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Restarting the Ubuntu Learning project

For the past several months I’ve been quietly working with a few folks to get things going again with the Ubuntu Learning project. This morning I sent a version of the following to the ubuntu-learning mailing list:

The Ubuntu Learning project has been quiet for some time, but we’re hopeful that there are a lot of folks still interested in the efforts outlined in our initiative to develop class material for students learning about Ubuntu.

In order to get things going with this project again, I wanted to quickly re-introduce myself and my own current visions for the project.

I work as a Linux systems administrator by trade, but in my free time I volunteer with a non-profit that deploys Ubuntu in schools and earlier this year I had the opportunity to travel with another non-profit to Ghana to deploy Ubuntu and train the educators there. Through these projects, it’s become clear to me that the development of training materials is essential for Ubuntu and other free software to be successful in these deployments.

Now, when it comes to this project one of the things I feel most strongly about is that we are not a documentation writing project. Documentation writing is well-covered by the Ubuntu Documentation and Ubuntu Manual teams. In places where documentation is lacking in these projects we should take it upon ourselves to volunteer our time to improve their source material. I hope that several members of our project go on to make significant contributions to these projects.

So what do we do? We write the material for teachers to teach. Think of the Ubuntu Documentation or Manual as the textbook and what we’re doing is the supplemental lesson plan, learning objectives, assessments and other tools that the teacher receives with the textbook. We’re also be working to put material in the Moodle teaching framework.

To help us with this, Jasna Benčić has put together a document that gets deep into the methodologies that we should be using when developing course material. Her document is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pLqSuStmh5PGfiUBfamPQIYbUVSQDCrvbKX2J2VBFAI/edit?pli=1

Additionally, we’d also like to assemble a small team to write our first course which can then be used as an example for future ones. So please sign up for the mailing list to join the discussion and get involved!

2 Comments

  • Bonnie Fallahi

    I’ve been thinking about ways to use Ubuntu for years. This project seems great. If there is more information can someone tell me where to get more of an overview?
    -Bonnie

    • pleia2

      You’re coming in at the beginning of this project so all the information we have is what is shared in this blog post and on the links I shared :)

      If you haven’t already, please join the mailing list so you are kept up to date as we add to these resources.