Training Drupal professionals: Towards an open Drupal training curriculum and certification
Submitted by bohemicus on July 7, 2009 - 16:05
Your session in a few words:
training Drupal professionals
Track:
Business development and strategy
Session Type:
BoF
Level of expertise:
Intermediate
Language:
English One of the issues clients who want to build on Drupal as a sustainable platform face is identifying qualified Drupal professionals or making sure their inhouse developers get up to speed with Drupal in a reliable fashion. At the moment, there are several Drupal companies that provide bespoke Drupal training but there isn't a unified training curriculum that could be easily replicated and adopted for in house training and against which people who haven't had the time to gain natural experience in the community could be assessed.
This is something the education community has a lot of experience with but that is still not as well developed in the tech community.
This session will propose a framework for a Drupal curriculum that will be open, community maintained and regularly updated in the same way that Drupal code is. The curriculum will be based on competencies and assessed using the mixed portfolio approach which will allow people with existing skills to achieve a qualification without attending unnecessary courses.
See early draft of the proposal here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dmjbnhb_4pnh27kc9
This session will consist of a brief presentation of the framework and the underlying principles followed by a discussion of the next steps.
re-tag?
This session looks great! I'm very interested in it, and I hope it goes forward.
May I suggest that you add additional tags? Or use commas? At the moment the 3 tags you put in are read 'as one' because the free tagging requires commas in between tags. So it's making it hard to find sessions related to education, training, etc.
Best of luck, I hope more people find your session!
Thanks Heather. I was having
Thanks Heather. I was having a del.icio.us moment. If it doesn't go forward as a session, hopefully, we can make it a BoF.
thanks!
I'd deffo attend as a BOF. I'd be surprised if there aren't more people interested in Drupal education/training. More may come out of the woodwork at the event.
Great Idea!!
Loving it.
I had posted this issue (New Project Type: Course) in the Drupal.org webmaster issue queue some time back. There was a small amount of discussion, but it never went anywhere.
I think four things are really needed to get this going.
1. It needs a catch phrase (I'm serious). Consider designintheopen.org. "Design in the Open" really captures the spirit of designers working in the Open Source space. Would something like "Courseware in the Open" or maybe "Education Open" work?
2. It's a "do-ocracy". That's what they say ;) What if we came up with a course or two and just committed them to the project? A couple of real live courses contributed to open source for all to post issues to and help maintain - surely that would make your point!
3. I think the concept of true courseware vs. documentation needs to be expanded upon. I have seen attempts to make tutorials (or even beginner's manuals - see the Beginners Cookbook in the docs - originally created by nancydru). So it begs the question, what is stopping you from just putting something like this in the docs?
My answer to 3 would be that the most effective courses and courseware are truly effective because they are created by 1 person (or a small group of people) executing on their vision. I think the best analogy is open source programming itself. Usually the best modules are (at least initially) the vision of a single (or small group of) developers. Why do we have project control, issue queues, maintenance of who has CVS rights to various projects? Because that allows the "owner" of the project to guide the project toward their vision while allowing contributions from others.
Ongoing efforts and initiatives
There are a few ongoing efforts and initiatives that seem to be very complimentary (and vise versa). This in particular is an effort unify and bring these efforts together to provide a complimentary program and platform -
http://groups.drupal.org/node/22703
It would be great if such an effort could serve as a testing ground for what's being outlined in these sessions.
And you made it a module!
http://drupal.org/project/drupal_kata
You see what I mean though. You made a module with no code because you wanted to use the Issue Queue to manage this idea.
I was aware of the drupal dojo, but I hadn't stumbled across this "module" before I must say. A lot of good stuff in that issue queue and very much inline with this presentation.
The Design community is struggling with similar issues I think.
What I like is the fact that you are using a drupal.org module and groups.drupal.org site which shows the dedication to having this live in the community. I think that is very impressive.
Just trying to follow through with an ambitious effort
That module which you refer to is actually the old Drupal Dojo 2.0. project. Changing it to the Kata seemed to make sense as the Dojo isn't really structured to be a learning program in itself. That said, we're still looking for ways to bridge all these related efforts together. It would be great if sessions like these could be more of a progress report, rather that 'how are we going to do this'...
So please - open invites to anyone who would like to help shape these efforts.
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-kata
Hi guys,
thanks for the great discussion. Unfortunately, it looks like I might not make it to Paris after all. But I'd definitely like to pursue this further (I'm interested in Open Curricula in general).
Perhaps we can schedule a virtual BOF over GoToMeeting at some point - my organisation is about to subscribe to a full account.