Training methodologies

Following are methodologies for various forms of Orchard training.

  • Remember that it's a good thing to have regular breaks about every 45 minutes.
  • Keep the time between explaining something new and demonstrating it short; i.e. if you explain something, show it.
  • After a session (lesson, tutorial video...) do a quick recap of what was covered: click through what was explained and briefly mention again if there is something to emphasize.

University course

Class work and examination

Lesson structure

Every lesson begins with a short warm-up task incorporating the topics of the previous lesson.

Lessons generally have repeated cycles of the following form:

  1. Presentation: the course leader explains the current topic (10-15 minutes), if the content is practical (like doing some dashboard work) students follow individually
  2. Group work

    • After hearing the presentation about how to solve a certain problem students are encouraged to try out the new techniques for given tasks in form of a group work. The task either
      • consists of the topic demonstrated before
      • or is something slightly new that can be derived from the demonstration or learned by reading a short documentation. The former one is a good choice if there is enough time, the latter one is efficient if there's only limited time available.
    • Groups of 2-3-4 try to solve a problem while the course leader is helping their work and is available for questions
  3. Evaluation of the group work: discussing common questions and issues

Examination

The course has no special examination, instead students should create and finish and Orchard-based web application project.

  • Students form teams of arbitrary size (it’s also possible to work alone)
  • Every team’s task is to create a real-world Orchard-based web application
  • There are no limitations or obligations to that, although the groups are encouraged to develop one custom module that uses existing Orchard features in a creative way but doesn’t replicate any built-in functionality
  • One student gives a presentation of the project after completing it with a maximal length of 5 minutes. The presentation should be a live demonstration of the web application. After the presentations the course leader has very brief code review sections with all of the other students were the students present a section of their software, demonstrating their understanding.

Schedule

Additional is the time needed for student presentations (depends on the number of attendees) since the course’s final lesson consists of student presentations and code reviews.

Intensive course

Since intensive courses should be tailored to the participants' needs the following points are just outlines and tips. Time constraint is also a factor that determines how in-depth the training can be, how many demonstrations can be carried out and how big is the part of the API that's only shown.

  • Live demonstration of the usage of Orchard APIs
  • Live demonstration of some inner workings with the debugger (e.g. demonstrating how the tree of shapes is built up)
  • Showing aspects of the Orchard API without running them just so participants can get to know what piece of API to look for when they want to achieve something (e.g. IStorageProvider is a good candidate: it's easy to use but one needs to know about it).
  • Few hour-long hackathon with a certain aim (e.g. to develop a module that's needed by the participants)
  • Code review: participants write some code on their own, then the trainer checks them and comments on them line by line with code review tools. Common mistakes can be discussed with the whole group.

This page is part of the Orchard Dojo Library!

This page and many others here are part of the open-source, portable package of Orchard 1.x goodies: the Orchard Dojo Library for Orchard 1.x. The Library is freely accessible by anyone; just go to its repository to download its full content (you can even download the textual content of the Library as a big concatenated document in HTML), file issues or fork it! You can even edit it online on Bitbucket, just click on the Edit link in the upper right corner!

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