Online TurboGears Class (Redux)
I learned a lot from my first attempt at an online class. So, I am going to try again having learned my lessons.
- Online classes require more structure than the last one had.
- We need weekly IRC chats, or at least weekly reading lists, projects, and screencasts.
- We need a group project with a group accessable SVN repository so people can check in their changes.
- We need a Forum or Mailing list for class discussion
- I need more people to be involved in helping with the class. 100 people in the class, with just me helping to keep things organized and moving forward was too much!
- We need more multimedia content — more screencasts, more diagrams, more code.
- I need to post “office hours” for me and other class helpers, and we need to be avalable (on IRC or something…) to help participants with whatever problems they are having durring those times.
So, given all of that, and my commitments with work and the TurboGears book — I’n not planning to set up another class untill July. But I do want to start with prep-work for the class now.
If you are interested in helping new TurboGears users get up to speed, and have about an hour or two a week you can donate to that project let me know, and we can talk a little bit about how you can help out.
And, equally if you have thoughts on how we can improve the pedagogy (teaching methods) of online courses like this, or software suggestions, let me know.
You can contact me by e-mail at Mark at (this web site address).com, or you can just leave a message here.
I’m planning on creating most of the class content, and I think we have the potential to create some fantastic resources for learning TurboGears.
If you have an web application which requires users to login, it can be harder to test because that means your application isn’t stateless any more, so you have to setup and maintain a user’s state. And that usually means you need to mock up a browser interface that that understands and remembers cookies.