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Report from the Front Lines: Free Drupal Training Day in Los Angeles

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At the end of 2011, we were excited to hear that the Drupal Association was planning a series of global training days, when high-quality Drupal workshops would be scheduled all around the world and all on the same day. We believe 100% in this initiative and talked with Jacob Redding, the Executive Director at the Drupal Association, about how to bring it to Los Angeles. We quickly settled on some common goals, including how to work together to promote Drupal to as many newcomers as possible.

Everything was moving forward until we learned that one of the key pieces of the Drupal Association’s strategy is that Exaltation of Larks and other Drupal companies with well-developed training programs were being asked to produce these trainings at low- or no-cost to attendees. This one had us at a loss — literally! — and had us wondering how to sustain the growth of our training program without sapping resources from our consulting and development divisions, not to mention the attendance at our upcoming paid trainings.

One of the things we enjoy the most is a good challenge, and we immediately started coming up with ideas to make it work with our training program’s existing costs and our dedication to quality. In the end, we succeeded on all counts with two parts planning and one part luck.

We were lucky because we have a great training venue at Droplabs, a Drupal-friendly coworking space in Los Angeles that a few of the Larks and other entrepreneurs founded last year and that many of the Larks work out of. One of the events that Droplabs hosts is Drupal Coworking Friday, a free coworking day on the last Friday of every month — which coincided this time with the Drupal Association’s global training day.

With the potential for cross-promotion with Droplabs and the local Downtown Los Angeles Drupal user group, we went ahead and scheduled our Introduction to Drupal workshop. This was a lunch and learn-style workshop and providing lunch was the only hard cost that we had associated with the event.

We usually go through a large marketing and production process for our trainings, but this time we didn’t buy ads or book a large venue. Instead, we liberally borrowed parts of some of our favorite presentations and workshops that we’ve done many, many times: an introduction to databases and queries, sections from our Drupal Fundamentals course, and questions and answers about web hosting and the Drupal community.

What We Covered

  • When and why to use Drupal
  • Considerations when starting a Drupal project and how to organize a project
  • The basics of Drupal, from content management to membership (“user”) management
  • An introduction to databases and queries
  • How to organize a site using Drupal content types, Taxonomy and Views
  • How to turn ideas for features and functionality into achievable tasks using user stories and use cases
  • Which tasks are crucial for a successful Drupal website and how to organize them
  • How to choose the right Drupal version and modules for a project
  • The basics of web hosting and getting Drupal running on a local computer
  • How to connect with the Drupal community, its meetups, conferences and job fairs and online discussion forums and chat rooms

What We Learned

The best learning experiences are where everyone learns something, including the instructors. Here’s what we learned by doing this format compared to our usual one- and multiple-day trainings:

  • Unlike our other courses, which have clear prerequisites and a “ladder” structure, this workshop is going to be different every time depending on the number of attendees and their range of technical expertise. We can’t assume anything about what students do or don’t know.
  • This isn’t a “deep dive” workshop and it’s important that the entire class shares the same overview and moves forward together. We tried to avoid getting sucked into Drupal’s details, like technical recipes for specific functionality such as galleries, content workflows for newspapers, etc.
  • This is a 3-hour workshop. We’d originally planned this workshop to be 2 hours and that wasn’t enough time to touch on some more advanced topics that some of the attendees asked about toward the end of the workshop. Our group was yearning for information and all but 2 attendees stayed for nearly 3 full hours.
  • Everyone likes to have fun when they’re learning, and learning Drupal is no exception. You never know when the “aha” moment will be. When it presents itself, grab it and run!

Although the workshop “sold out” and all the seats were technically reserved, there were a few no-shows. We always expect this to happen with low- and no-cost events, but we didn’t expect those available seats to be immediately filled by walk-ins and people who were attending Drupal Coworking Friday but hadn’t heard about the workshop.

Our experience was so positive that we immediately added it to our list of available courses. Not only are we planning to offer this workshop again, we’re going to do it every month! We’ve already scheduled the next one for March 30, 2012, which happens to be another Drupal Coworking Friday.

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