MDN/Archives/Projects/Content/Learning Area

MDN is a well known resource for average and advance users but we are still failing to address beginners needs. W3School and other similar web sites remain a place of choice for them, even if they are flawed. As we have the row material, now we need to turn it into something more appealing for beginners. Organizing the current content and writing the missing parts will be the biggest part of that project.

Goals

In a more detailed fashion, this project tend to cover the following goals:

• Improve the discoverability of beginner contents: We have some existing contents but it is pretty hard to find. We need to organize it in a better way for beginners.
• Improve the quantity of beginner contents: While writing we mainly focus on average and advanced users. As a consequence, we lack some serious beginner oriented contents. We need to write those missing contents and organize them with the existing contents to make easier for everybody to access and contribute to them.
• Improve the quality of beginner contents: Still, we have some existing content for beginners but we need to organize it, complete it and make it more appealing.
• Make sure beginners are taught well during their journey to the Web: MDN is not the only resource out there to learn the Web. Beyond our own contents, it's part of the Mozilla mission to help discover and found useful good resources to learn about the web.

Related metrics

In order to get some rational measurement about the success of our actions, the following metrics are suggested:

• Measure the increase number of unique visitors on beginner contents:
  That would be a good sign that our beginner contents is easier to reach.
• Measure the increase number of returning visitors on beginner contents:
  That would be a good sign that the beginners content is appealing for them.
• Measure the increase of time per page on the beginners content:
  That would be a sign that more beginners read and learn from that content.
• Measure the decrease of bounce rate on the beginners content:
  That would be a sign that more beginners read and learn more from content on MDN
• Measure bounce to third party resources we selected:
  That would be the sign that more users trust MDN as a reliable source of information regarding third party content.
• Measure the increase of incoming links to MDN beginner contents:
  That would be the sign that MDN is considered as a trustable resource for beginners.

Extra point:

• Try to gather some direct feedback about the improvement which will be made.

NOTE: This project is action driven rather than time driven. It means that we do whatever is needed to reach our goals, whatever the time it requires. However, in order to not to be swamped into an endless project, we try to cut into small actionable steps that allows to measure progress as often as possible.

Critical path

To ensure the success of the project, the following schema detailed its critical path in term of actions.

Critical path

It can be summarize as follow:

1. Identify what's missing to MDN to make it suitable for beginners
2. Inventory existing content available for beginners on MDN
3. Organize content
4. Write missing material and build missing features

Aside ideas

The following ideas are not critical for the project but could be some very nice enhancements.

• Add a "search per level" option on our search engine

Get involved

Any one who wish to get involved with this project is welcome. This page will provide information about the project and its progress. Everything is discuss directly on the dev-mdc mailing list. Schedule and progress are summarized on the the mdn-drivers mailing list.

Jeremie is the resource leading that project, feel free to contact him for any question. He's available, for sure, on IRC every Monday (European time) on the various MDN Chanel (#mdn, #devmo, #mdndev) and more.

Current progress

In progress

• Define how to structure beginner content
  • Results of the "Tree of knowledge" workshop during the MDN Work week-end on March 2014
  • It will help to tag content with http://goo.gl/vpxkP1 (Webmaker FTW)
  • Draft plan is: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/learning-area-structure

Next steps

• Create a learning "Zone" on MDN
• Start writing content
  • Set up a streamline glossary
  • Set up an FAQ section on MDN
  • Set up a resources page

Done

• Kick off
• Creating a survey about MDN and third party web sites for beginners
• Gathering initial feedback (We must do things with the webmaker team)
• Spreading the survey (dev-mdc dev-mdn, education, webmaker, engagement-developers, mozillan, reps-general)
• synthesize the survey and the raw feedback
• Spread the survey results
• Inventory MDN content for beginners, intermediate, and advanced users (considered done even if it will be subject to change)

Status reports

• 01/20/2014
• 02/07/2014
• 03/14/2014

Useful resources

• The legacy learning area (pre redesign): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/learn
• Chris Mills awesome work:
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Development/Beginners_MDN_material
  • http://people.mozilla.org/~cmills/coding-beginners/
• Notes from MozFest 2013: https://teach.etherpad.mozilla.org/scrum7-future?
• WebMaker project info:
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning/WebLiteracyStandard
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/Roadmap
  • https://webmaker.org/standard
  • NOTE: This project is a complement to the webmaker initiative, not a competitor. It can be considered as a concrete implementation of some of the webmaker ideas. Due to its nature MDN will focus on the following skills define by the Web Literacy Standard: Web Mechanics, Composing for the Web, Design and Accessibility, Coding/scripting, and Infrastructure.
• Pamela Fox at dotJS 2013 about "Making JavaScript more learnable": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JdS5RHGroQ
• The Opera Curriculum
  • On the W3C Wiki: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page
  • On Webplaform.org: http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/html/tutorials

Web sites made for beginners

The following web sites are sources of inspiration for the current work

English speaking resources

• http://www.w3schools.com
• http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/web
• http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/
• http://learn.shayhowe.com/
• https://www.codeschool.com
• https://www.learnstreet.com
• http://www.codeavengers.com
• https://www.khanacademy.org (not web related but good ideas for inspiration)

French speaking resources

• http://fr.openclassrooms.com/
• http://www.alsacreations.com/tutoriels/