State of Webcraft: Webmaking 101


101
(Photo CC-BY-NC-SA rgourley)

NOTE: We need your help, find ways to get involved at the end of this post.

It’s been an exciting year for School of Webcraft. Starting with Mashing Up the Open Web the community has rallied to offer over twenty different courses ranging from Introduction to Ruby on Rails to HTML5. We have shown that there is demand for a better way to learn web development. Thousands have joined courses and we’ve heard many interesting success stories. We’ve learned a ton from our experience and are kicking into high gear with a revised plan.

School of Webcraft started as an experiment, we tested our ideas and learned from mistakes. Drawing from our experience we’ve decided to refine our offer and ask with the goal of lowering the barrier to entry. We want to make it immediately clear how Webcraft works and get people started without a huge time commitment.

The Offer

  • Learn web development by completing challenges. Build useful things, develop a portfolio of projects, get help and recognition.

The Ask

  • Create a challenge that helps people learn by doing.
  • Become a volunteer mentor and help new developers.

How it Works

We’re trying to make the offering much more straight-forward. We are currently designing a set of challenges that take you through the first steps of Webmaking 101. We’re removing the application process, scheduling restrictions, and the requirement to join a group. But don’t worry, you’ll still be able to get help from your peers, in new and improved ways. We’re adding a mentorship feature so that participants can get one-on-one help. Once you’ve completed a task, you are invited to “adopt” it – which means helping those who come after you, in case they get stuck or have questions.

We’re working on a set of example challenges now but down the road we’ll open up the ability for users to create new challenges.

Get Involved

  • Mentor – Offer help to people working on Webmaking 101.
  • Test Challenges – Complete early versions of our new challenges and give us feedback to help improve.


About School of Webcraft
Learn web development for free, get help from your peers, and earn recognition for your skills. School of Webcraft is a partnership between P2PU and Mozilla.



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