Teaching Drupal is not training Drupal

It has become clear that we should make a better distinction between "Drupal training" versus "teaching Drupal". The trainee is aware of what Drupal can do an is motivated to solve a particular problem. However student are a different breed. They may never have heard of Drupal before or not even know what CMS stands for. Their attention span may be very limited and there budget even more. This section focuses on teaching students. We look at four years of experience to share our understanding on how we can get more young people interested in Drupal, particular students who do not have a developer background.

Many differences exist between training and teaching. Where training can just work with simplified tutorials, teaching needs scaffolds. Scaffolding is a well known educational term. In this session we look at existing tutorials and why they miss scaffolding principles. We show our own alternative exercises.

In our experience it turned out that we need a Drupal-only course as to give the students the opportunity to actual develop a project. This leads to the problem to justify a Drupal-only course to the university/college or any other educational institution. We can do this by not calling it a Drupal course but a "Web Service Development" course were Drupal is both the CMS and the development tool to get the job done. No other system can take its place.

In business, people spend a large amount of time to listen to their customers, this is not different for teaching, we do need to listen and talk to students. Students have expressed how they experienced the course. By talking to students not following the course we can learn how to motivate them to take the course. Basically every engaged student is interested in the internet and wants to do "things" with it, they do not need a technical background for this.

Trying to address the most gifted students requires a very different approach to training. Only the worst students are interested in the certificate. The best students are interested in traveling (education abroad) and an education that stimulates their own personal development (e.g. philosophy, social sciences, artificial intelligence, etc), only later do they consider a second education with more market values (e.g. management, law, etc). The best students are active in student organizations, considering the interest in traveling some of the better organizations have gone global. Talking to such organizations can help us truly get closed to the brightest students.

The brightest students have entrepreneurial spirit, considering the tight budgets most have, we see an opportunity to attract students with the opportunity of existing and temporally work that fits nice with their goals for personal development. It seems as many opportunities exist to attract more young people to Drupal, we just need to have the proper incentives and organizational structure to do so.