Courtney Robertson 3:26 pm on July 19, 2022
Tags: slides ( 36 )

Proposal: Merging Lesson Plans, Video Tutorials, and Slides

As a team, we’ve spoken about merging our content types, and even making it easier to create one of our long-requested content types.

Based upon our UX audit, we know we’ve got some site design work to be done.

Where are we now with Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site. design?

For the landing page design, move forward with the first option shared.
For the archives page, the team landed on this design with containers around the lessons and filters in the right sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.. Much of this piece has been done.
Finally, for the single lesson plan page, all looks good. The only two concerns raised were around whether or not the accordions could be made accessible and if it’s possible to add some sort of breadcrumb navigation.

These options have been sitting in the GitHub issue for some time. It seems now would be a good time to revisit this.

Where are we with Slides?

The team has been requesting support for Slides relatively as long as we’ve been a team. Our last real look had us considering a WordPress plugin that would create a Slides custom post type. Our GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue is still open as well.

The advantage of doing this on Learn would more easily allow contributors to access the source file that may be used in recording videos from inside WordPress, vs access to the paid Canva account or tracking down Google Slides previously used.

Next steps:

Implement lesson plan landing page and archives page designs.
Consider single lesson plan layout. We’re most of the way there now. When improved, embed Video Tutorials into Lesson Plans, rename Lesson Plans to Tutorials.

Discussion needed:

The drop-downs on single lesson plan page are great. As a team, we’ve talked about keeping the example walkthrough fully displayed upon page load with a table of contents, while collapsing the sections like Objective Statements, Prerequisites, Materials needed, and other teacher bits behind those v dropdowns.

What do we envision in current lesson plans being collapsed upon load?
If we bring videos in, and if that lesson plan has a video prominently at the top, would we envision the transcript being collapsed as well, or remain in sidebar as a button? We do require captions on WPTV before embedding on Learn.

Example Video Tutorial.

Are the outcomes and objectives here in unison with Lesson Plans objectives and descriptions?

How will we show the transcript? How will this work with translations?

Why do videos have a print layout option but lesson plans do not? What do we want displayed if someone wishes to print the lesson plan?

What considerations do we have for this in merging?
Both content types have versions shown publicly, and any other publicly viewable taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies..

Any additional considerations for combining these?
Slides: As a team, several contributors over the years have come forward expressing interest in getting this request passed. Currently there is a Slides pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party that has been forked from the one tested above. It would still need to be submitted to the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team for review/approval to use on LearnWP.

We can currently store reveal.js slides in GitHub, as shown on High Level Overview. However, making slides these way was a barrier to entry for many WordPress-familiar contributors.

If/when the Slides plugin is available, do we want to embed the player in the single lesson plan OR do we want to link to it from the button in the right sidebar?

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

#slides

Sarah Snow 6:30 pm on July 19, 2022
I’m curious as to the future of who the primary audience is for lesson plan development: remote-first learners, or in-person instructors. I’m following the discussion on Rethinking the Lesson Plan Creation Process. Traditionally, lesson plans existed so that someone could teach a lesson plan in a live setting. However, more and more learning is taking place online; I am definitely interested in creating lesson plans for both in-person and remote learning, but feel like an online-first (geared toward learners and/or online teachers rather than in-person instructors) might best serve the community’s needs. This will inform what toggles we look for, so I hope to find an answer to this question soon!

Some Potential Toggles
- In-Person Learning Materials (Written, Group-based Exercise Directions, Printable “Assessments” Quiz Worksheets, Readiness Questions)
- Remote Zoom Classroom Materials (Slideshows, discussion questions, digital learning environments pre-set-up)
I like the idea of having the “Example Walkthrough” be fully displayed with a table of contents. However, we need to determine the audience for this; many of my “example walkthroughs” say things like, “Ask learners what they already know about X topic and write down their answers on the board, discussing the pros and cons of each idea and correcting misconceptions”. This obviously doesn’t work in a text-based tutorial geared toward a learner. 🙂

The example walkthrough could be text, image, and/or video-based (a multimedia approach). The way I picture it, this would be geared toward a learner rather than a teacher. However, it should give enough information that a teacher would be able to read it, expand on it, and confidently teach it in a live classroom or online learning space. We could provide supplementary resources (exercises, printable assessment quizzes) in toggles for in-classroom learning to support both.

What do we envision in current lesson plans being collapsed upon load?

Upon reviewing the lesson plan script content, a lot of what we ask instructional designers to include is really important. However, it’s not very user-friendly. Would we be open to changing some of the lesson plan terminology to display on the front page with the Example Walkthrough?

For example, rather than “Experience Level” or “Prerequisite Skills”, we might ask learners this:

Are you in the right place? This tutorial is right for you if you are an [EXPERIENCE LEVEL], [TARGET AUDIENCE], and familiar with [Pre-requisite Skills]. Ask yourself: [Readiness Questions]

If you answered YES to the questions and felt confident about your answers, keep reading! You’re in the right place. If you answered ‘no’ or don’t feel like this tutorial is for you, you might look at [Related Tutorial] or [Related Resource].

[Insert Example Lesson Tutorial Text and Images and maybe Video].

^ Does that make sense?

We could potentially even use custom post types so that instructional designers could put in things like “experience level” and “audience” and it would display in a standardized way on each lesson plan to help learners and teachers figure out if they’re in the right place, provide them with the right materials, and get them started.

If/when the Slides pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party is available, do we want to embed the player in the single lesson plan OR do we want to link to it from the button in the right sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.?

Directly embedded probably makes the most sense; I could also see lesson plan authors creating a slideshow that could be woven into the Example Lesson, the same way someone might do with short video tutorials. The audience matters, though, whether this slideshow is intended for learners or for instructors.

If we bring videos in, and if that lesson plan has a video prominently at the top

Most of the Video Tutorials I’ve created are mini-lessons within a lesson plan; they do not encompass the entire lesson plan. I feel like video tutorials would be better woven into the fabric of the the tutorial itself; would a multimedia approach work for an example lesson?

You’ve asked a lot of really good questions. I’m going to continue to think on this, but these were my first thoughts!
Jonathan Bossenger 7:59 am on July 20, 2022

As a team, we’ve spoken about merging our content types, and even making it easier to create one of our long-requested content types.

Could I clarify here, is this a proposal to merge lesson plans and tutorials into one single content type, or is this a proposal to incorporate tutorials into lesson plans?
- Courtney Robertson 11:54 pm on July 20, 2022
  
  To merge these together. The team has considered merging these since about the time Learn launched, which is reflected in part back here: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/02/01/lowering-barriers-to-entry-for-workshops-on-learn/.
  - Jonathan Bossenger 10:03 am on July 21, 2022
    
    Thanks for confirming, which leads to my follow-up question, does that mean that the newly merged lesson plan can only be published once it has all the different pieces of content in place, ie a video tutorial, the lesson plan content, and the slides? Or could a lesson plan be published containing only the video tutorial and the slides, and the lesson plan content be added later?
    - Courtney Robertson 10:57 am on July 21, 2022
      
      Sarah asked this recently as well. It’s worth exploring. I see no issue with publishing the lesson plan first and adding the rest later. Worth a team discussion on the other way around though.
Milana Cap 3:10 pm on July 20, 2022

From the Documentation team perspective, we’ve been waiting for this to happen for a while now. We would like to link to Learn resources from documentation as a way of “Learn more” about the topic.

Documentation, especially the end user one, is organised and created in a form of a manual – how to utilise WordPress. Next to reference, it’s one of 4 essential parts of software documentation.

Another two parts are tutorials and how-to’s; where tutorials intentionally guide user from the place they are to a place where they have a functional knowledge about the topic and how-to’s are more specific, problem-oriented guides in solving said problems by following recommended steps.

We, the Documentation team, see Learn platform as missing parts in existing documentation, providing tutorials and how-to’s in a consolidated format with all mediums available in order to make learning as efficient as possible.

Really looking forward to this one to be completed.
- Hugh Lashbrooke 3:42 am on July 25, 2022
  
  Thanks for commenting here – it’s great to get input from other Make teams!
  
  I’m curious about this:
  
  From the Documentation team perspective, we’ve been waiting for this to happen for a while now. We would like to link to Learn resources from documentation as a way of “Learn more” about the topic.
  
  It would be helpful to know how merging tutorials and lesson plans helps with linking to content from documentation. Lesson plans are designed for educators and facilitators to use, while tutorials are for learners or end-users. Tutorials can (and should!) definitely be linked to documentation, and that’s something I really want to see happen sooner rather than later, but I don’t follow how merging them with lesson plans helps with any work on the documentation side.
  
  We can start linking content today without any need for a merge of content types on Learn and, in fact, I’d like to see us get a discussion going about the best way to do that.
Benjamin Evans 6:25 am on July 21, 2022

Thanks for listing the context for many discussions that have happened in the past.

For the landing page design, move forward with the first option shared.

I just wanted to confirm, when you say “landing page”, you are referring to https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plans/, correct? And not the general https://learn.wordpress.org/? If so, great!
- Courtney Robertson 10:56 am on July 21, 2022
  
  Yes, the lesson plan landing page 🙂
Hugh Lashbrooke 10:11 pm on July 21, 2022

Thanks for sharing these thoughts @courane01 – it’s great to see progress being made on how content is managed on Learn!

My primary concern with merging lesson plans and tutorials is that we don’t have a 1:1 relationship between the two content types and, more than that, I don’t think we ever will. While some tutorials can and do have related lesson plans, many of them are simply too short to have a full lesson plan written for them. Many tutorials form a smaller portion of what we define as a lesson plan.

If we were to merge the two content types as they are now, this would present the problem of what would happen to lesson plans that don’t have a related tutorial and what would happen to tutorials that don’t have a related lesson plan. As things stand right now, I don’t see a feasible way of merging the two content types, so I have some thoughts about possible ways forward to make it realistic:

1. Change tutorials to encompass full lesson plans
This would mean that tutorial videos would, on the whole, become longer and be more involved. This is largely what we have stayed away from doing, as shorter videos that focus on one thing have proven to be much more effective learning tools.

2. Change lesson plans to cater to existing tutorials
This would mean changing how we understand and publish lesson plans to make them a 1:1 match to how we currently publish tutorials. This would make lesson plans shorter, but likely less useful to educators who want to use them.

I’m not sure if either of those options are good, to be honest, so I’m not too stoked about implementing them as each would be detrimental to one of the existing content types. That being said, I do have an entirely alternative suggestion that, if implemented, would make this discussion moot and take things forward in an entirely different direction:

Create two “portals” on Learn
Broadly speaking, we have two different focuses for the content on Learn – some for learners, and some for educators. What if we separated things out, so we had two separate landing pages that focus on content for each type of user. One could be at /learners where we highlight tutorials, courses and online workshops. The other is at /educators (or whatever name we choose) where we highlight lesson plans and any other content that is relevant, such as the diverse speaker training tutorials. We could also create content for each type of user as posts on the site and publish those.

The landing page redesign for lesson plans would be super effective here, so all of that work would still be 100% relevant and usable.

With this setup, we could still link content types (like when a tutorial and lesson plan do have a 1:1 match, we can indicate that on their respective pages), but they don’t need to be merged and, in fact, it would be better if they were not merged.

In many ways, this would help reduce a lot of the confusion that learners are experiencing when they encounter lesson plans on the site. As was highlighted in the naming content types discussion and in feedback that has been sent in from time to time, it isn’t clear to site visitors what lesson plans are to be used for. If we had two separate landing pages, then it would immediately make their purpose clearer and highlight their practicality and usefulness.

I feel like that makes sense, but it’s likely that there are many aspects I have not yet considered, so please weigh in with your thoughts!
- Sarah Snow 10:29 pm on July 21, 2022
  
  I really like these thoughts, Hugh.
  
  My primary concern with merging lesson plans and tutorials is that we don’t have a 1:1 relationship between the two content types
  
  I share this concern.
  
  I do think this could work:
  
  Create two “portals” on Learn… One could be at /learners where we highlight tutorials, courses and online workshops. The other is at /educators (or whatever name we choose) where we highlight lesson plans and any other content that is relevant, such as the diverse speaker training tutorials.
  
  I like this idea. Some things are wonderful resources for classroom educators; the purpose of Learn has shifted in some ways, so I do like this school of thought. This would, however, unlink lesson plans from online courses, tutorials, and online live workshops.
  
  That isn’t to say that lesson plans couldn’t be used as a springboard to create these things, but it does separate them. It also doesn’t mean that we couldn’t put a related pre-existing tutorial in the middle of a lesson plan for an educator to display on a screen in a live setting, but it rests on the idea that lesson plans (as they currently exist) won’t form the basis for future content. This would create a headache in updating old content, however, which is where I think the idea of merging lesson plans with other content comes from: keeping things updated.
  
  Can we base other types of content (tutorials, live online workshops, courses, short-form, text-based tutorials) in solid instructional design practices that are easier to springboard people to getting started and produce high-quality content?
  
  Lesson plans as they currently exist are brilliant in that they ask content creators to assess what resources already exist that they can include, what level and audience they’re trying to reach, and provide strong learning objectives to center learning on achievable tasks. They ensure high-quality content from start to finish, but often are daunting to folks who know something amazing they want to share with our wider community. In short: Where is the middle ground here?
  
  One of the easiest ways to increase contributor engagement (or any learner) is in the power of choice. What do you want to create? If contributors could pick a place where they feel especially skilled (live workshop teaching, creating video tutorials, writing engaging text-based content) and we provided clear, concise, and evidence-based instructions grounded in easier-to-follow text-based content on how to get started fast (and how to contribute to things already in progress), it would help a lot.
  
  I think this conversation comes out of this question: How do we keep all our content updated?
  If it’s all in one place, that’s a lot easier.
  If we have all kinds of (potentially duplicated) content type, spread into different sections, that makes it a lot harder. Which creates an entirely different conversation. 🙂
- Victor M Ramirez 2:40 pm on July 22, 2022
  
  None of this matters if no one can find anything we create. For that reason, I would be careful about using the word “educators” for SEO and market reach purposes.
  
  The phrase “Educators” is for WordPress education and would confuse people simply trying to “Learn WordPress.”
  
  As I’ve stated in many replies before, the market does not use the word “Learners” or “Educators.” They use the words “Tutorials” and “Workshops.”
  
  According to the site stats, only 6,000 out of 50k+ visits were from search engines. https://a.cl.ly/o0uGApYz
  
  This is abysmal considering that WordPress is…. “WordPress” and Google gives authority to non profits & organizations over everyone else.
  
  We should not be making these decisions based on opinions or from the hip.
  
  In addition the portal you’re proposing isn’t seen in other comparable systems.
  
  If you look at Gatsby’s “Learn” you get listings to quickly navigate and 2 CTAs https://a.cl.ly/mXuxQnWR – now keep in mind Gatsby is for developers and ONLY developers in that portal.
  
  A complicated product like WordPress has marketers, editors, developers, and just plain old bloggers. This documentation portal for mParticle has 3 CTAs based on how you want to learn. https://a.cl.ly/GGuKeveR
  
  The Learn homepage (as all homepages are) is a re-orienting page. If someone is coming from search, Make, SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., etc they should be quickly able to see all offerings and orient themselves.
  
  Doing a “portal” doesn’t follow this principle and is not the ideal UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. experience and we should have a designer plan this.
alexstine 11:53 pm on July 21, 2022

I think for the sake of accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), no video should be alone. If there is a video, there should be text. Not only does this make things accessible for everyone, but it will ensure things stay accessible going forward. Think about it. Learn finally gets an advanced PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. series of courses. With all that on-screen code, you are eliminating every blind person from enjoying this course. This is how most of the advanced courses go. Let’s not be like most, let’s do the right thing and be one of the few that go above and beyond to ensure all the info is accessible to everyone. Having closed captions alone only makes things accessible to the deaf, I doubt wordpress.tv supports captions like YouTube does where the screen reader can actually read the inline captions. Although rare in the US, people in other countries could have slower internet connections. This is yet another area text-only transcripts along side all videos could help out a lot.

Sorry for the book, hope it helps.
- Courtney Robertson 12:31 am on July 22, 2022
  
  Thanks Alex. We do include captions in all videos and in the body of video tutorials, such as in this one about Action HooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same.. https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/wordpress-action-hooks/. I do not know if a screen reader would pick up on them, or rely only upon the videos audio file.
  
  Do you find the narration to be effective?
  - Courtney Robertson 1:38 am on July 29, 2022
    
    @alexstine Checking in on this. The videos may be playable, and have captions, but does the audio narration of the video seem helpful to grasp the topics? Do we need to improve the descriptions of what is spoken?
    - alexstine 2:52 am on July 29, 2022
      
      @courane01 I honestly could not say. I have not really had the time to watch anything all the way to the end. 🙁
- Hugh Lashbrooke 1:11 am on July 22, 2022
  
  As @courane01 noted – all videos on Learn include both captions and full transcripts. We don’t publish any videos without them.
Ross Wintle 8:59 am on July 22, 2022

Jonathan suggested I might have some thoughts on this as someone who’s on the edge of the training team, but also a consumer of training.

I confess, I’m very confused about why you would merge a content type that is intended to be consumed (videos) with a content type that is intended to be delivered (lesson plans).

As someone who wants to watch video tutorials, it would be very confusing to have material intended for someone giving the instruction in person alongside it.

As someone who wants to deliver a workshop, it may be helpful to have the video (I think that one possibility for in-person training is watching the video together. Is that right?), but that should be a relationship between content types, not a merging of content types.

Hugh’s idea of two portals makes much more sense to me. You’re either interested in consuming content, or delivering it. Sure, you should probably be able to navigate between the two (e.g. video tutorials could have a “Share this tutorial with an in-person group” link that takes you to the related lesson plan and encourages people to share the video at a local meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. or something)

Regarding the 1-to-1 thing, as someone interested in creating content, this could be a barrier. If a video tutorial required a lesson plan to be present alongside it, or vice versa, then that’s more work and might mean I decide not to create the thing that I had envisioned making.

As a newbie contributor with limited time, I’m already feeling the barriers to making content here are high (perhaps that is intentional?) so adding more doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

In terms of slides, I don’t really have a view other than that slides on their own aren’t helpful. If you encourage slides as standalone content then either:
– people will make detailed slides with lots of text which I would view as bad practice; or
– peopel will make less detailed slides with don’t mean anything.

Slides should be “metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. data” on tutorials or lesson plans. If that’s a link to an entry of a separate content type then great, but I don’t think slides, by themselves, should be surfaced and browsable in the UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing..

Hope that makes sense. Keep up the great work, and I’ll try to keep contributing.
- Jonathan Bossenger 9:09 am on July 22, 2022
  
  As someone who wants to watch video tutorials, it would be very confusing to have material intended for someone giving the instruction in person alongside it.
  
  I asked Ross for his thoughts because this comment echoes my own concerns: if we make this change, is it in the best interests of the content creators or the learners?
  
  I worry that most of the folks commenting here (including me) are mostly contributors to the content, and we should do our best to get feedback from the consumers of this content, to make sure any changes we make won’t negatively affect them.
  
  Edit: I would also add that I appreciate this is a conversation that’s been going on for some time, and I’m very new to the training team, so I’m not here to complain about the work that has been done up to this point.
  
  I also appreciate I’m not really providing any solutions to my concerns, and the reason for this is that I’m not 100% sure my concerns are valid, due to my newness to the training team.
  - Ross Wintle 9:23 am on July 22, 2022
    
    Yes, likewise, I’m not spending much time in existing discussions as you are, so there may be conversations, and information that I’m not aware of when I comment. But hopefully these contributions are useful and I’m always happy to chat in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. if they are not or if you need clarification.
    
    Thanks!
Wes Theron 10:07 pm on July 24, 2022

Thank you for bringing this to the table Courtney. There have been some very thoughtful responses here. The main question swimming around in my head is; “Who is the target audience for Learn WordPress, learners or teachers?” I think the answer is both; therefore, I don’t believe merging them would be feasible. Lesson Plans are aimed at a completely different target audience than Tutorials.

Lesson plans are causing much confusion for people visiting Learn WordPress to ‘learn’, figure out something or increase their knowledge of WordPress. I, therefore, echo the following statement:

I confess, I’m very confused about why you would merge a content type that is intended to be consumed (videos) with a content type that is intended to be delivered (lesson plans). As someone who wants to watch video tutorials, it would be very confusing to have material intended for someone giving the instruction in person alongside it. – Ross

The reference to Lesson Plans and Tutorials not having a 1:1 relationship is also very relevant and something I have been grappling with.

My primary concern with merging lesson plans and tutorials is that we don’t have a 1:1 relationship between the two content types and, more than that, I don’t think we ever will. – Hugh

The idea of having two separate landing pages also makes great sense to me as well.

As was highlighted in the naming content types discussion and in feedback that has been sent in from time to time, it isn’t clear to site visitors what lesson plans are to be used for. If we had two separate landing pages, then it would immediately make their purpose clearer and highlight their practicality and usefulness. – Hugh

Lastly, we also need to think about contributors and making it as easy and practical as possible to contribute to Learn. Ross made a very valid point here:

Regarding the 1-to-1 thing, as someone interested in creating content, this could be a barrier. If a video tutorial required a lesson plan to be present alongside it, or vice versa, then that’s more work and might mean I decide not to create the thing that I had envisioned making.

As a newbie contributor with limited time, I’m already feeling the barriers to making content here are high (perhaps that is intentional?) so adding more doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. – Ross

The last thing I wanted to bring up or thought of as well. Could we foresee contributors creating text-based ‘How-to’ Tutorials instead of Lesson Plans? Many contributors actually want to teach the user/learner, instead of teaching an educator how to teach something.
Hauwa Abashiya 8:03 pm on July 25, 2022
I would like us to be mindful that while developed countries may be moving more towards online learning. This is not necessarily the case for developing countries especially when you consider the cost of bandwidth.

That said, here are my thoughts.

I agree with most people that we have two audiences one that consumes and one that delivers. However, I see both those audiences using either or a combination of video and text-based materials to achieve their goals. Some folks learn by watching, others by reading and as others have suggested maybe we need to consider having text-based tutorials.

I don’t always see a one-to-one relationship with lesson plans and tutorials and I’m not sure if there needs to be one. There are many elements of the lesson plan that can be reused to create a video tutorial and vice versa. Some may find it easier to create videos and others find it easier to create text-based materials or lesson plans. So what elements of the tutorials and lesson plans are:
- necessary
- nice to have
- only required for teaching
For the elements that are necessary and nice to have, they become the Tutorials, video or text-based. They all share a common description and objectives or learning outcomes. And whilst I see the benefit of creating the lesson plan before the tutorial, I’m not precious about that process if the aim is to get more contributors to create content. However, we need to ensure that the content created is of good quality.

For the elements only required for teaching, can these just be a downloadable pack behind a button on the single Tutorial page that someone can use to teach/share (whatever terminology gets the downloads)? Yes, an exercise will need to be done to turn existing lesson plans into Tutorials and that may be an easier route for those wanting to create videos as the work is already done for you.

I am very hesitant about creating two portals but like the idea of having one portal with different CTAs for each audience. It can display the same content but those delivering content would only see the Tutorials that have a downloadable pack.
caraya 4:32 pm on July 26, 2022

Has there been a decision on what format we would like the slides to be in?
Benjamin Evans 4:03 am on July 28, 2022
I love this discussion! And with our recent increase in contributors, I think it is very timely.

Below is how I’ve interpreted the conversation here, and some thoughts I’ve had. I may be over-simplifying some concepts. But as we’re discussing many things at once, this is how I’ve broken them out in my mind.

===

I’m interpreting there to be at least three different discussions happening here. They are about:
1. The presentation of content
2. The creation of content
3. The maintenance of content
— 1. Presenting content —

It would make sense to identify our audience, and present content in a way that caters to their needs/desires. Our handbook explains that we serve two audiences – learners and instructors.

Reading the discussion, it seems instructors would benefit from having access to material intended for learners. This could be in the form of embedding videos or slides into Lesson Plans, or creating toggles in one way or another.

However, presenting Lesson Plans to learners is where the confusion arises. There is mention of access to text-based resources being essential, especially from an accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) point of view. But I don’t think we’ve found a need for this text-based resource to be Lesson Plans.

My thought is to clearly split our presentation of content on Learn. Ideally, learners would never find mention or access to Lesson Plans, while instructors would have access to the learner’s resources where relevant. (It’s been mentioned that CTA buttons on the homepage would be a better approach for this from an SEO perspective, rather than creating two separate sites.)

— 2. Creating content —

I am reading a general consensus that we’d like to make it easier for (new) contributors to create content. To this end, it’s been mentioned that the creation process of content could be simplified and diversified.

At the same time, we value quality, and want to ensure quality is sustained as contribution increases. I don’t see any specific suggestions here, though, as to how we can achieve that. But I personally think that deserves another post of its own.

— 3. Maintaining content —

One of the motives behind merging content type seems to be to make it easier to update content. I agree, that would be a huge benefit!

My personal perspective, though, is that a maintenance system “behind the scenes” would make more sense for this, rather than modifying the way we present content on Learn. The Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site. would most benefit our audiences if we can design our content presentation based on their needs, rather than our ease of maintenance. Ideally, content would be presented separately to each audience on Learn, but maintained in a uniform system elsewhere.

I’m not an expert in this field, so I’ll defer to others who are knowledgeable regarding the practical setup for this. What I’m envisioning is we could create a tracking board per WordPress feature. Each time a GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issue is created for a new piece of content, that issue’s link would be added to the tracking boards for each of the features included in that content. Some content may only be linked to one feature, while other may be linked to multiple features. Whenever coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. is updated, the Training team can look through the feature boards that have had modifications, and confirm content linked there to see if any updates are needed. We’d be updating similar content that exists in multiple locations, but we’d be managing those from only one set of tracking boards.

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Separately, I’m also seeing discussions on this post about:
- Updating the Lesson Plan landing page to present a better search UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. to instructors
- Adding slides as a new form of media to Learn
In my mind, both of those are great initiatives, and I think they can each be pursued separately to the other discussions happening here.
- SeReedMedia 12:14 am on July 29, 2022
  
  Ideally, learners would never find mention or access to Lesson Plans
  
  Can you expand on why this would be ideal in your view?
  - Benjamin Evans 1:35 am on July 29, 2022
    Sure! It’s based on two points of thought:
    
    Learners have voiced confusion when they’ve encountered Lesson Plans. Therefore, if they don’t encounter them, we could reduce this confusion. (I realize that’s a very simple solution.)
    
    Lesson plans are like manuals that guide an instructor on how to teach a concept. They are “specifically geared toward the standards of professional trainers” (by @courane01 below.) A learner is generally not a professional trainer, and therefore they would find limited benefit from lesson plans.
    
    And so to serve the interest of the learner, it would be more effective if we only presented them with content directed at them, rather than providing other options and asking them to figure out lesson plans do not provide the best answer to their inquiry.
    
    Let me know if I can clarify anything further 👍🏼
SeReedMedia 12:05 am on July 29, 2022

There are a lot of in-depth comments here, but I think perhaps a reframing is in order.

It makes sense to me to have all the resources on one page. It also makes sense to keep the Lesson Plan and the Tutorial CPTs separate, as they are separate pieces of content with different formats, audiences, and assets.

In addition to the two audiences of Student (tutorials) and Teacher (lesson plans), there are also Devs (how to code WP) and Users (how to operate WP).

IMO, whichever of the above audiences they fall into, the way that people want to browse through the Learn materials is by topic.

Thus a topic page (perhaps a cross-CPT taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies.?) would be the ideal place to gather the related assets.

In addition to the assets (Lesson Plans, Tutorials, Slides, Videos), the Topic page could also have a basic definition/summary of the topic. And of course as many subtopics (subcategories) as needed.

So the Lesson Plan can be its own dedicated CPT, and the Tutorial can be its own dedicated CPT, and if either of those exist, it will be listed on the Topic (categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging.) page. Related Codex pages could also be linked (blog roll style 😉

Of course you will then have to single Lesson Plan and Tutorial pages, but those pages can then be streamlined to focus exclusively on their chosen audience and specific content, and display links back to the related Topic page for more context.
- SeReedMedia 12:13 am on July 29, 2022
  
  I made this matrix other day when discussing primary Learn audiences. Including here for reference only.
  
  https://imageshack.com/i/pm1fwMc4j
Courtney Robertson 12:15 am on July 29, 2022
Noting more conversation happened during 2 Zoom meetings among the Faculty team. The notes can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/07/27/july-2022-faculty-meeting-recap/.

@bsanevans‘s summary of the conversation has been helpful:
- The presentation of content
- The creation of content
- The maintenance of content
I’ve thought as well about how inside courses, we are displaying text, screenshots, and video in the same lesson, and how many lessons can stand alone. At times, folks do not want to go through the entire course to learn a single topic within.

Regarding the instructor-related lesson plans, these are specifically geared toward the standards of professional trainers. These are not areas we can approach from opinions but can be guided by professionally trained trainers.

I’ve thought about ways to try experimenting, and am not yet finding a good solution that would be a small experiment really. Most ideas seem to immediately shift to workflows and user journeys from front of site.

In addition to the assets (Lesson Plans, Tutorials, Slides, Videos), the Topic page could also have a basic definition/summary of the topic. And of course as many subtopics (subcategories) as needed.

This was actually a recommendation provided during a contributor day with Yoast staff. From an SEO perspective, organizing content around topics was suggested.

@isvictorious and team have some really great insights on data architecture for educational sites with considerably more content and moving pieces. I’d like to hear suggestions on SEO, workflows, and the like.

Given that, I think this is where we leave this open for a bit, but provide us ample time to consider and implement. Let’s shift to thinking here about workflows. This is where a Needs Analysis would really shine.

Welcome

Meetings (Calendar)

Proposal: Merging Lesson Plans, Video Tutorials, and Slides

Where are we now with Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site. design?

Where are we with Slides?

Next steps:

Discussion needed:

Welcome

Meetings (Calendar)

Where are we now with Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site. design?

Where are we with Slides?

Next steps:

Discussion needed:

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