There could be an audience for short, intensive Drupal training for non-developers. This training would be offered to organizations where people - frequently not even a "web team" - need to be able to interact with Drupal and feel comfortable doing so. This is intended to collect initial ideas which might inform training materials.
Goals
Overarching goal
A key goal for such training is simply that the people are satisfactorily trained: that is, many such organizations would see such training as just being an enabler to the person's everyday job.
In addition, because we might be already training people who've used Drupal (a bit or a lot) but who have been mandated by their employer to take a course, then we have to accept that a goal of the training isn't necessarily to teach people completely new skills.
The immediate goal of the training is to satisfy the organisation that the training has been completed: obviously the training should feel useful and like it can help people progress, but different organisations will provide trainees at different levels.
One way to cope with "advanced" classes could be to have extra modules on hand (and possibly a dedicated Drupal training site to try them out on.)
Skills we can teach
However, even with that in mind, here are some skills that it should be feasible to teach people during the training.
- Log in and out, and manage their own account.
- Add content and know where that content is going to appear (views, homepage etc.)
- Edit content they see
- Work with rich-text editors, related content (on other nodes) etc.
- Find content they worked on before
- Work using revisions and (if enabled) Workbench moderation
- Managing content with taxonomy and metadata (depending on site)
These items seem obvious to Drupal developers, but one or many of these can often present serious obstacles to people new to Drupal, or even to the idea of a CMS in itself.
Pre-requisites
Trainees
The most important pre-requisite! At most half a dozen trainees, because of the intense nature of the workshop format.
Trainees should:
- Be comfortable with using a web browser and word-processing software e.g. Microsoft Office, Libre Office.
- Need to use the website for content entry and editing existing content
Trainees must already have an account on any organisation's site (see below.)
Prior access to the organisation's staging site
If we are to train on an existing site, an essential pre-requisite is access to a staging (i.e. non-production) version of that site, and details about what user roles will be assigned to the trainees.
In advance, all training workflows should be attempted on that site. Any workflows that cannot be completed will need to be discussed with the organisation: omit, work around (will require investment in a modified training resource) or do on the dedicated training sites (see below.)
On-the-day copies of the organisation's staging site
Staging copies of the existing sites (at least one) will need to be made available for training.
- Trainees must already have an account on the organisation's staging site, with the relevant roles.
- The trainer must have admin access to the staging site, just in case.
Training site?
A dedicated "whitelabel" training site would be useful: simple to set up (an install profile), and containing enough prerequisites to satisfy the training here. This could be rapidly installed for each trainee, and torn down after training.
Trainees can switch to the training site for any training not to be carried out on the organisation's website (for whatever reason.)
Training description
Format
The training would be mostly in a workshop format, with at most half a dozen people working through the training step by step. Because of the number of new concepts involved, it might be helpful to have some pat explanations (single slides) to hand for the trainer to talk through.
Environment
Training would need to take place primarily on the system they have to work with. This is the main stumbling block, as not every Drupal site is built the same way. There would need to be some up-front "R&D" into whether someone's done something weird (e.g. disabled the standard view/edit node tabs) as otherwise no training materials would be of use.
Length of training
Initially it would be good to have training that an external trainer (e.g. a consultant) could feasibly do during an on-site visit. That means e.g. a half or full day.
What to cover
To meet the itemized goals, a number of user actions can be covered:
- Logging in, account maintenance and password reset
- Permissions and what to do if you can't do something
- Navigation and "how things are arranged"
- Overlay, Admin menu, Toolbar, Shortcuts or any other navigational help provided to them
- Creating content & (what are) content types
- Rich-text editing and different rich-text buttons (and shift-ctrl-V from Word :) )
- Relating content to other content and why it's best to do it with a reference (keeps in synch)
- Special properties of content (path & pathauto, owner, date published)
- Metadata (published, front page etc.) and how it affects appearance in different bits of site (touch on Views briefly and show views editing interface)
- Advanced (if time/suitable): Editing/creating views
- Advanced (if time/suitable): Taxonomy, Blocks, some site configuration
- Advanced (if time/suitable): Managing users
In addition, some brief "tuition from the front" might be helpful:
- "What is a CMS?"
- "What is a node?"
- "How do permissions work"
- "Why can't I just do X"
Resources
Reusing OpenDrupal Foundation
This course is mostly for rapidly upskilling new developers, but here are some of the elements that could be reused here.
- Intro 3. Content Management Systems
- Intro 4. What is Drupal (mostly resources section)
- Intro 6. Manage your site (some bits relevant)
Other resources
Please add other resources here that might be useful for training.
Comments
Are my assumptions about audience correct?
Is this too narrow an audience of trainees, or does it not hit the mark properly? What kind of training are organisations asking about?
Hi J-P, This sounds like a
Hi J-P,
This sounds like a great idea. If training modules could be developed within the Open Drupal curriculum for training on site management skills in Drupal, that could be very handy for a wider range of users.
I think this may be especially useful to larger organisations who have multiple staff members that would find it useful to be trained in general Drupal management skills.
This may also be useful to smaller organisations - and some slightly more advanced training for them on how to create new parts of their websites may be useful, so they can save money by making updates to their sites themselves instead of employing freelancers or agencies.
I can't help but think of Mozilla's efforts on Web/Digital Literacy when thinking about this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/WebLiteracyMap and the wider 'Digital Literacy' material out there which feels like it could be a prerequisite or partly incorporated into this training.
CTO @ Settled
http://www.hedleysmith.com
Great to hear this talked about
As someone who has and is grappling with this, there is a need for it without a doubt. I have been asked many times what resources exist to train a web editor in Drupal. The issue is whether or not you can tailor training well enough to suit the website that people will actually be working on (better than the people who developed it) and whether or not people will be able to pay for training before they have taught themselves how to use it!
Most organisations max out their budget on building their websites and although training is nearly always built in to a website build, it tends to get sidelined.
I am in the process of creating an online training package for one of our Drupal products at this level and have done a couple of face to face group training sessions. The thing is that most web editors (not site managers) need to understand tangibles, not abstract concepts.
My instinct would be to pitch this at a non-developer audience, but not at web editorial level and go deeper into Drupal.
Training within the open Drupal curriculum at this level would be invaluable in my opinion. However, real hands on training at web editorial level, I think will have to remain with people that run individual sites or the people that have built them to be really useful.
I'm really happy to review any proposed curriculum for value to a 'web management/editorial team' though. All of my training has been built around video - but it is totally dependent on the way that Drupal has been structured and wouldn't work very well for any other solution.
Scenarios and tailoring
Thanks for the feedback. Here's a couple of my thoughts based on what you've said:
Tailoring
I hope the training can be slightly modular i.e. you could re-use some bits and not others. Something like:
I obviously don't plan to write it all but I hope that we can structure it for at least a couple of organizations and that will give us some idea of what varies and what doesn't. We can also always fall back on a "standard" site as discussed.
Paying for training
This is an issue, definitely. I'm hoping to get a few contacts at organizations that might let us beta-test on them; I don't have those yet. But the initial paying organizations will at least dictate the initial structure of the training.
This is the only aspect of the training where who pays, gets an advantage, because the initial materials are geared to them. But that's a decent quid pro quo, I think.
Your planned training
When you say "go deeper into Drupal" can you give me two or three example training scenarios and say maybe a bit about what you expect people to learn from them e.g:
That's too deep, right? :) But if you can give me a couple of them then it'll give me something to work with and maybe incorporate.
I'm hoping that, even with an editorial audience, we can go a bit deeper than just editing content; however, it really depends on what arises from the organizations I hope to trial it with.
Between two audiences
The training you outline to me falls between the 'web editor' level and 'site manager'. As someone who would probably look for this kind of training for my organisation it wouldn't work, because there is too much confusing detail for a 'web editor' and not enough depth for a site manager. I think it would be awfully difficult to do both together.
Two thoughts a) It is the web editor level training that is lacking - but web editors need to know a lot more than how Drupal works, which is why organisations tend to do the training internally - to bring other elements in (Brand, risk management, image/video editing, standards, legal obligations etc.). There is normally high turnover of this type of staff also...
b) Drupal is supposed to have been built so that non developers can manage it - the reality is that this is very hard to do. Many organisations want to be able to do this - particularly in my sector, where developer salaries are hard to find. So you would definitely find an audience for training pitched at site maintainer level - but maybe not all from the same organisation.
Permissions, rich text editor, how Drupal works (not how a CMS works, people doing that job would know that) - all of that is essential to the above. I would also include contexts and creating/editing views and content types. Maybe choosing and installing a module - not building or modifying one - btw. I'm not a developer, which is probably clear anyway - and finally theming - how theming works, style sheets and how they work - how to modify a style sheet (this is not impossible for many non-developers).
I hope this helps. I do know a number of organisations in my sector that use Drupal that would could be approached to beta test this if you'd like a few names to approach. Are you only interested in Oxford based organisations?
You can contact me via email if you are interested carolyn.baker@oxfaminternational.org
Different organizations (sizes, requirements)
I'll answer this in two comments if that's OK, to separate out the threads.
I think the point at which you get onto creating views and content types is definitely a point where different organizations, and their requirements, diverge. For a start there's a size issue:
But there's also organizations who will always look to agencies; who will always look to doing it in house; and the vague crossover area in between. They all have different requirements.
However, maybe there's scope for introducing Views in a gradual way: maybe
That could lead into creating a very simple view. But, yeah, that last step would need to be modular and swap-out-able. At least it would introduce them to Views, regardless.
Alpha and beta testing: where?
I'm not wedded to Oxford-based organisations: but as I'm currently doing this for the love of it then it has to be somewhere I can get to on public transport from Witney.
From a personal perspective, I see there being an alpha phase, where we test with 2-3 organizations possibly pro bono (maybe asking for travel expenses) and they accept the testing and its materials might not be perfect. After that point, we'd have to wait and see (wife and cat need to eat and so do I) but regardless of what my personal decision is, the training materials would always be freely available through Open Drupal.
So if you do know of anyone for the alpha phase who either is Oxfordshire based, or willing to pay for train tickets for a seasoned Drupaler to wherever they are, then I'd definitely be interested.
I like the idea of feeding web literacy into this
I like the idea of feeding web literacy into this, or using it as a way of structuring what we cover on the Drupal site. I guess most of "Exploring" could be relevant; then the top 2-3 of "Building" and "Connecting", depending on the site in question.
That aside, does the current scope of the wiki content sound good to you? Anything you'd add/take away?
Yes I think what's on the
Yes I think what's on the wiki page is good to go for a 'beta test', running a workshop would definitely reveal a lot.
A fair amount could already be covered from the existing materials if it were training for more site-manager type people.
Really exciting stuff, I think this could be very useful to a number of organisations and would be fantastic to have some material for others to use for free online!
CTO @ Settled
http://www.hedleysmith.com
What is the time frame?
There are other lists I can explore for contacts: both 'test' phase and paid. However, I think I'd probably need to know a bit more about the training you will offer and timeframes. I'm hoping to come to the next Oxford Drupal Groups meeting - will you be around?
Carolyn
Should be!
Hope to be there, Carolyn, but the meeting could be busy with Drupalcon updates. We could always chat afterwards if you're able to stay around for half an hour or so when the group decamps to the Royal Oak?
Oh yes...
sure - I'll try to.