Learning Area documentation status

This page tries to track ongoing documentation work in the MDN Learn section.

Summary

See also localization status of this section.

No tags

Found 3 pages. Learn more about how to tag pages.

Needs* tags

Found 22 pages. Learn more about how to deal with meta-tags.

Missing tags

At least missing one of the following: Navigation, WebMechanics, Search, Credibility, Security, Composing, Remixing, Design, Accessibility, CodingScripting, Infrastructure, Sharing, Collaborating, Community, Privacy, OpenPractices, junk, Index, MDN

Found 69 pages. Learn more about how to tag pages.

Editorial reviews

Found 15 pages. Learn more about how to do an editorial review.

Technical reviews

Found 14 pages. Learn more about how to do a technical review.

Outdated pages

Found 50 pages. These pages haven't been updated in over a year. Outdated pages can have problems with both content and format. Look at these pages and consider: Is this page talking about the Web of today? Does it look consistent with newer pages in this topic area? If not, make any needed changes.

Documentation requests

Found 10 bugs. Documentation request bugs can contain various kinds work related to MDN pages. Read through the bug and ask questions in the bug if in doubt.

Browse as bug list.

Localizations

Please help us to localize this documentation into different languages. Read more about how to translate.

How to contribute

The learning area on MDN is brand new and offer a lot of opportunities for contribution from small tasks to large ones. Here's a list of all what you can do to help.

Writing learning articles

Expected time: A few hours

This is the core of the Learning Area. Those article are self teaching material which details a given skills to learn. A learning article focus on a single topic to learn and follow a strict structure which include. Read "Write an article to help learn about the Web" to learn how to structure such an article.

As an example, you can be inspired by the "Understanding URLs and their structure" article. See the Writing priorities section to know what is needed.

Creating "Active learning" material

Expected time: A few days

A TextBook article always need to be linked to some Active Learning materials. Those are projects, exercises, interactive code samples or everything that allows the reader to interact with a topic details into a TextBook. Such learning material is as important as any TextBook.

To create such Active Learning material, you are free to use any tools you wish. Nonetheless we strongly encourage you to use the WebMaker tools (especially Thimble) to do so as it provides various features very helpful for beginners and allows anyone to remix any content to learn from.

Creating learning pathways

Expected time: From a few hours to a few days

We also call them "learning tutorials". A learning pathways, explain how to complete a task and will link to all the necessary TextBook articles. As it is a pathways, it will also tell in which order the various TextBook need to be read to be able to complete the task. This is the backbone of the Learning Area as it provides guidance on what to learn first to do something.

Improve the glossary

Expected time: From a few minutes to a few hours

Our glossary is one of the key element for the Learning Area, see its dedicated doc status page for details on how to contribute.

Handle tagging

Expected time: From a few minutes to a few hours

Tagging is very important on the Learning Area. We should not have pages without tags. At minimum, a page in the Learning Area should have two tags:

• All pages must be tagged with a skill level: Beginner, Average or Advanced

Making editorial and technical review is also important. Remember that it's more important to be understood than to be technically perfect.

Get involved

Want to do more? Great, any one who wants to get involved with this project is welcome. Everything is discussed directly on MDN discussion forum.

Chris Mills is the resource leading this project; feel free to contact him with any questions. He's available, for sure, on IRC  (UK time) on the various MDN channels (#mdn, #mdndev) and more.

Team

• chrisdavidmills: Project leader.
• klez: Glossary topic driver

Goals

The overall goals of the project are:

• 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.

Success 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. For 2015, we expect to get 580 000 unique visitors to our Learn zone and Glossary by the end of the year.
• 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.

In addition, we should try to gather direct feedback on the improvements which are to be made.

Current available metrics are available on WikiMo.

Project status

2014 Archives

• 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: File:Learnin-area-survey-2014.pdf
• Inventory MDN content for beginners, intermediate, and advanced users (considered done even if it will be subject to change)
• Planning meeting with the WebMaker team on May 28/29
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Learning_Area/mdn-webmaker-june
• 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
  • Mock up for a possible Learning Zone landing page: https://moqups.com/JeremiPat/9MbRALc2
• Sort out the results of the code sample survey
  • Results: Media:Code-samples-survey-results.pdf
  • Raw data are available on Google Drive
• Set up the Documentation status page for the Learning Zone

Status reports

• 01/20/2014
• 02/07/2014
• 03/14/2014
• 04/08/2014

References

• 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.
  • Definition of HTML tag by WebMaker: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/simple-mdn
• 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
• Learning pathway
  • http://www.bentobox.io/

Existing third party content

These web sites are potential sources of inspiration when creating content for new Web developers.

• English
  • 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)
  • Very cool interactive videos (wich use of the full potential of the web platform)
    • http://hello.p5js.org
    • http://hello.processing.org
• French
  • http://fr.openclassrooms.com/
  • http://www.alsacreations.com/tutoriels/