[Beta] Test a new online learning course

I’m hoping some of you fine folks can spare a bit of time to check out a short online course I’ve put together, and share any feedback you have.

And not just feedback on the course, but also feedback on whether you think this would be a useful thing for us to pursue further.

https://learn.privacyguides.org/

The course is called Basics of Personal Threat Modeling and it more or less covers the first few pages of our knowledge base, nothing too exciting. I’m hopeful that we’ll have the opportunity to write more in-depth courses at some point.

You can share any thoughts here, or finish the survey on the course page after checking it out. You’ll need an account, but this is self-hosted/FOSS and not a third-party LMS provider.

Upon completion of the course you’ll also receive a digital badge and certificate, if you’re extrinsically motivated :wink:

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Why can’t I use my existing PG username and password?

It seems that by default the email is shown to all other participants. Might be good to change that to hidden @jonah?

@ph00lt0 What page are you seeing that on? I see, I don’t think that profile setting would have applied here, because course participants were separately hidden already, but it’s been fixed regardless.

@Bhaelros it’s a separate system from the forum.

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Pretty cool stuff

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@jonah well done :100: . Will enroll once I have some spare time :slight_smile:

EDIT: OK, enrolled and my first though: why 100/100 to pass? Shouyldnt be lower like 75 … 80 %?

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Maybe, I was thinking about that. Mainly because there are unlimited attempts (and it gives you the answers after 1).

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After going through the course and using the website, I have to say that I feel like this provides a nice and easy way for people to learn about privacy. It even comes with a mobile app, but I haven’t tried that yet. I like that there is a short test at the end of each topic and that there is a reading indicator to show that you have read or viewed a page. I haven’t went through the whole course but from what I have seen so far, it seems pretty good.

I do have one question which is, how are translations provided?

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I’m not planning on having translations done for the content at learn.privacyguides.org at the moment, maybe a very long term goal.

Authentication for this site has changed to use forum credentials, if you made an account before this post, you should link your forum account at https://learn.privacyguides.org/auth/oauth2/linkedlogins.php to continue being able to sign in.

If you aren’t able to then I’ll probably have to fix your account manually, so let me know.

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Do we want to have a certification or reward for completing this? I’ve gotten feedback that this is not exactly desirable.

Other than that, yeah I’m 100% on board with a serialized format for onboarding onto privacy. This pretty much covers the areas of improvement I thought would have most impact for newcomers.

Will the contents of the course be available on GitHub and allow others to create PRs to update the course content?

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Can you elaborate on this?

Just was mentioned here - could just be a misunderstanding on my part.

Yeah, I think that’s fair. There is a fine line between more interactive content like this and the sort of gamification being talked about there.

The way I see it the distinction kind of comes down to recognizing people’s knowledge versus rewarding people’s actions. It’s harder to justify a points/leaderboard system where people are awarded points for performing tasks like installing Signal, as opposed to a certification system where we are just acknowledging that a reader has completed some course and has a certain level of understanding.

I also see value in having some sort of standard for establishing baseline knowledge. Maybe it doesn’t really matter for this particular course, but I can imagine more in-depth or advanced topics where someone might find it useful to know the person they’re talking to has completed a lesson in the subject.

It’s supplementary content that wouldn’t replace the main site. I’d envision the content of other courses drawing from the current knowledge base and/or adding to the current knowledge base, and the LMS platform optionally extends it if you want quizzes/activities/certificates, without it being the default path for people.

This is just something we’re testing out and hasn’t been reviewed for addition on the main site, so what we think about this is ultimately still TBD. Maybe @dngray can elaborate on whether he thinks this is something worth pursuing or if it is too close to what we were looking to avoid in that other discussion.

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Personally I’m not entirely convinced by all the arguments against your other proposal either. There’s some concepts from that thread I’d be interested in brainstorming further perhaps for the main site, this forum, or this new LMS platform. It’s not black and white so I wouldn’t take any response there as a flat-out rejection of the idea, just a signal that it needs a lot of thought on how to handle it properly if we were to use any of those ideas.

They would not, because the course content can’t be trivially edited in a text-based VCS. The plan would be for all the lessons to come straight from the site (if we add courses that cover topics which aren’t currently on the site, we would try to add those lessons to the KB), and for everything else to be developed separately.

If anyone in the community wanted to volunteer with creating quizzes and other activities for the course, we could potentially add people on an individual basis, but it’s not exactly an easy process to come up with quizzes, lesson plans, etc. I would think that it’s probably not something most people would want to contribute to unless they have prior education experience.

Ive looked at some page real quick total 5 min, and it llooks nice. It takes more time to explain the concept that the main page, whuch can be nice to not feel overwhelmed and understand with more examples…

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Honestly it’s not really that different from the website outside of the quizzes (but even those draw heavily from main site examples). I was kind of surprised how many pages of Moodle content could be made from basically just 3 pages on the main site.

I think different people will prefer different formats, I personally prefer the main site content and layout to this course, but I more clearly see why other people would consider the main site overwhelming now, and I certainly see the appeal of something structured more like this.

Yep, I agree. Sometimes I feel that the main site can feel overwhelming, since there are too many words on the screen. I feel like we should promote the course once it is out of beta, to the main site so users can have an alternative way of reading without getting overwhelmed.

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Fair enough. I won’t detract too much from it. If anything, I’ll personally brainstorm more concrete ideas rather than abstractions and see what sticks. Might even create my own beta application for fun :slight_smile:

Back to topic, I’ll go through the course content and give feedback. I’ll be on the lookout for tying examples with the course content.