curriculum

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!

Several months have passed since the Dojo lost it's way a bit when some noble ninjas attempted to create a great deal of good for the Drupal project. In a group of 1500+ members, there is no way to achieve any sort of consensus to why it stalled, how it could succeed, or what the purpose was in the first place. There are, however, a lot of indicators that the concept/ideal of an open learning/mentoring group is solid and is worth reviving.

Later is better than never, right? So here is the summary of the Drupal training and certification at the Szeged 2008 Drupalcon (you can also watch the video of the full session).

The panel gathered together (from right to left):

• Jacob Redding (Rain City Studios)
• Joeri Poesen (Symbiotix)

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)

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. The following are goals and desired outcomes for the Dojo itself.

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.

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.