To further develop Learn for everyone, there are a few problems I’d like to see the training team solve through structured Microcourses. These microcourses will be “choose your own adventure” style. Before enrolling in a microcourse, learners will be prompted to assess their own existing knowledge and use their own interest to guide their course choices.
Microcourses will be:
- Largely text-and-image based (with a few short videos thrown in for variety) for accessibility
- Bite-sized; every lesson (currently known as a “workshop”) should be able to be completed quickly, within 5-10 minutes
- Self-paced; unlike with longer videos, Learners can set down this learning and pick it back up as their schedule allows.
- Leveled based on pre-existing knowledge (101/102? We would need to name each level and provide guidance on what someone would be expected to know at each level.)
- Interactive; each course will prompt users to do something with their knowledge.
This benefits all learners because it creates…
- A shorter period of ramp-up time for the basics (from 4.5 hours to 1 hour or less for the basic WordPress 101 course, preferably)
- Personalized learning experiences based on need & interest
- Self-Paced learning with deliberate scaffolds in place for neurodiverse learners
Eventually, I would love for each course to be recommended based on how people answer certain questions. For now, however, each microcourse page will include “suggested prerequisites” — in other words, skills and knowledge people will need to have in order to best work through a new microcourse.
Here is a potential structure for a Basic WordPress 101 Microcourse:
Setting Up WordPress
Prerequisites: None!
Take this course if…
- You are getting started for the first time with WordPress;
- You haven’t decided on a host yet;
- You haven’t picked a domain name yet;
- You haven’t set up WordPress in any way yet.
By the end of this unit, you will be able to… (Quiz questions will be based on these statements–you’ll notice these are very action-based)
- Describe difference between a host and a domain name
- Determine which kind of hosting may be best for your website development needs
- Set up WordPress on a host or on a server of your own
- Navigate WordPress’ unique dashboard
Do you know this information already? Take the quiz and earn a badge!
Modules within a Microcourse: Modules/lessons would explore those objectives bit by bit in a fraction of the existing course time. Structured, carefully crafted formative assessments would exist throughout the course (partially to give us feedback on our own instruction). This would ultimately culminate in a summative assessment (quiz for now, complete with action tasks) at the end of the course.
Course Complete!
When someone completes a microcourse, it would be useful to provide suggestions for the next most useful microcourses they might take depending on their goals.
For example, on a “Course Complete!” page, learners might see something like this:
Congratulations! You’ve finished the course, “Setting Up WordPress”. To decide what you’d like to learn next, let’s find out: Which of these is closest to your goal?
- Design a WordPress website with pages that does not have a blog.
- Design a WordPress website with pages that also has a blog.
- Set up a WordPress blog–no need for additional pages.
- Something more advanced (eCommerce website, etc.)
Potential Personalization: Depending on functionality, ideally, each of these options might take learners to a slightly different grouping of microcourses .
For example, a single lesson for setting up a blog page wouldn’t be toggled on for a course if someone didn’t want a blog on their website.
To find the proposed course outline (tentative), please click here to be taken to the public GoogleDoc. You are welcome to comment upon that document as well. I would like to begin work on this by Monday, the 16th of August.
Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Is there a topic I am missing from the original course outline?
Drop your ideas in the comments!
#course-outline, #microcourses, #new-course, #training
Love this type of format/structure as it really helps calibrate the end user’s expectations:
I love this! The structure makes sense and I really like how it’s laid out. The recommendations based on what you already know are a great touch and I think that will add a lot of value to the course.
I love the concept of this. The recommendations are great, especially including accessibility and neurodivergent needs.
My initial thoughts:
1. We can take this to the team during our weekly meeting on August 17 for comments and review. Ideally, for significant functionality changes, the team should have more than 1 week to review and offer feedback. I’d love to append these to the team sprint post, and work toward having a monthly cadence to what is coming.
2. Will this format of the material live within the lesson plan post type, or the workshops post type?
3. Can we include feature parity lesson plans of the same material (many introductory lesson plans are already created, but assess and fill in the gaps where any are missing)?
4. The UX audit will hopefully provide the needed feedback soon to create a better learning journey. I have concerns about adding more content before we revise the site layout and functionality, or the means to audit this to stay current with releases.
5. At this time, the team is not mentioning any brand names (plugins, themes, brands). We need to continue this until we have wording and guidance for how we selected such sources.
That seems like a lot of concerns… but please know I am very very excited about the chunked-down content.
Let’s definitely do that. 🙂 I will be delighted to begin work after collecting some additional feedback.
To my knowledge, neither — the plan is to make it into a Sensei course, similar in format to this one:
http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210906141740/https://learn.wordpress.org/course/polyglots-contributor-training/
This type of training, in my mind, is a new way of doing things. As always, I’m open to comments, suggestions, and questions!
Let’s clarify: If I’m understanding you correctly, it seems like the main concern is that this will repeat existing information. It might be preferential to fill in gaps for information that doesn’t currently exist. Is that right?
My plan is to use existing Lesson Plans and Workshops to create an entirely different kind of course–one that someone Googling “How to Set up WordPress” for the first time could find and complete quickly. As it stands right now, someone who is looking to get started would have to spend ~4.5 hours to set up a basic website with our Beginning WordPress course. That is not ideal. I think we can solve that issue through this new course format, which would also aim to close missing gaps.
I hear you! I have the same concerns; this is not a long-term strategy for the creation of lots of courses. For now, I will take ownership of keeping this course up-to-date. As the course will be largely text-and-image based, it should be much faster and easier to update. I will also make sure to record Audit information (such as WordPress version) for this course so it can be easily integrated into the audit tool.
I’m excited to get started and look forward to future feedback from the Training Team. Thank you, Courtney!
Great idea, I like the structure and I’m glad to see that it will use existing material.
How does this fit in with the UI/UX audit of Learn? I want to avoid anyone having to redo work.
Let’s present this idea to the wider #training team.