The things you find in the lessons app are worksheets we
developed for our own training courses. We tried to come up with a
new approach where the worksheets are focused on the learner's doing
things and figuring things out themselves and not so much ‘follow the
bouncing ball’ instructions.
The latter are ok but very hard to maintain and in our opinion, the learners
don’t learn as much as when they have to work stuff
out themselves.
Previous versions of these lessons were managed as libreoffice documents.
The original repo for those is here
QGISTrainingWorkshop
These lessons are also intended to be instructor
lead - you need a competent person guiding the learners through the materials
and filling in extra bits of info beyond what is presented on the sheets.
We would be interested to hear feedback from those using these lessons
for self-study to see how they work in that mode, but that
wasn't the design intent.
We wanted to make it so that each worksheet could be used independently
and that it fits on two sides of an A4 sheet so that the activities are
in nice bite-sized chunks. We devised a fairly tight structure for the
sheets so that learners get the rhythm of the training and start to move
through the materials easily.
Another design intent was that we could
quickly assemble courses customised to the user’s needs. For example if a group
wants to focus on digitising we can pull out a set of sheets relating to
that topic area.
We have run quite a few training courses with these
sheets and they work pretty well for us.
Once students grasp the fact that they are not being spoon fed, most of
our learners feedback to say they enjoy using their brain more during the
training.
Each lesson has an exercise with a list of specifications.
We really try to avoid making particular reference to GUI elements, and
rather give instructions like ‘open the vector layer properties and set
your line thickness to 4pt, colour to red and opacity to 50%’.
This makes the content less vulnerable to a developer tidying up the UI and
breaking all the documentation for it, and makes it more fun for the learner
to hunt around in the GUI for the different options. We didn't always succeed
completely in avoiding specific GUI references but we try our best to do so.
One of the other motivations for shifting to the web is to make it
easier for people to get the content formatted nicely - the lessons
are created using a structured form that asks for different elements
(intro, further reading etc.) and then we assemble the content into the
lesson layout.
You can also use markdown in the lesson content for basic
styling. We have some work in progress to have a ‘curriculum designer’
that will let you tick off one or more sheets on a form and assemble
your own PDF and unique URL with your curriculum so that when you present
a course you can link to the sheets being used for the course.
At some point it would be nice to link this to the certification app too
so that you can say ‘Joe did our course and it covered these modules’...
We don’t know if our approach will work for everyone, but if others are
interested to use the platform for QGIS everything we made is open content
and the platform is open so feel free to use it - and if you are interested
contribute new content.
If QGIS.ORG as a whole is interested in making it an official part of the project
(e.g. to replace our old training manual work) that is fine with us too -
though we don't have the same level of coverege for QGIS as the manual has yet.
Also, we would probably want to move the translation system into QGIS.ORG sphinx
since it will probably be tedious to support ~26 languages or whatever the count
we have currently in QGIS.ORG. If you want edit rights to tweak and improve
what you see in the lessons app, just pop us a note and we will give you the needed access.
Thanks to
- Tim Sutton
- Etienne Trimaille
- Ismail Sunni ismail@kartoza.com
- Rohmat Muhammad rohmat@kartoza.com
- Alison Mukoma alison@kartoza.com
- Anita Hapsari anita@kartoza.com
who are great examples of people that you may not have heard of who are working away to make cool stuff for QGIS :-)