#2847 - Training through private institutes (on hold)

Notes from discussion with Rajesh...

Clear PPT presentation - keep tuning it
Pilot in local town; roll out to franchises across India to multiply the number of students up
Offer for completely free at first, do with a signup fee for smaller ones once it's tested and proven (we can show them real results from past students)
List official training institutions on our website - so that they feel official and secure
Make the learning materials private, copyrighted only available to the institutions that are in the programme - "
Provide course materials - Chris will need to do, or maybe Patrick
Grading scheme
We can give someone like a gold rating on our website as well as just helping people get graded. They can be listed in the partner directory with that as a marker for them
Rajesh can beta test the course
Provide an FAQ of trainer questions
Have basic email support for trainers, so long as they read the FAQ first
Students need to contribute a Composr addon at the end of their course to pass
Potential for multiple programmes, e.g. PHP, themeing - some more exclusive with higher fee
Program only in English - we can say that they may do their own translations if they wish
Get Manoj to design a nice cover to the materials, so it looks great when printed and bound
We can supply printed and bound for a fee, covering Rajesh's time arranging it, for it to be done via a professional printing company, and delivered, plus a reasonable fee to cover unexpected costs and risks
Have a demo bound copy for Rajesh
Terms and conditions for the program, all materials developed during course should be dual copyright between student, institution, and ocProducts
We are creating a new market here for low-cost but high-quality CMS/PHP training; we can 'sell' the benefits of working in an industry where there are high salaries and not enough workers
We are also increasing our own user base, which is our primary aim - ultimately the program should be self-funding, but also helping Composr
We can approach students for selling additional materials if they've done particularly well on the course and create an eCommerce marketplace for them to do that


I'm actually very excited about this training programme. I think it'll be a great way to create growth for Composr. It can also tie in with our Patreon intentions, if we are focusing on not-for-profit training in developing countries. I think a lot of people would be happy to donate money to further Composr development if that's how we present ourselves.

I think it's a lot more fulfilling than just doing individual projects, it's more meaningful, feels like we're making the world better in a bigger way

Rajesh will be rewriting this issue with a lot more discussion we've had. It needs to be comprehensive so we keep track of everything. Further notes from me to incorporate...

The course will be available in multiple ways:
- Developing countries, where we give the course free to training institutions
- Potentially sold to training institutions worldwide (there seems good potential for working directly with government organisations, as this is promoting filling important skill-gaps and is very affordable and practical for people)
- Fully online, where we sell access to the course
- Free to anyone who has done over £1500 in business with us (for 1 person per £1500 in business); this includes feature sponsorship
- Free to anyone who has accumulated a certain number of points on compo.sr (i.e. so we can reward community contributors) [the contribute page will need updating to mention this contribution benefit]
- One module will be provided for free as a demo

We will aim to make the course financially profitable in the developed world, and a marketing and goodwill project in the developing world. It'll all be the same course though.

As the course produces a profit we can potentially directly advertise it, e.g. using Google Adwords, using adverts in business magazines.

We can run parallel with #1177, with prioritising producing response tutorial videos to members on the scheme, but also advertising the scheme at the end of each video.

We need to produce materials to help the third-party training institutions market the programme:
- Presentation for why developers benefit from the programme
- Presentation on how the programme works
- Direct advertising material that highlights the key benefits (e.g. training people for where there is a skill shortage)

As well as directly promoting the programme:
- As a part of our website
- With our partner presentation (what Rajesh and Manoj have already been working on)
- 'Success' videos, recorded with students

We want to make this a really good online course, so we will produce:
- Course materials, each module containing:
- a video
- written text
- a summary
- an automated online test
- using the Composr quiz system. The tests can only be re-done once a week (for example - to determine later)
- a practical task
- Private discussion forum for students
- A link to view each video on YouTube (useful for people who love to queue stuff up on YouTube); unlisted videos only
- A section to see student grades on profiles (private only to the student, staff, and trainers)
- Automatic system to tell us when a student passes/fails
- Automatic inclusion of certificate badges in student profiles if they pass (visible by all), and placing them in a certified user group
- Some kind of guidance/automation for setting up free web hosting
- On Heroku free tier
- With Composr installed
- With a good online IDE installed: http://codiad.com/
- Private discussion forum for trainers
- Online FAQ for trainers

To make the first modules we will see if we can find some public domain materials to help us along, as writing a full HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP course seems a waste of time, many will already exist. We'll of course have to restructure it all, with our extra tests, videos, etc.

We need to formally write up terms and conditions. These are ones I already know:
- Material is copyright to ocProducts
- You can not share the material with any third parties unless you have direct permission from ocProducts
- Even if that is just linking to the unlisted YouTube videos

Potential for multiple courses. Details still to be determined. Each course would be sold separately, but there'd probably be access to all other courses once a student has paid say $500 in other courses (i.e. there's a ceiling price to access everything).

I think we can price it around $200 per course. We can also do special offers occasionally.

Some quick googling around found these...

Treehouse: $250/year
Code academy $250/year
Khan Academy free
https://www.sololearn.com/Course/PHP/ free
https://www.webucator.com/webdev-training/index.cfm
http://www.siliconindia.com/online_courses/php_tutorial-cid-6.html
http://www.expertrating.com/certifications/Instructorled/Web-And-Computer-Programming/PHP-and-MySQL-Intermediate/PHP-and-MySQL-Intermediate.asp
http://www.zend.com/en/services/training
http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/php/php.html
http://coursesweb.net/php-mysql/
EDX: Free

There are also loads of tutorials out there, including sites aggregating them - but those don't fall into neat courses.

Update...

Training institute partnership:

Blue Horizon, a training institute in Kochi is one of the popular institute among student for learning PHP. A 3 month course on PHP programming cost INR 28000 (roughly $411). Blue Horizon is located in Kochi city.

Course contents, http://www.awesomecoders.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Awesome-Coders-Training-Syllabus.pdf

Key challenges shared by training institutes visited earlier are, faculty availablity, faculty skill and Composr market demand. Video tutorial for course materials is considered as the solution for these challenges.

At present steps are taken to meet town based training institutes, Datatec (http://www.datatec.in/) and Orbit Online (http://www.orbitonline.in/) for partnership.

Training institute partnership task is on going.


Course contents:

Following is the proposed course contents. This is not final and subject to revision:

Semester I
Introduction to PHP
Basic PHP
Introduction to HTML and CSS
Working with PHP and MySQL
Coding Standards
A project work based on semester I contents
Training institute test for semester I (Qualified students will move to Semester II)

Semester II
Introduction to Composr
Composr Architecture
Understanding Composr
e-commerce
Banners
Theme
Add on

A project work based on semester II contents (For example, building a live site using Composr, creating a theme for Composr and creating an add-on for Composr etc.)

Training institute test for semester II (Qualified students will be eligible for Composr certification)

Semester III
Composr certification test
Certification and Grade to eligible students

Video tutorials:

Create video tutorial and upload to official YouTube channel and share the same video as part for course material. Use of video tutorial in training program will reduce faculty dependency.