Open-Source Software Development Curriculum
Big news! We decided to open-source all of our content at Enki 🎉. There’s a slack dedicated to maintenance, planning, and new course development that you can join here. It’s licensed Creative Commons, so anyone (including you) can use it to teach others for free.
Why?
Enki is a large community. There are literally hundreds of thousands of developers participating by commenting, answering questions, asking questions, and most importantly, a large expert community pointing out where we could improve. Why not empower them to help us?
I personally have written curriculum for a number of organizations, and it seems to me that everyone is recreating the same content, over and over, and asking the same questions, over and over. When the open-source NodeSchool courses came out, organizations around the country were able to use it to rapidly train their developers for free, and schools teaching Node were able to focus on their students by having a set of exercises readily available. By providing the world with content that is maintained by the community, we’re helping everyone.
Education is not a zero-sum game. Learning happens in a number of environments and contexts, but every educator’s ultimate goal is that learning happens. What we’re seeking to do is build and iterate on a shared curriculum that anyone can use, and that everyone finds valuable. Our product will sit under that and provide what we hope to be the simplest and most effective process for you to use that content, and for teams to learn together.
Developers across the world disagree all the time on what is most relevant, what constitutes expert knowledge, and implementation detail. A single one-size-fits-all education for software is, in my opinion and experience, an impossible definition. Each role and task in each different geographic area requires a different set of skills and knowledge of different detail. Education doesn’t stop at some imaginary endpoint either, it continues on for one’s entire career.
Enki is a small team. We want to focus on building the best product possible, and we want to have content that’s engaging, fits in your life, is relevant to you personally, simple to understand, and is polished and free of errors. We can’t possibly represent a community of hundreds of thousands. Even if every Enki user ever paid us for our content, we couldn’t hope to represent the required knowledge of most of them- we would need an army of developers to research and write about what other developers need, and then maintain that content so that it is up-to-date.
That’s where you come in: we’re hoping you’ll help us build a free, open-source programming curriculum, and help keep it up to date- no one likes an old tutorial. We’re still investing in writing new content and courses by maintaining a team of content creators, but because we’re giving away the content for free, and encouraging educators to use our content, we’re hoping the community can come together to help polish and improve on what we have. Our team will mainly focus on creating the backbone and core content for new courses, as well as reviewing your pull requests and moderating the community. We also have an open-source content fellowship for those of you who want to work on your technical writing and education skills, and we’re looking for enthusiastic contributors to apply.
Writing a tutorial is a great way to interrogate your own learning, and we’ll be reviewing pull requests and giving feedback if you want to deepen your understanding of something by writing it up. Our team aims to provide some mentorship to new contributors to open source projects, so consider this another great way of committing to learning. If you’ve never committed to open source before, this is a great place to start. Your content will be reviewed by one of our experts before being added to the main curriculum.
We also hope to see other educators use, remix, and share this content, because we believe that everyone should have access to the most relevant skills of the next decade, and beyond. Feel free to use it at your meetup, code camp, or study group. Soon, we hope to release some tools that will make using it as a learning group even easier and more rewarding, so watch this space!
We’ve also licensed it CC-BY-NC-SA, which means you can totally use and build on it, but not use it as part of a product you intend to turn a profit on.
For example, this means you’re free to use it as an educator as part of your classes, even if you charge for them, but you can’t charge just for access to this content, or claim it as a monetary value-add for your product. Another example- if you’re a student and you need content for a programming-game-show app, you’re totally welcome to use the content, so long as your app doesn’t charge people money to see this content.
We aim for maximum community-building at Enki too, so the license is also ShareAlike. That means if you do build something on it, you have to share that thing as well. We have a Private Content for Teams feature available, but if you find yourself writing something that everyone could learn from, we’d really love to see it!
✨ 🤗 ✊ - LizTheDeveloper
