On Tue, 2016-01-05 at 16:57 -0500, Justin W. Flory wrote:
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= Quick
Summary =
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1) Online university meets contributing to Fedora (kind of)
2) Join process: Move from wiki to more modern + centralized "course"
3) Improve process to jumpstart new contributors
4) Four main questions to answer
5) Opinions / thoughts very welcome *
* Longer email, but worth the read!
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Hello all,
This idea originates from a discussion Gabri (mailga) and I had in
#fedora-join today.
Gabri pointed out the availability of a variety of different "online
classroom" type of applications or websites. They're pretty commons
nowadays, with things like Udemy or Coursera being used to let
people
take full-fledged courses in any subject they want (sometimes at a
cost,
sometimes not).
The article that started this discussion can be found here:
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/02/seven-free-platforms-for-tea
ching.html#.VowZWHXRbeQ
It's easy for someone to create a "course" in anything and set up a
series of lessons or classes for their course. They can be in
different
formats depending on what suits the topic best.
The connection of this to Fedora that Gabri pointed out is that it
may
be something to look into to have a "Becoming a Fedora Contributor"
course in an environment like one of these. The purpose of doing
this
would be to create a "curriculum" of the tools, resources, and
information needed to be jumpstarted as a Fedora contributor.
There could be a general course with a few different lessons of
different things in Fedora, and then perhaps subgroup-specific
lessons
about how to get started with a specific subgroup, e.g. Design,
Kernel,
Marketing, Packaging, CommOps, etc…
This would intend to replace the often decentralized wiki articles
that
accomplish the same thing. As it is becoming more well-known, the
wiki
is sometimes a difficult place to store useful information because
it
can be so difficult to navigate. Most subgroups have some sort of
"Joining" series on the wiki, but finding all the pages can sometimes
be
a challenge.
The needs for something like this would be as follows:
1) Create a series of "lessons" for newcomers to follow in order to
be
"ready" to contribute to what interests them
2) Courses / lessons easy to update and keep current with the fast-
paced
speed of Fedora
Gabri also linked this article which may of use of finding a platform
we
like, should this be something we are interested in:
http://blog.capterra.com/top-8-freeopen-source-lmss/
However, to the point - now what? There's a few questions I think we
need to answer?
1) Is this something we think would be useful to pursue?
2) If so, what is the scope we want to pursue? Start small and see
if
it works well, then try a wider adoption?
3) Is this something we would have as a long-term goal for 2016
for
every subgroup to try to adopt (with the assistance of CommOps)?
4) Are there any downsides that stand out by trying to pursue an
online "contributor classroom" sort of style versus using the wiki?
I think these are the core questions we need to answer to move
forward.
This may be an interesting discussion topic for a meeting if there
is
support for the idea.
And Gabri, feel free to chime in and add anything in case I missed
something. :)
Interested to hear your thoughts!
We did a small face to face experience with two universities in
Nicaragua that we called fedora little school. There was two sides to
this eight hours course. First there was Fedora specific stuff, like
what is Linux and Fedora, but also how to work and communicate with
Fedora: FAS, mailing list, irc, wiki, ask. Then the other side was the
tools of the trade. A bit of terminal, ssh, git, ftp. During this crash
course we installed fedora and setup wordpress in a remote server. We
find out that most universities tech to program but they do not teach
how to use version control and collaborative tools. In the end was a
lot of energy so we did not get people on board to get it done the
third time. We got people interested in fedora and linux, but nobody
really get to join the community. But at least we came up with a buch
of topic that we agreed that somebody needs to know to be able to
collaborate with Fedora.
There has been at least one attempt to build a Fedora school in LATAM
community, it got to the point to have the server running and be ready
to people start creating their curses. But creating a good small
tutorial for one topic, like creating a FAS account, is a lot of work.
Making some short videos, adding a doc, presenting a exercise, it is
all time consuming. I taught one online course in an university using
moodle and it was not easier that teaching face to face. Probably I
would have benefited the most if I had taught the course again, because
i would just fine tune and re-use everything. But it is a gigantic
commitment to make this reach critical mass, so people will look at it.
Besides this is not just update content, somebody has to be ready to
answer questions coming from the small courses.
Probably I sound all too negative. What I really want to say, this is a
big challenge and has to be considered as such. It is needed to gather
all the help possible. I will love to help with one or two topics.
Neville