How the curriculum works - problem analysis and proposed solution

[Dedekind561]

What problems are we currently observing?

#88
#86
#80
#78

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Why is it worth addressing these problems?

Getting new members of our community to understand how to use the curriculum is enormously important. It will enable us to setup new cohorts more efficiently and help us to scale faster.

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What were the previous approaches?

• Documentation like this: https://docs.codeyourfuture.io/leaders/running-the-course/running-a-course
• On-demand training sessions for teacher training in various regions.

[Dedekind561]

Why were they ineffective?

• People don't read documentation when they join the community (if ever!)
• Documentation is out of date/wrong
• Documentation refers to roles which are inconsistent between regions
• On-demand training sessions create a staff dependency
• Insufficient focus on community autonomy as a goal of CYF

[Dedekind561]

What is causing these problems?

The curriculum is a complex object. Its complexity arises as it endeavours to support new communities in solving several hard problems. In particular, we use the community uses the curriculum to:

• self educate
• self coordinate
• self evaluate

The self part here is critical. Our ultimate goal is to develop autonomous communities that can learn, plan and check their progress with as minimal staff support as possible. Everything we develop in our curriculum is done at the service of achieving these goals. At the moment, we don't communicate this information effectively, which explains in part why it is difficult to make sense of our curriculum.

[Dedekind561]

What does the solution look like?

We need a module built into the curriculum that educates new people in how to use the curriculum.
This module addresses how we self educate, self coordinate, self evaluate.

Here is an idea of what it might look like: https://deploy-preview-617--cyf-curriculum.netlify.app/how-the-curriculum-works/

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What are the constraints?

• No staff bottlenecks/dependencies. The solution shouldn't need staff from tech-ed to deliver this content. It is self-educating content.
• No duplication of documentation. This module shouldn't duplicate content that exists in the documentation.
• No coupling to Fundamentals. This educational content may need to be reused/resurfaced in Fundamentals or DLP so it shouldn't be coupled to a module like Fundamentals.

[Dedekind561]

Why is this solution better?

Async delivery

New volunteers can do this module whenever they join CYF. It won't need a staff member to deliver it.

Resuability by volunteers with different level of context

This content can be used by new volunteers and by cohort founders.

Reusability across the curriculum platform

Any content developed in this module can be reused in other curriculum modules like Fundamentals where it needs to be reinforced but without duplicating the source content itself e.g. content from How the curriculum works module can be reused in

Immediate community engagement

We can design this module to ensure that new community members go to the community self to ask questions, check key information and orient themselves properly.

[Dedekind561]

How can we break this down?

We will break this module down section-by-section using milestones on the curriculum planning board.

See here for an example milestone with some of the success criteria for this piece of work: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/milestone/14