Ubuntu Community Training

[Bodhi Zazen]

Just a FYI :

The beginners team members are encouraged to contribute to the greater Ubuntu community.

We, the UFBT, are looking to set up a moodle site not to re-create the wheel, but rather to fill an unmet need and to enhance the community offerings. We would be grateful to receive any support for the project, but feel capable of maintaining the server.

The project is to enhance our efforts with the classroom and to support educational activities.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Belinda Lopez" <belinda.lopez at canonical.com>
To: "Matthew Lye" <matthew.lye at ubuntu.com>
Cc: "Connor Imes" <rocket2dmn at aol.com>, "ubuntu-doc" <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>, "Billy Cina" <billy.cina at canonical.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2009 2:06:09 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Re: Ubuntu Community Training


Matthew East wrote: 

Hi Matthew,

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Matthew Lye <matthew.lye at ubuntu.com> wrote: 

The Ubuntu Forums Beginners team is preparing community based training
to assist new users in learning Ubuntu. We are going to be attempting to
coordinate all the training currently being delivered by several
different teams from simple tutorials on the command line for new users
to lessons on python programing, packaging, and triaging for people
wanting to become further involved.

We are currently in the process of setting up a Moodle installation to
host training materials to coordinate this effort and will be
approaching members of several different teams to ask for contributions
(many are already Beginners Team members as well). The overall intention
of this is to provide a central repository for information currently
found in many different wiki pages, in irc classroom sessions, and in
the Ubuntu Forums in a manner that allows for further assistance as
required.

We have two questions that need to be answered:

Can we use the Ubuntu name (as it is branded) for the name of the site?
The planned name would be something like Ubuntu Community Training or
Ubuntu Community Education.

and

Would it be possible to have a cname created such as training.ubuntu.com
or education.ubuntu.com directed toward the server? Canonical is already using both those domains for existing projects so it will not be possible to redirect either to this new initiative. I'm not sure on the Education side but there is also an Ubuntu Community Training team in Launchpad that works primarily on the Desktop course materials which Canonical offers as a free download under the CC-NC-SA license. 

There is certainly nothing stopping your group from creating a Moodle site or repository of community training resources and frankly I would love to see some quality offerings but you will need to find domain names that do not conflict with current offerings/projects. I believe you can run any potential names by the copyright at canonical.com email address, explain your project and intentions to make sure there is no conflict of interest with your choices. 


As you mentioned, there are already several initiatives which cover
this type of ground around, and it would probably be best if you
worked directly with those initiatives that already exist.

In particular, there is already a training team here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training And the type of thing you've described sounds very much like it would
be the basic purpose of https://help.ubuntu.com/ (for user help) and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ (for help with contributing to Ubuntu). No, training materials and potential courses/classes are a very different audience and style of writing than the wiki or help offerings. There is obviously a great need for such a resource or so many would not be asking for it or offering to help develop them. Completely different skill set to do quality materials and manage a Moodle server and offerings. Moodle can provide a nice framework for courses but there is overhead maintenance and administration. Be aware that Canonical cannot provide any technical or other support at this time, other than the current desktop materials (and my own personal cheers on your efforts). :-) 

Best of luck! 

Belinda Lopez 
Training Project Manager 
Canonical 




Creating another subdomain for this sort of activity would result in
having too many different resources around, which might end up
confusing rather than enlightening users. It's clear that that isn't
your intention but I think you should have a serious think about
whether creating a new resource is the right thing to do. I'd really
like to see you collecting information from the forum and irc sessions
and contributing it towards the existing resources.

I'm copying this message to Connor Imes because I know that he works
extensively with the Ubuntu Forum Beginners Team and also with the
Documentation Team so he is the ideal person to give you some guidance
about this.

Obviously, if you feel that I've misunderstood the idea, feel free to
let me know. But given that there is already a training team which
uses the wiki, I think it's likely that a cname for this initiative is
not going to be forthcoming.

All the above is not to discourage you at all, I'm pleased to see the
energy and willingness to improve the user learning experience with
Ubuntu, I just want to make sure that this energy is channelled in the
right direction.

(For the future, it's probably best not to send messages to the entire
ubuntumembers team, there are 460 people in that team and your mail
goes to all of them. This is an appropriate subject for the ubuntu-doc
mailing list, so I'm copying that as well). 

-- 
PK 
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