Community Authoring and Identified Opportunities
Having taken a week off to relax around Thanksgiving and finish up the final project for my class in Research Strategies and Methodologies, I am back and rested and ready for…..more of the holidays!
First up, an update on the MCT Summits: it looks like I will be unable to attend the Summit in Prague (and I had already purchased my Prague street map and a Czech phrasebook, too…..), but will be onboard at the Summit in Redmond (January 21-23). If you haven’t made your plans yet, rush to the site and let us know that you’re coming. It will be a terrific event, plenty of technical sessions, lots of networking and catching up with colleagues, and several sessions on joining the rapidly growing Authoring Community (not to mention Technical Reviewers, Maintainers, and Localizers…more on those roles in a later post). Both Mark Shea and I will be on hand to answer your questions and sign you up.
Some of the questions that have come up are, “How can I find out about upcoming authoring opportunities? Are they posted anywhere?” Yes, they are. On the Microsoft Learning Courseware Library site’s “Submit a Course” page there is a grid entitled “Courseware Submission Opportunities”, what I like to call Identified Opportunities. When our product planners work through the coverage needed for a training portfolio, a number of titles are proposed. Some may be built by Microsoft Learning, but the rest, perhaps more solution-focused, more advanced, more niche (if you will…) are noted as desirable to complete the overall learning portfolio for training. You see, some of the challenges we have around creating training for Microsoft products are (a) there are so many of them, and (b) there will inevitably be gaps in the coverage for products that Microsoft Learning produces. This is where the community really shines.
The members of the community go face-to-face with their customers daily. They know the challenges and the need for training, and most of the community members who train step up and augment existing Official Microsoft Learning Products (OMLP) or, if there are none, create courseware because their customers need it. Anyway, without going into a deeper discussion, the Identified Opportunities are the courses that we at Microsoft Learning recognize as gaps, so we advertise the gaps. The length of the courses listed on the grid are merely suggestions….there is no requirement to create a 2-day course if a community member feels that a 3- or 5-day course would be more appropriate. If you see something up there that you are interested in creating, or have already created, let me know.
