On Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:48:48 +0200, Martin Schlander wrote:
Lørdag den 26. juni 2010 06:00:20 skrev Jim Henderson: Is your idea just to write more online documentation? Or are you thinking about actual real world classes/courses or creating some kind of formal e- learning? I don't think either of the latter is realistic.
I think it's more than online documentation, but probably less than formal courses. There's no reason, though, that we couldn't do formal e- learning courses (not multi-day courses, but more like the "quick fix" training available from Novell's On Demand system - 1-2 hours of presentation/hands-on that covers a specific topic, for example).
I have created http://opensuse-guide.org targetting end users.
I like it - this is a great resource. :-)
Note that there have been e.g. packaging sessions both on irc and at events.
Also good to know. One thing that I find useful is to take information like that and "package" it in a form that can be reused. I spend a fair amount of time doing "manual" training on Novel's practicum system (for exam proctors), and I've been moving pieces of that to pre-recorded demonstrations that the proctors review, and then we do a 30-minute online session after they review the information. That way, they can learn on their own schedule, and have the opportunity to ask questions. That kind of 'blended' learning experience is very effective for an audience like ours - and it can provide the user with resources to learn what they need to know so they can ask better questions (whether synchronously or asynchronously).
I think everything needed for technical and motivated people is just about there. Non-motivated, non-technical people are nearly impossible to help imo - unless there's someone (friend, relative, co-worker) to do face-to-face handholding.
I think the target audience for initial materials would be the motivated non-technical user. We're seeing more and more of this type of user in the Linux world in general, and I think that audience is one we could successfully train on, especially if they're coming from another platform (that gives us something to relate to that they already have an understanding of).
However, in our LUG we have actually been discussing doing some kind of beginner's course in Linux - but if this ever comes into existence it would be a cross-distro thing. At least here in Copenhagen there's not high enough concentration of openSUSE users that an openSUSE specific course would make sense.
This is something we're seeing in the Novell training world as well - we've got a partnership with LPI on entry-level Linux certifications; the thing is that Linux is Linux is Linux is Linux - so learning openSUSE if you come from Fedora (for example) is a fairly quick learning path, because you only need to learn the openSUSE-specific things like YaST.
Also, a few years ago 75% of new openSUSE users came from MS Windows, but now 75% of new users seem to come from Ubuntu (surprisingly this hasn't seemed to make user support much easier at all). This is also something to consider.
Very true. When you start getting into the details of the differences between the distros, we may find the differences are bigger than we thought. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org