[QGIS-Developer] Projecta

Mon Jun 25 16:05:21 PDT 2018

Hi

> On 25 Jun 2018, at 19:06, DelazJ <delazj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Tim,
> 
> 2018-06-25 9:26 GMT+02:00 Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com <mailto:tim at kartoza.com>>:
> Hi
> 
> 
> 8< ————— snip ——————
> 
>> 
>>> The same for the lessons platform we build (see http://changelog.qgis.org/en/qgis/section/list/ <http://changelog.qgis.org/en/qgis/section/list/> for all the new training materials we have been developing for QGIS) - we could be pulling this over to QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> as static content and then incorporating into translation workflows there. We have also a translation framework for lessons on the platform, but it probably won’t scale well for many many languages.
>> 
> 
> Would that be possible to have more details on what is planned for this and how it relates to the Training manual?

> While I'm glad to see that the Training manual update has been retained as 2018 Grant Proposal (and I really appreciate how this has been managed by the PSC and members), I'm afraid that once it's updated for 3.4, the next round will be for 4.x (meaning that we have some stale lessons at a moment).
> So if there's an ongoing work to provide a more modern, more uptodate and maintainable, and more efficient lessons interface to the community, better avoid spreading the project energy/time/money in different plans and focus on what looks the best and future-proof option (in case it's).
> 
> PS: I didn't check how the lessons in projecta do work yet but these are the questions that come to mind when I read your message. Maybe I'm totally mixing things up, here.

Basically the things you find in the lessons app are worksheets we developed for our own training courses. We tried to come up with a new approach where the worksheets are focussed on the learners doing things and figuring things out themselves and not so much ‘follow the bouncing ball’ instructions. The latter are ok but very hard to maintain and IMHO the learners don’t learn as much as when they have to work stuff out themselves more. The lessons are also much more intended to be instructor lead - you need a competent person guiding the learners through the materials and filling in extra bits of info beyond what is presented on the sheets. I’d be interested to hear feedback from those using them for self-study to see how they work for them, but that wasnt the design intent. We first started working doing the materials in libreoffice but it was very cumbersome dealing with docs in git. The original repo is here:

https://github.com/kartoza/QGISTrainingWorkshop

And you can get an idea of the intended structure of the worksheets here:

training-approach.pdf <https://github.com/kartoza/QGISTrainingWorkshop/blob/master/training-approach.pdf>

We wanted to make it so that each worksheet could be used independently and that it fits on two sides of an A4 sheet so that the activities are in nice bite-sized chunks. We devised a fairly tight structure to the sheets so that learners get the rythmn of the training and start to move through the materials easily. Another design intent was that we could quickly assemble courses customised to the user’s needs. So if a group wants to focus on digitising we can pull out a set of sheets relating to that topic area. We have run quite a few training courses with these (and we made similar sheets for InaSAFE) and they work pretty well for us and, once they grasp the fact that they are not being spoon fed, most of our learners feedback say they enjoy using their brain more during the training. Each lesson has an exercise with a list of specifications. We really try to avoid making particular reference to Gui elements, and rather give instructions like ‘open the vector layer properties and set your line thickness to 4pt, colour to red and opacity to 50%’. This makes the content less vulnerable to a dev tidying up the UI and breaking all the documentation for it, and makes it more fun for the learner to hunt around in the Gui for the different options. We didnt always succeed completely in avoiding specific Gui references but we try our best to do so.

One of the other motivations for shifting to the web is to make it easier for people to get the content formatted nicely - the lessons are created using as structured form that asks for different elements (intro, further reading etc.) and then we assemble the content into the lesson layout. You can also use markdown in the lesson content for basic styling. We have some work in progress to have a ‘curriculum designer’ that will let you tick off one ore more sheets on a form and assemble your own PDF and unique URL with your curriculum so that when you present a course you can link to the sheets being used for the course. At some point it would be nice to link this to the certification app too so that you can say ‘Joe did our course and it covered these modules’.

I don’t know if our approach will work for everyone, but if others are interested to use the platform for QGIS everything we made is open content and the platform is open so feel free to use it - and if you are interested contribute new content. If QGIS.ORG as a whole is interested in making it an official part of the project (e.g. to replace our old training manual work) that is fine with us too - though we dont have the same level of coverege for QGIS as the manual has yet. Also we would probably want to move the translation system into QGIS.ORG sphinx since it will probably be tedious to support ~26 languages or whatever the count we have currently in QGIS.ORG. If anyone wants edit rights to tweak and improve what you see in the lessons app, just pop me a note and I will give you the needed access.

I hope that gives a better background, and thanks to Etienne Trimaille, Ismail Sunni, Rohmat Muhammad, Alison Mukoma and Anita Hapsari who are great examples of people that you may not have heard of who are working away to make cool stuff for QGIS :-)

Regards

Tim

> 
> Regards,
> Harrissou
>> Wow, that is looking good! It would be great to advertise this more!
>> 
>> 
> 
> We should probably link it from https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/index.html <https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/index.html>
>> 
>>> 
>>> SSL is on our roadmap for projecta,
>>> 
>>> We are also going to be rebranding it soon as http://prj.app <http://prj.app/> (nothing to see there yet) with an on ramping process to make it easy for new projects to sign up.
>>> 
>>> We would be happy to tweak things to include custom domain support for other parts of the app e.g. http://lessons.qgis.org <http://lessons.qgis.org/>. There are also other interesting things that we built on the platform that never really got used - especially the quorum tool which lets you form teams in a project, make and record decisions (pre-dated loomio) and has a concencus model built in.
>>> 
>>> For QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> I would suggest to generally keep things as you have it - pull static content onto the site and use projecta as backend where you prepare content. It is a ‘safe’ way to manage things since once content is static, there isnt much that can go wrong and we trade a few moving parts in the content preparation phase for basically no moving parts in the content delivery stage.
>> Cool, not much to add from my side. I'm generally happy with the process as long as a visitor can easily see where the "authoritative" version is located and whenever the "authoritative" version of a framework is on prj.app it appears trustworthy for a visitor.
> 
> Agreed that would be nice.
> 
>>> 
>>> Hope that sheds some light on the big picture view of things from project’s side - and hopefully those with other published software will consider using Prj.app in the future to benefit from all the stuff we have built for QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> and to help support us in maintaining the platform….
>> It does, this platform has a big potential for QGIS but also for other projects.
>> 
>> 
> 
> Thanks Matthias.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Tim
> 
>> Best regards
>> 
>> Matthias
>> 
> 
> —
> 
> 
> <KartozaNewLogoThumbnail.jpg>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Tim Sutton
> 
> Co-founder: Kartoza
> Ex Project chair: QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/>
> 
> Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:
> 
> Desktop GIS programming services
> Geospatial web development
> GIS Training
> Consulting Services
> 
> Skype: timlinux
> IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net <http://freenode.net/>
> 
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—

Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:

Desktop GIS programming services
Geospatial web development
GIS Training
Consulting Services

Skype: timlinux
IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net

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