[UCLP] Course Development Workflow

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

Hi folks,

There has been some discussion today over course development
preferences, and I wanted to send out a general email to the list to
clear up some things. All of the content of this email comes from
discussions this evening.

I will start out by saying that the goal of this project has been to
develop some core material for use in 3 major deployment formats:

 * Live classes
 * Moodle
 * IRC

As such, we seek to to create course outlines, collect resources and
put together coursework that could be deployed on these multiple
formats. To aid in this effort I was brought in from the IRC course
world, Charles was brought in from the Moodle world and Martin was
brought in based on his ongoing experience conducting live classes,
and others on the team have focuses in these areas or a combination of
them as well.

The general plan for our workflow, at the most basic, consists of the following:

A) Collaborative discussion and outlining on the wiki
B) Further development and fleshing out in bzr+asciidoc
C) Putting material from B into our 3 major deployment formats - live
classes, irc, moodle

Now, the obvious problem with this workflow is that people have
different expertises and may not have time to devote to learning
bzr+asciidoc and contribute that way.

Instead, to draw from an example of my work with the Classroom
project, we want to allow for someone to give an IRC session from
material outlined in the wiki, but maybe they don't want to/don't have
the time to formally put it in asciidoc - they're too busy being a
brilliant kernel hacker. Similarly we want someone who may want to do
development in Moodle to develop there if that's what they are most
comfortable with, and we also want folks to give us notes and tips
from live classes they give without requiring them to formally put it
in asciidoc themselves. This is all very valuable stuff, so even if
they skip step B, it can be our job to collect these great resources
and put them into asciidoc for use project-wide. This would be the
path of skipping B, and jumping straight from A to C.

So if you choose to directly go from A to C, we'll allow it because we
want to see good material come in and the project grow, but it's not
the ideal since the material is of limited usefulness to folks using
the other release formats and will require work from the team to make
it as useful as possible.

There will be the following basic responsibilities on the team
regarding the core workflow:

 * Wiki maintainers keeping track of who is working on what outlines and formats
 * bzr+asciidoc experts pruning the core material in B (doing some
backporting too - if a great course is published in Moodle we want to
backport the core of it to asciidoc)
 * Moodle experts putting the documents from B into Moodle
 * IRC experts putting the documents from B into a format useful on IRC
 * Real Life session teachers putting documents from B into a format
that can be taught offline
 * Course writers either using the set workflow, or developing
directly for Moodle, IRC or Live sessions

Obviously this is the dream land ideal - that the project will be so
vast that we'll have development happening and backporting and
everything. In reality I think we'll have some people developing for
live classes and releasing PDFs, and folks developing in Moodle, and
people giving IRC sessions - maybe it won't all get back to asciidoc
and we'll directly pull from each others resources to teach our
segments. But having goals is nice, and this is the structure we'd
like to see for maximum usefulness of the core course material.

We still have details to work out regarding precisely what belongs on
the wiki, and in asciidoc and how much work we need to put into
writing courses vs referencing existing reference documentation, but I
wanted to make the basics clear before diving into all that too
deeply. Charles is going to work on some of his ideas and give
examples, and Martin has several great courses already developed in
bzr that we're going to look at to see what our happy medium is
regarding reference and rewriting.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com