Training in Drupal

DAVID:
Alright, so I suggested this because I am part of Pantheon, and we do a regular training workshop in conjunction with Drupal global Training Day, which happens five times a year. It's a workshop that I've it started way back with Drupal seven when Drupal seven first came out with Jen Lampton back when I worked at chapter three, and it's something I picked up when I in Drupal eight, when I started my own company doing stuff. And now it's continued in Drupal eight and Drupal nine, here at Pantheon, but I wanted to kind of organize this session, because I, first of all, like the material that we make is totally open, anyone can take it and share it and use it for any pre events That's, that's absolutely a resource you can make use of. But also, I know that it's not the best. I know there are ways to improve everything. And so I would love to hear what other people are doing for training, what things especially in this last year, are working really well what things have you wanted to try but haven't for some reason.

And that's sort of my loosely collected thoughts for this session. But because it's an unconference, it can go any direction. I have started a notes doc kind of like ratio did in the migrations workshop, and I put the link, it's on flack, it's also here in the chat room, I started just by adding my little bit for anyone who wants to get information about that. If you have specific training things that you do on a regular basis, if you want to add that info in there, that could be helpful. Perhaps that might be a good place to start. Would anyone else like to just briefly introduce themselves and say, either like what they do with training or what they're hoping to talk about today.

JOE:
I'm Joe, I work at Drupalize.Me. And we do a bunch of different types of Drupal training. The most, the majority of it is in the form of like pre recorded video and written content. This year, we've been experimenting recently with doing more remote workshops held in zoom. Historically, we've tried to do in person workshops in conjunction with various events like DrupalCon and camps, like mid camp. But it wasn't really an option this year. And so we've been experimenting with remote workshops. And all of that has led me to think more about like, how in a remote environment like zoom, can you make? Can you create a workshop or a like learning space that is collaborative and interactive? And, you know, if you're like, when you're in person, there are some benefits of being able to like turn to your neighbor and poke them and be like, "This isn't working. Like, I don't understand a word of what Joe is saying, Can you help me?" Things like that, and trying to figure out ways that we can capture some of that value, at least in a remote workshop.

And then the sort of flipside of that is a bunch of things that we can do with the remote workshop that are probably harder to achieve in person. Like just the, for example, the ability to we held our workshops over the course of a couple of days and broke it up into like, two hour chunks instead of doing a single like six hour workshop and that has that has some advantages, like people get a break in between having like consuming a bunch of information. It can also be challenging, because you have to try to schedule it across three days or three weeks or whatever the case may be. But what's kind of been my experience recently and I'm curious to just explore that further.

DAVID:
Thank you, Joe. I've sort of paraphrased some of that into the note stock. Please do update it corrected if I missed something important or didn't quite capture it correctly.

RALF:
Try go next well, I'm more on the recipient side, as attended a few trainings over the years, and I was just interested and wanted to listen a bit. And I also like consistency in trainings and thought my pay could give some, some a bit of input. Let's put it that way.

DAVID:
Cool. Thank you.

SPEAKER:
Hi. My name is Quynh Pham (UNKNOWN), and I'm here just for your exploring to see what type of training I have so.

DAVID:
Alright, welcome. Alright, Benji, I think that leaves you not to call you out. Sorry. But if there's anything you'd like to share?

BENJI:
Well, I I've done a few trainings. But it's not really what I spend most of my time doing. And I don't have any practices that I especially recommend. But I was just looking for it and just found a link from that we use that Ned camp just about a week ago. It's Replicat.com so let me paste it into the shared doc. And, and that we use that as a sort of collaborative programming environment. So, we were, it provides an interface where where you can edit a source file, and then run it in a terminal emulator. And, and I guess the the session was organized. As an exercise in Mob programming. I don't know if anyone has heard of that before. But you have a bunch of assigned roles. One person is the keyboard and is supposed to be relatively dumb. And another person is telling that person what to type. And, you know, one one person is the moderator. So, it was the first time I done that, but, but I think someone just asked what tools there are for collaborative training. And that's one that I just saw for the first time a week ago.

DAVID:
Thank you for sharing.

RALF:
For collaborative editing. There's also, if people have a mac sub ether added, there, you can collaboratively edit the same document. And same goes for VS code. There are also plugins where you're able to share documents as well as terminal access and so forth.

JOE:
When we've been doing, one of the workshops that we've been doing recently is like Drupal eight and nine theming workshop, and we have exercises for people to work on. So, you get some like hands on experience, and especially in the remote version of the workshop, it was often like OK, here's the exercise, everybody tried to like, you know, edit an info file and do this or override a template file. And then you're kind of like, we'll regroup in 15 minutes and talk about it. And like, everybody would like mute their mic, stop their video. And then I would just be there like, "Hello, Is anybody here? Like, if you have any questions, you can ask them." And occasionally people did. But that it'd be interesting to see things like the mob programming that you're talking about. Benji could be an interesting way to like, do that in a more collaborative way. Again, the thing about being in person was like, I could walk around the room and like, sit down next to someone and be like, 'Hey, how's it going?' And I don't know, I think there's like, I get that in a zoom call with like, 10 other people.

It can be intimidating to be the person who's like," I don't know how to do this." But it'd be interesting to explore some of these collaborative editing tools as a way to like do a hands on exercise by do it as a group. So, that I think there's a lot of value in learning things with someone versus just having someone like, here's the presentation, OK, today, did you learn it, but actually like working on it, and then working on it with someone.

BENJI:
I'm currently working on a project where I'm trying to teach people how to do a migration project. And my ultimate goal is to develop it to a point where we have the documentation and the structure so that I could bring it to a contribution event and say, "Hey, does anyone have a charity or nonprofit with a simple Drupal six or seven site that they want to upgrade to Drupal nine, and with a bunch of volunteers that such an event can't get it done in a day?" I'm not close to that. I'm on the first iteration and writing the documentation. But but but the hope is to have a sort of training by doing approaches and actually combine it combined learning with contribution.

DAVID:
Yeah, interesting. A lot of the training that I've done has been very light touch, you know, like they, they can follow along. But if they get stuck, we kind of have to stop, or really, we can't stop the whole class, because there's a lot of people attending. But yeah, there's trainings that we've we've done in person that we've thought about converting to an online format. But the problem that we've hit up against is, you know, people always get stuck. People always have some sort of a computer problem that's specific to their own. And we don't have tools that would make it easy for us to jump in, see their screen or take over control. And, you know, I guess zoom could probably do that if we had breakout rooms or something. But that seems, I don't know. The hazard hesitancy, there is a reason why we haven't done a lot more of those interactive workshops.

JOE:
I would say the same is true for me sort of the like, I'm sure you could do this and zoom, but it just, it feels like it would be really awkward. But also, maybe not. You know, I would like this morning, I was like, oh, man, it's gonna be so weird and awkward to try to organize an unconference in zoom, and I was pleasantly surprised. I was like, oh, actually, this and like the zoom. And the mirror board combined was like, a good example of a thing that you couldn't accomplish in person, because I was like, "Oh, mural is awesome for organizing this. So, next time we do one in person, everyone can just sit at their table with their laptop and log into a mural board..." And it's like, no way. But I definitely have a like, tendency, I think, to get a little bit afraid of the potential for these online tools to be awkward or that I'm gonna like fumble around trying to make something work that in practice ends up just not being that big of a deal. People are generally pretty accepting of like, "Hey, I'm happy to wait a moment while you figure out which button to press and zoom.

It's fine." Like we've all been there.

DAVID:
Yeah, perhaps making room for mistakes and things going slower and figuring stuff out would would help make that possible. You know, instead of instead of what we would typically scope out for a full day course or like you said, a five hour course, setting the scale back to be like, well, what could we accomplish with you know, two hours? Like you said, if we did it collaboratively, how much time would that give us for troubleshooting if you know people, they have problems?

JOE:
We've only done a couple of them so far, but we tried this thing of breaking up our workshops so that instead of like a full day seeming workshop, we do it over the course of three days for a couple of hours each and with that idea of like that gives us you know, each day we can add like a half hour of time for kind of like, fumbling around or answering questions or whatever needs to happen. And so far, it just feels like that time ends up being like, dead space mostly. And I've struggled to like, even like get like participation from people in a zoom call when you're like, OK well, let me ask a question, then you ask a question. And everyone's like, "Yeah, alright. Well, I guess I'll answer my own question?"

DAVID:
That's true.

JOE:
You know, and that's probably as much like on me as the facilitator as it is on attendees, right? Like, we have to find ways to engage and get people that answer questions.

BENJI:
I guess one thing you could try is maybe the first half hour of the every workshop, except the first make the first half hour optional. So, there's people have questions, so ask them. And if not, you'll be staring at that screen. But at least you you will have three other first 10 other people are also...

JOE:
An interesting idea. We've often I've always done like, kind of making the last part of the workshop as the, like free Q&A space. But inevitably, what what ends up happening is if like, nobody has a question right away, then I'm like, Well, I can just keep talking about this thing we've been talking about for the last hour, because I have more to say. But if you did it upfront, it is much more of a like, well, I'm just gonna hang out here. And if you have questions, cool, and if nobody does,

BENJI:
We'll start with the new stuff.

JOE:
Might have to try that.

BENJI:
Half an hour, and that way people get a chance to try out what you were talking about in the previous session. And if they if they went into a couple, they can come with your questions. I'm going to drop off, I just get some food we're eating.

DAVID:
Thanks, Benji. Go ahead Ralf.

RALF:
I have I've looked up a tweet or put a thread basically, about learning lens, be it webinars or lecturing formats. And it's really interesting take on it, I pasted in the collaborative doc as well. Here's the point. And it's a quite a good one. it departs from the lecturing part. And it's maybe difficult for trainings. But he says basically, you get 10 minutes maximum talk at people the rest of the time has provided experiences provides disproportionate value, meaning it's harder to plan, and you don't know where the group will be heading. But basically, the people will be more engaged. Because if you are lecturing, then everybody is switching off their heads and falling around, if you will provide in in trading contexts. I've taken a look at David's document here linked in the beginning, by of basically get to do list, where to click and what to do. And then three people are following, but when they're at home, in their own context, when they get again, possibly if they haven't consciously taken the steps into problems again.

And if you get them to participate already during the training, then it's a completely different experience, but it's more difficult to plan and to facilitate. Definitely.

JOE:
Sure that makes sense. So like, when I start a webinar, and the first half an hour of it is me giving a slideshow that sets this expectation of like, oh, the person who's going to talk during the zoom call is Joe and the rest of us are just gonna like mute our video and may or may not be at our desk. Yeah. Interesting. I've kind of been toying with the idea of because Drupalize.Me, you know, first and foremost, we create video, like pre recorded video content. And I've been kind of thinking about ideas or where like, if we did online like a remote class like this Then, for like each meeting of the class, I could have a set of pre recorded videos that are like before you come to class, you should have watched these three videos. And then class itself could be like the first couple of minutes could be like, OK, here's the five minute recap of what you should have gotten out of those videos. Now, let's now is the more unstructured time.

RALF:
That's good, excellent point. Unfortunately, it's, it's a video by Charmin lecturer in mathematics department. But he has a similar stance. He's providing basically online videos for his students, or for his students, and they have to, in their own pace, when they have time, they're able to watch them, and then they have a similar level and may have basically on the wages are available on Monday, then they have two time winner of two or three days to work on them and to digest them, then then meeting up with the tutors on a Wednesday or Thursday, and then they can go a bit deeper and on Friday, then meeting up to the professor. I could and I not exactly remembering the procedure you had, I could rewatch it was just in German, wouldn't be much useful for you, you all but I could revisit it and sum it up and and add it to the document. document. But it's it's similar approach. And he is isn't the pedagogic department, also and is it taking a different stance about learning and those complex topics in mathematics.

DAVID:
Interesting. I didn't, I hadn't thought about that. But we actually do something like that, for what we have an internal training for getting the non technical people that are hired at Pantheon to understand, like, what Pantheon is, and how we fit into the market, and what Drupal and WordPress and open source really means. And we it's three days, two hours each. And we have prescribed, like videos to watch in advance, like not ones that we created, but just like out on the internet, you know how to answer the question that we're trying to address. And then a list of like homework that we all answer, we kind of start the the next day by, you know, going into breakout rooms and discussing as a group like your answers. And you know, we do like drawing assignments and things trying to break it up. But the problem we've seen has been like actually getting people to do the homework or you know, actually watching the videos in advance prior to the live discussion.

JOE:
Yeah, you know, one advantage I have with your blinds me, is it regarding that is that we're typically charging someone to take the class and there I from personal experience I can attest, like, when you pay some amount of money to do the thing. I'm more likely to watch the videos in advance cuz I'm like, well, I had to pay for it. But trying to like that is a common problem, like how do you incentivize that, like get people to actually do the homework? More or less? And I think part of the answer to that is like figuring out how to make the time that you spend in person, really valuable. So, that people are inspired to like they can get more out of it if they've done the work in advance. And it's useful for them and like, more or less like if you can ensure that what you're teaching people is going to benefit them and be useful to them. But what is totally hard when it's like my boss said I had to go to this training. So, now I'm here.

RALF:
One question, how long are those videos on this, those smallest snippets of 10 minutes or 20 minutes or are those one hour or two hour?

DAVID:
No, they're they're pretty short. The ones we're talking about are you know, less ten many of them are, I think, closer to three. And we asked them, it's like, you know, you don't have to watch all of them just like, pick one. And these are different opinions on the same sort of topic.

JOE:
It can be even with short video that's super challenging sometimes to just like, find the space and set aside the time to sit and watch it. You know, I think we've probably all experienced this thing where it's like, yeah, you got to, like work says you can do some on the job learning. Go ahead. Do it, you know, do it whenever you want. And you're like, well, but I have so many things on my to do list. What am I gonna spend an hour watching these videos? Yeah.

DAVID:
Yeah, well, the best we can do in our class right now is we we assume that most people didn't watch it, or at least by by breaking the breaking breaking the the class into different breakout rooms, we hope that at least one person in each of the groups, But we drew my manager was very deliberate and making it not just a lecture. So, you know, we have them discuss and then draw what they discussed, and then kind of go on from there. So hopefully, there's something taken from it, even if they didn't do any of the prep, work.

JOE:
Do people are people pretty engaged in the discussions? Like...

DAVID:
They seem to be. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's the same. It's the thing we've always seen, like, when we did it in person, people are super engaged. When we first started doing it online, people were, you know, engaged pretty well, and you know, stayed on muted. But now it's, you know, we've been doing this for a year, I think there's a lot of zoom fatigue. And I think it's it's hard to stay unmuted and engaged the whole time.

JOE:
I'm always like, super conscious self conscious of like, putting four or five people into a random breakout room without any facilitator and being like, Alright, discuss things. 'Cause me, I'm like, that's the worst. Like, you end up in a room. And like, five people are all just looking at each other, and no one's talking. And then I'm like, I'm gonna have to say something. But (CROSSTALK) most of the value, right? Yeah.

RALF:
Maybe even if you sent them into a breakout room, give them along, some sort of icebreaker question. Alongside the topic they should work on.

DAVID:
Yeah, I can certainly help get the discussion going. Yeah, we've also been discussing switching that and other trainings that we currently do live into some sort of asynchronous, you know, LMS type thing where we can track progress and watch little videos and do other things to engage. But we really don't want to lose the interaction that people have and giving them options to like, ask questions throughout, like, the questions that people ask during most training that I do are usually way better than anything that I planned out intentionally.

RALF:
One question, do you access your curriculum based on the questions? So mean, you refine it over time?

DAVID:
Yes, we constantly make changes and improvements to the, to the material. Whether or not it's enough, though, is you know, a question but yeah.

RALF:
Cool, because usually, the questions are the best feedback, you can get up audio learning material.

DAVID:
Well, I have another topic potentially. Another thing that we have done for training, you know, like I said, we kind of moved from online or in person training and pretty much all of it being in person to being online through zoom with registration and stuff like that. And then over time, as interest is dwindled, or as you know, We're just trying to like reach as many people kind of get the material in front of as many people as possible. We've recently started live streaming some of our, our training workshops. And so, you know, we'll just do like 45 minute long live streams to YouTube, and LinkedIn, and Facebook. It can help sometimes, you know, sometimes we'll get people watching and asking questions and engaging that way, especially through LinkedIn, which I was really surprised about. I'm curious if anyone else has tried other other things like that for online engagement?

JOE:
Now, I'm aware of the fact that live streaming is a thing that exists, but I have not done it at all. Do you do like, like you do a training? Like this kind of thing? And then you're just you're live streaming the training to these other platforms? And then people can if they want to watch it, is that? Or are you like, Oh, I'm just gonna, like the kind of, when I think of live streaming, I think more of like, "Oh, I'm gonna spend some time trying to write this migration. And I'm gonna do it on Twitch, and I'm gonna talk about it while I do it."

DAVID:
Right. It's not live recoding. We have talked about doing that. But I think it's intimidating for some folks. Also, from pantheons perspective, like, I don't know, if we have a ton, that is super valuable. Maybe I'm sure we could find something that's that's probably more of an excuse. But no, our material tends to be like we're taking stripped out, or like, you know, simplified material that we used to do for the in person training, and then run it as a webinar with regular prompts to ask questions in the chat. And they kind of all roll back so we can answer them. And just like everything, you know, if we get lots of questions, we know the session is infinitely better than when we Yeah. But then those those end up on the places they were streamed to, and we will get engagement sometimes after, after it was live.

RALF:
From a recipients perspective, I would consider it odd if you would provide a live streaming basis, basically that lecture scenario. The tweet I've pasted. advocating against so I, the live streaming is for, for example, for problem solving, showing how to solve a certain problem. Excellent. If you can follow along and see, hey, I want to know how problem x is solved in Drupal. And you can watch along and they see for example, in a twitch notification, say David is streaming as my as went live right now and is streaming about how to solve problem x. Excellent, but to provide the foundation I would go more with it other format, in the context of a workshop or whatever, that you can provide a consistent foundation you can build on it's a several step process, in my humble opinion.

JOE:
I have no doubt that you're correct.

RALF:
And one additional in the tweet I've pasted. There's also a book recommendation about workshops, which is excellent.

DAVID:
Where is the book recommendation that you mentioned?

RALF:
In the in the link tweet.

DAVID:
Or in the tweet itself, OK, gotcha.

RALF:
In the thread. It's workshop Survival Guide. It's called.

DAVID:
Got it. Joe, you mentioned you've been sort of switched to doing the online stuff. I've seen some of your tweets as you've been preparing and kind of thinking about what to do. You mentioned changing the time, you know from you know, breaking it up and stuff? What are the things have you? Have you changed over from like the first time that you ran online to right now?

JOE:
We've tried, yeah, we've tried a couple of different things. We, one thing we did, like I said was we changed the time. So, we ran one work online workshop that was like, six hours. And it was like, that was a poor idea. And so then we split it up. And we've tried a couple variations of that, where we've done three hours for, or like to like two hours plus, like an hour of kind of, like, hang out, I'll be on the zoom, if people want like to stick around. But to do that over a course of three days, three consecutive days, or to do it over the course of like, every Wednesday for three weeks. And I, you know, I wouldn't say there was a huge difference between those two things. I was kind of curious to see like, if people would kind of come back after a week and have more questions or like be have spent time in the interim thinking about theming Drupal, and then come with new questions. And mostly, it didn't seem to make a huge difference. So, you know, in retrospect, we could do things like assign homework, that would get people to think about it, and maybe spend some time learning on their own and come back with questions.

But we've... I, you know, when we do in person workshops, we like the day before the workshop, I can send out an email to everyone that's going to attend or a couple of days before. And I can say, you know, like, here's what you can expect for the day, here's what you should bring to prepare. And one of the interesting side effects of doing like it online, and then over the course of many days, is you just have more chances to do that. And so you could we would send out an email, like every day, like, here's the schedule for the day. Do you have any questions? and largely, it was beneficial, and that was just more opportunities for people to hit reply and ask questions. And in a few cases, that led to people asking questions where you could made it clear that like, it was something we talked about last week, they're not quite getting it, maybe we should go over that again. Or people would ask questions about like, "Hey, I saw that on this week, on the schedule for today." You're going to talk about, you know, asset libraries, I have this very specific question about asset libraries.

And because they would respond, like, a couple hours before the class started, I would have some time to think about that, and prepare. And so I could have like more meaningful answers to some of those very specific questions. Whereas a lot of time in person, people are like, you're like trying to explain like how template files or something work. And they're like, "Well, I have this, I have this one problem that is hyper specific to my use case, and no one else in the class is gonna care about it. But the reason I'm here is because I want to answer that." And we often have to say like, that's a great question. Here's a sort of generic answer. Because I can't, like, I can't spend an hour answering this question that the other half of the class doesn't care about. And this gave me an opportunity to, like, I could identify those questions, and I could either come up with answers that were valuable to everyone. Or I could tell that person like, "Hey, stick around in the time that we have allotted after class.

And we can talk about it." And that was kind of cool. I like that. I you know, training like this, for me is always this balance of like, how do you do something that scales to be valuable for all 10 people that are in attendance, while also making sure that you as best you can, like, answer the questions that people have about like their real world things because ultimately, like I want you to succeed with your Drupal project, and trying to balance those two things, and I feel like doing the remote training provides a little bit more opportunity to do that. Certainly more than in person where you're like I don't know, find me afterwards, and we can try to talk about it. But yeah.

DAVID:
That's that's kind of what I do in the Drupal workshop that I do, where it's it's three hours long. But I say, you know, throughout, like, if there are any questions that you have that are, you know, volunteers and in the Q&A, like, can't answer for you or that I can't answer live, I will stick around until the last person leaves. So, you know, the last few times that I've done it, I've been online, answering questions for upwards of an hour past the time, it's supposed to end. And those discussions and the questions again, are just like, wonderful. And, you know, we do have time to get into the, here's my hyper specific problem. And sometimes I still say like, well, you need to email me because that's, you know, yeah, much.

JOE:
You know, another thing that happened a couple of times is people would ask questions that I don't know the answer to, and no, like, one day in person thing, I would mostly just have to be like, I don't know. Like, here's where I would go to try to find out. But I don't know. And I can't figure that out right now. And in this case, I was able to be like, I don't know. But by next time we meet, I can find the answer to that. And that was really cool. And then I would have the space in between those meetings to go dive into something and be like, "Ah, the reason that it works this way, but not that way, is let me show you these three lines of code and this obscure file somewhere." And that was, as the instructor that felt like a really powerful thing to be able to be like, I don't know the answer, I can find out. And then I can both tell you the answer. And I can show you how I figured it out. So, the next time, you can do so too. But like it's hard to do that in person, right? Like, "I don't know, let's just go steps to the debugger for the next two hours." And, you know, may or may not learn how this works.

DAVID:
Right, yeah, I that's, that's really good. I if I had classes that followed up or not for the other that would probably, I could see that would be really useful. Yeah.

JOE:
Yeah, I mostly like, like, here's the single unit of like, intro to Drupal, and then done. And then here's that same one again. Yeah.

DAVID:
Yeah. But the good news about the having that time at the end, where I can, like unmute people, or let people kind of openly talk is that if I don't know the answer to something, someone else in the group of, you know, however many people we have, will sometimes jump up and say, like, "Oh, I saw that you need to go to this." or Hey, you should check out you know, and then we'll explore it together. And that's also a good learning opportunity.

JOE:
Are any of you familiar with Kent C. Dodds? He does a lot of JavaScript, training stuff. And so he created a site like EpicReact.Dev, that teaches JavaScript react, I suppose. But he also has, I've been following this thing that he's doing, where he's creating what he refers to as learning clubs. And he has set up like a, I don't know, probably like discord or something server, where he's helping to facilitate groups of like up to 10 people who all want to learn the same topic, going and kind of doing so together. And it would be like, Oh, I want to like, there's five of us. And we all want to learn how to write a Drupal module. Let's like, let's all sign up for this class and do it together, but then have a space where you're, you know, and then once a week, you get together with your classmates with no teacher, and kind of talk about things and like, the learning that happens in that space where, like you're saying, David, it's like, you might not know the answer, but someone else in the room does.

But when you're the person who's giving the presentation. If someone else asked the question, everyone else is like, well, David's gonna answer that question.

DAVID:
Right.

JOE:
I have to find the it's in the learning clubs thing is interesting.

DAVID:
Yeah, I put a link to it in our doc. I'll definitely be looking at that and several of the other links that we put in there later on. Alright, well, I'm acutely aware that we have about five minutes left in time and there's another discussion happening in this room after this and more people are showing up. So, any final closing thoughts or questions to maybe think about and discuss later, maybe via slack or something.

JOE:
Now, I find this to be very productive. Thank you.

RALF:
Great. Thank you.

DAVID:
Alright, good. Well, thank you all for attending. I'm going to put the notes in the doc just in case someone who just joined might find that interesting. And yeah, I'll hopefully see you around the rest of it camp.

BENJI:
Yeah, thanks. It was good to listen.