Learning/Networks/Product-Roadmap

Mozilla Learning Product Roadmap

Purpose

The Mozilla Learning product exists to support members of the Learning Networks community. To that end, the products should:

• Provide entry points to our on-the-ground programs, and clear pathways for engagement
• Draw people in by telling an accessible story about connected learning, web literacy, and digital skills (and provide access to wonky stuff for those who want it)
• Offer individuals and institutions a clear value proposition related to leadership development, community engagement, and reputation
• Facilitate self-organization of local communities
• Distribute good ideas and OER across the network, using both push and pull methods
• Serve as a hub for professional development and credentialing for self-identified mentors, including those affiliated with partner organizations

Additionally, the product will serve the following strategic (and measurable) goals:

• Acquisition: Attract new mentors, generate interest in new Maker Parties, Clubs and Hives
• Retention: Provide pathways for sustained involvement, whether through regular involvement in intermittent campaigns, or ongoing engagement via increasingly deeper commitments
• Activation: Provide channels for communicating Mozilla-level initiatives and campaigns to a broad audience
• Community engagement: Inspire community members to create, remix, and otherwise engage with content and with each other, as well as self-organize into peer groups

Audience

The primary audience is people who self-identify as a “teacher” or “mentor” or “educator” and who want to teach web literacy.

They are likely to discover the site via previous knowledge of the existing Learning Networks programs, a connection to one of our partner orgs, word of mouth, or a CTA from Webmaker.org.

Many will have regular access to a group of learners, and will be looking for content and perhaps professional development resources. For them, we offer the social model of Clubs; a high-quality curriculum and complementary badging pathways; training; and access to our community.

A smaller group will not have regular access to learners, but will be interested in becoming mentors. For them, we offer a contributor pathway that starts with basic skill-sharing, moves through the heavier lift of the Maker Party model, and then up through the Clubs model and even Hive; offering skill-advancement and community-building opportunities along the way. We use contributor badges to guide these mentors through the engagement ladder.

Value Propositions

• Content: access to world class curriculum and resources
• Community: access to community support and mechanisms for self-organizing
• Credentialing: homebase for managing professional development in this area

Technical Requirements

• mobile-friendly
• localisable
• key content must be easily editable by non-technical staff

Proposed Roadmap

v 1.0: Here’s Some Stuff! (Heartbeats: February 13, February 27, March 13, March 27)

• implement IA that supports major use cases and workflows (see http://mzl.la/1IP6chM)
• develop/consolidate new content and copy
• build out tooling for staff to easily edit featured content
• gallery of curriculum
• link to discourse
• training calendar integration (gCal?)
• create Clubs/Hives database (allow users to add their basic Club/Hive information including location and url)
• map of Clubs/Hives
• authentication (using Webmaker login) - allow users to self-designate as a Mentor

v1.1: Badges 2: Electric Boogaloo (Heartbeats: April 10, April 24)

• Clearly present our badge offerings and highlight learning pathways
  • We'll build a landing page that showcases the Webmaker badge offerings and clearly differentiates the several types of badges we offer. The landing page should also illustrate the progressive nature of our badge offerings.

• Improve user experience for badge earners
  • We'll make a few key improvements to the badge application workflow, including allowing applicants to view the status of their pending applications, and edit their submissions while they're pending.
  • We'll create a Badge Manager page for mentors and learners. From the Badge Manager page, people will be able to:
    • see the badges they've earned, including the evidence that was provided
    • see their pending applications, and respond to any questions from reviewers

• Improve user experience for badge issuers
  • We'll also make some improvements to the badge issuing dashboard:
    • Show counts of outstanding applications, and provide multiple views of outstanding applications (e.g. by submission date, by badge type)
    • Provide search tool for issued badges, with criteria such as issue date, badge type, or reviewer (the search results will be exportable, enabling us to contact everyone who's received a certain badge, for example)
  • We'll improve the design of the application reviewer pane by including (in addition to the applicant-provided evidence):
    • badge criteria
    • information about the applicant, including other badges received/applied for

v1.2: Let’s Get (Self-)Organized! (heartbeats: May 8)

• Add the concept of connecting yourself to a Club (this is a necessary prerequisite for the “Badged Again!” work below)
• May also want to allow functionality for Club Captains to invite people to join their Clubs (if we’re okay with letting users send each other email through our system - Holy Blacklisting, Batman!)

v1.3: Badged Again! (heartbeats: May 22)

• Create concept of limited badge-issuing privileges
• Create interface for granting badge-issuing privileges to Club Captains. The permissions may be limited in two ways:
  • They'll be able to grant badges only to members of their Club (hence the need for creating connections between individuals and Clubs in the earlier iteration)
  • They may only be able to grant certain badges (TBD)

v1.4: Let’s Go Clubbing (heartbeats: June 5)

DEPENDENCY: During the Brooklyn workweek, we’ll make a decision about whether to implement an off-the-shelf solution at this time, or perhaps continue to build out some features on our own platform. Examples:

• Find people based on a set of criteria interesting to me (e.g. location, language, experience level, profession, interests) and organize into a group
• Organize around a specific project or campaign, maybe in a kickstarter-y way (where the currency is people, not $)
• [See http://mzl.la/1xZgfKQ for an in-depth discussion of the groups platform]

v1.5: The Badgening (heartbeats: June 19)

• More badge improvements!
  • Show users recommended badges (based on their previous earned badges and our pathways)
  • Allow users to share their earned badges, and invite others to also earn them
  • Allow badge issuers option to receive notifications or emails when new badge applications are submitted
  • Automatically grant certain badge-issuing privileges to users with the Super Mentor badge

v1.6 Curriculum Like Whoa

Stories may include:

• As a mentor I should be able to:
  • easily create beautiful activities and kits
  • find content that’s relevant to me (e.g. based on web lit competencies, age/grade appropriateness, author, skill level, duration, materials/hardware needed, group size, language, particular skills/coding languages, popularity, rating, freshness).
  • easily remix content (could include forking and/or commenting)
    • including l10n
  • group activities and kits into pathways and share those pathways with others
  • “manage” curriculum (could include a range of things, e.g: add/edit/delete, favorite, save drafts, add to a wishlist)
• As an admin, I should be able to:
  • curate curriculum (e.g. designate as “featured”, moderate inappropriate content [if that’s a need])

v1.7: Teach v2: A New Hope

• Make the Teach site even jazzier
  • Full Discourse integration
  • A blog? (+ a content strategy)
  • Ways to promote our projects and initiatives
  • [Needs determined by usage so far + agreed upon KPIs TBD]

v1.8 Got Training?

Stories may include:

• As a mentor, I should be able to:
  • independently go through a training program on my own time
  • participate in live training activities
  • be notified of upcoming trainings that are relevant to me
  • request specific trainings
  • participate in an online mentoring program

v1.9: Hive

[Placeholder for possible integration of hivelearningnetworks.org content into teach.webmaker.org, or perhaps just iterating on HLN.org. I have zero opinion on which is the best course right now, so I’m including this as a thing to think about.]

[Could also include an interactive re-packaging of the Hive Cookbook. Latest is here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/HiveCookbook]

v2.0: Maker Party and/or Events

[Placeholder for possible integration of add’l Maker Party content, not included at launch] [Placeholder for possible integration of Webmaker Events platform]