In traditional trainings, students watch a trainer lecture for the bulk of the training, during which some students will get lost, some get bored because they're already familiar with the material, and most will simply not be able to stay focused on a trainer speaking for long periods of time.
There are numerous educational initiatives around the world addressing the problem with this model in various ways. You may have heard of the Flipped Classroom model, for example, which has been popularized by the Khan Academy. The Mentored Training model is rooted in this kind of approach, where we use recorded lectures and let students work through them on their own time. This particular model is unique in that students actually watch the videos in the classroom, where there are multiple trainers available to help answer questions or guide students when they get stuck.
There are numerous ways in which this model beats out the traditional training model:
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Students get to work at their own pace. They can re-watch material they didn't get the first time around, and forge ahead to advanced subjects as soon as they're ready.
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Because the trainers aren't stuck at the front of the classroom, they're available 100% of the time to help students with questions.
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Trainer preparation is minimal since there's no memorization or presentations required.
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Because there is no single overwhelming voice that students have to pay attention to, they are free to interact with one another, asking questions, discussing problems and enhancing their network.
We will give each student a free 8-day pass to the full BuildAModule video library, which includes videos to help build both basic and advanced Drupal skills so you can continue working after the training.
Learning Objectives
Learning objectives are up to the individual student. We suggest that you come in with a goal of learning a particular topic instead of skipping around the coursework. Take a look at the video collections at BuildAModule.com.
Prerequisites
Please bring your own laptop and headphones so you can listen to the videos on your own. To get the most out of the training, we would like you to have a local development environment to play with. You can watch the introduction videos for free to prepare.
Instructors
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John Rearick is a web developer for Iowa State University. He has been using Drupal over 4 years as a site builder and light module development. He is a community organizer for the Central Iowa Drupal Users group and is involived in planning DrupalCorn Camp for the last 3 years. John has put on the BuildAModule training the last two years at DrupalCorn.
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Genevieve Johnson has been working with Drupal for about 3 years as a site builder, custom module developer and themer. She enjoys an active role in the Drupal community, regularly submitting patches for contrib modules, maintaining/co-maintaining multiple projects on drupal.org, and helping organize the University of Iowa Drupal User Group and DrupalCorn Camp 2014.
Cost
