Shelley Keith

As part of the WPMU implentation I’ve been working on for a year now, it’s time to start training my content contributors (“content managers”? I haven’t come up with the right title for these departmental “please take this responsibility off my plate” types). Simply giving faculty and staff basic software training and sending them on their way would be catastrophic, hence a (hopefully) well-rounded 4 hour training session that includes some elementary yet essential content tips and an overview of 508 and W3C before giving them the power to change a single character of text. The expectation is to offer this comprehensive training on a twice/year basis and provide one-hour lunchtime sessions on specific topics throughout the semester, as well as make refresher materials available online through my department site.

I’ve coordinated training with both our HR department to be counted as staff development, and through our Continuing Education department who will be issuing CEU credits. As such I feel the need to have some sort of assessment in place to gauge the success of the training, beyond just a session evaluation. If anyone has any ideas about assessing this kind of training, I’d love to hear it.

For this first round of training I have a wingman, Brent Passmore (@bpmore) from University of Central Arkansas. Brent has graciously agreed to dedicate some of his post-baby paternity leave time to my little project. Props.

Overview: Four-hour training session for faculty and staff who will be responsible for managing departmental Web content. Sessions will be presented with the aid of step-by-step video and hands-on examples.

Training Outline

1. Content
   1. Evaluate
   2. Generate – Writing for the Web
   3. Review
2. The WHY
   1. Section 508 and Web accessibility
   2. Browser Compatibility
3. WPMU
   1. Posts vs. Pages: What’s the difference?
   2. The Admin Interface
   3. Managing Posts & Pages
   4. Media for your site
      1. The media library
      2. Adding images and files to your posts and pages
      3. Flickr options
   5. Links, Widgets & Sidebars
   6. Forms
   7. Your campus directory profile

Upcoming blog entries will outline in further detail the issues we’ll be touching on along with comprehensive resource listings for existing training materials and content guides. At the end I’ll post our slides and any supplementary materials we generate. Some of these items (like Flickr options, Forms, and the directory profile) are plugin specific and/or highly customized to our site and may not be relevant for you, but I’ll show how we’ll train for it anyway.

Training is scheduled for February 3, 2010.