Re: Outreach

On 19 Oct 2011, at 03:11, Andrew Cooper wrote:

> The idea of keeping a list of School / College / University contacts that Chris Mills came up with is something I hadn't thought of but is absolutely essential. I don't have any ideas for that solution, but if we can keep it within the Wiki (somewhere password protected of course) then that would be great, or perhaps we could each E-Mail School / College / University contacts to the INTERNAL mailing list (internal-webed@w3.org), although that could, in time, become very unorganized.

yeah, these solutions wouldn't be great. We can't just have their personal details publicly available, but the W3C needs to run as transparently as possibly. I wonder how other W3C groups generally deal with stuff like this? Anyone on this list care to answer? Doug? Shawn?

Maybe we could keep a public Wiki page with links to educators' public contact pages, and an idea of what the relationship is looking like with those educators, and then keep a private database somewhere of specific contacts' details? Access to the latter could be outreach group only?

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> Regarding the Wiki page for Outreach and the Current Activities: In what way are the three links related to the Outreach of the W3C Web Education CG and our aims of a W3C Standard Webcraft "course" or "degree" so to speak? In addition - the metaStudio Website is down.

I didn't put them there, but it looks like they are all places that we would benefit in doing outreach to, and maintaining good relationships with. I know P2PU is, for a fact.

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> In regards to the actual outreach project linking to the Curriculum and Learning Materials themselves are we confident that schools, colleges, and / or Universities around the World (providing all of the materials are translated appropriately) will be happy to use them, incorporate them into their courses / degrees, and provide W3C endorsed certification or are the aims of the outreach group to contact these people and getting them to adopt our learning material and curricula AFTER they have been produced?
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we are fairly confident. Many schools and universities around the world have already adopted Opera WSC and WaSP InterACT into their courses in some way, and/or benefitted from them in some other way.

The best thing to do, in my mind, will be to put up an initial set of learning material/curricula and do outreach on it to get the ball rolling. We can then add to that set of material as we go along, including getting educators to contribute to it, and shape it/feedback on it (helping to make it as useful to them as possible).

And it's not ever going to be finished, as new material will always be needed, as well as updates to existing material to keep it current. But we can give it  our best shot.

We'll have to form a maintenance/updates group somewhere down the line...

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> Would it be a good idea to, for example, produce a small Web-based survey (through a tool such as SurveyMonkey for example) and send these to a contact at each educational institution we know of to get feedback from them and then analyse the data we have from the surveys? At the end of each survey we would then invite the person who answered the survey to become a participant within the Community Group and help us shape the learning materials and curricula and in turn, hopefully, they would provide W3C endorsed training and certification at their educational institute in the future, increasing our chances of success with the aims overall and of course making more money.

You mean, a survey to ask what they want out of educational material, what they need help with, what would make the project most useful, that kind of thing?

I still think it would be most useful to produce the initial set of material, then ask them to look at that and comment, rather than just asking them to comment on the outset, with nothing to visualise.

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> In addition to the outreach project contacting and getting educators, companies, and trainers to adopt our material and curricula, we want to focus heavily on community building to spread the word about...The Community Group project or the results of the Community Group project? We obviously want as many people as possible to know about the existence of this project, but how many participants do we want actively involved in contributions? Under 100, hundreds, thousands?

The answer is - primarily the results of the project - the learning material, etc. There will be far more people wanting to make use of the material, than contribute to it. But there is nothing wrong with tacking a small section on to the bottom of your e-mail correspondence with educators that says "if you want to contribute to the learning material or curricula, then ...."

Plus we will will also want to focus some efforts on encouraging educators, developers and designers to pass the word along.

We will of course also want to contact developers and designers that we think would be good for writing specific parts of the learning material, but this is more a task of the learning material group, in my mind.

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> As a contributor to the Outreach project what should I and the other contributors be doing? Should we be inviting educators (tutors and lecturers who teach Web development based courses) to become active participants or talk to them about whether they would adopt and integrate something like that into their existing programmes / courses? I'm a Mentor at the SitePoint Forums and posted a thread there (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?786479-W3C-Web-Education-Community-Group) but there's been no response so far, despite the 133 thread views. Is this something we should be doing in other places too or not? 

I really appreciate your efforts so far - this is great! And I would love outreach members to do more of the same. However, my advice is that you are probably less likely to get responses about this in general web dev forums, and probably more likely to get useful responses from educator forums, and contacting individual educators and web devs that you know will possibly be interested.

Hrm, I really have to invite Anna Debenham to this group - she knows tons about this kind of stuff. I'll do that tonight.

In the meantime, feel free to invite people you think might be interested.