could use in high school, college, or youth group setting to train students in web design using Drupal? The students would have no previous web design experience.

If not, is anyone interested in contributing to a curriculum? Maybe using training modules you have already developed?

Thanks!

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Revised request - colleges that offer Drupal training?

Posted by valnelson on April 7, 2009 at 7:08pm
valnelson's picture

After speaking with a Drupal expert, I now realize it is probably unrealistic to jump into Drupal programming without starting the students on other things first.

Therefore, I'm now looking for colleges across the U.S. that teach web design with Drupal within their web developer program course selection. Surprisingly, this is not as common as one would think.

Thanks again!

I teach

Posted by kaw3939 on April 7, 2009 at 7:51pm
kaw3939's picture

Hi,

I teach Drupal at a University. I have given what you are trying to do a lot of thought and come to some conclusions. Namely, students need to be exposed to CMS like Drupal but the skills they are learning at the college level are not up to the task of seriously modifying the CMS. I would actually like to come up with a curriculum that would get students to that point.

My class is using Drupal and it is the first experience students have with anything similar to an enterprise level system i.e. one with users, groups, rolls, permissions, etc... I actually think that it is probably a better approach to have students editing Drupal sites and then have them take a course in CSS/HTML (higher level) and PHP. If you were to want to use Java as the base language in your program then Alfresco would be a good substitute / alternative to Drupal. Ideally, it might be a good idea to do both, so that students have some experience with two different languages and two different cms / web enterprise systems.

Thanks. More thoughts.

Posted by valnelson on April 7, 2009 at 9:08pm
valnelson's picture

Thanks Keith. I appreciate your insights.

Let me see if I understand. Is it possible for a student in their last semester of a web developer training program to build a Drupal website for a real world organization under close supervision from the instructor?

I'm imagining the instructor might provide parameters such as certain themes and modules to stick to, as a way to keep it simple. Maybe the student wouldn't need to do serious modifications to the back-end. Or is that unrealistic? I'm not a programmer so I am looking for feedback on this.

Or is it one of those situations where a having only a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing?

By the way, I found a long and useful discussion about Drupal curriculum models here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/17630

Thank you!