Drupal Courses
I have been developing sites with drupal now for several years, and have been consistently amazed by how well the code works and how easy it is to extend the functionality to deploy robust content managed projects. In the last few years, along with another developer, I have succesfully used Drupal to build sites for travel agents, estate agents, charities and residential communities.
Drupal is clearly now a mature project, and I have been talking to a couple of Further Education colleges and Universites about developing a course that uses Drupal at its core, which teaches people to build commercial websites, given an original (or unoriginal) idea. Such a course would open up Drupal to people with little technical knowlege, and would allow them from the outset to begin developing a site, which, if the idea is reasonable, can ultimately allow them to earn an income. This is a nice idea simply because it has an underlying practical theme and it touches upon a broad range of skills, each of which can be developed as much or as little as possible and still lead to the development of a fully functioning site.
So...aside from the great online videos and (IBM) tutorials - is anyone aware of any face-to-face courses that teach users to build sites and businesses using drupal?
how about eLearning
Given the distributed nature of the Drupal community, wouldn't a eLearning course be more appropriate. I don't mean self study, but problem based, tutor lead, group centered course. I have been involved with such eLearning courses and they do work. Studens colaborate trough topic based forums and tutor guides them on individual and group basis. There are number educational institutions that provide good eLearning IT courses. (The one I was working for is: PEVE – The University of Manchester
http://octette.cs.man.ac.uk/peve/peveWebNew/e_learning/index.htm
)
cheers
Darko
possibly...
Thanks Darko for your response.
I agree that eLearning courses could accomplish some of what I've talked about. I've had a few years experience working with a university that provides online computer science degree courses. What we found is that elearning is a great complement to traditional teaching, but that it still requires a face-to-face component for the more practical lessons, such as programming.
This would also probably be the case with a 'build your own site' course. Eventually students would be able to make full use of the resources provided by the drupal community. This course would be pitched at getting them over the initial learning curve....