What's the difference between MDN Guides (MDN Learning Area) and Curriculum?

[jlduchaney]

Please describe your problem or observation

I'm someone who's just beginning my coding journey, and I was looking into MDN Guides (MDN Learning Area). Now I see that Curriculum has just come out.

Can you please summarize, at a glance, the relationship/distinction between the two? (i.e. On what occasion do you recommend using one vs. the other? What content/pages overlap vs. can only be found in one? Is one more comprehensive than the other, or did Curriculum just rearrange all of the preexisting content from the MDN Learning Area?) In other words, what tradeoffs does a learner miss out on by moving forward with one resource over the other? Thanks!

Describe the solution you'd like to see

No response

[chrisdavidmills]

Hi there!

The difference is that the learning area provides a lot of guides aimed at beginners learning web development, but it doesn't necessarily provide a detailed structured learning pathway, or recommended learning outcomes.

The curriculum provides that pathway and learning outcomes, but it doesn't provide learning guides of its own. It links to recommended learning resources on MDN, and in other places, for each set of topics. And in future we will be recommending paid and free learning partners, whose material we have reviewed and vetted.

A student should use the curriculum as their guide for what to learn.

[glmvc]

I have to add that the difference was not entirely clear to me at first, and I was expecting something quite different, even though I read the About article first and have been familiar with MDN and learning and working with it for more than 2 years.

Therefore, I can imagine that the concept of the MDN Learning Area and Curriculum can be confusing to someone who doesn't know MDN at all or has recently discovered it.

Like I said, I was also confused and surprised at first, asking and thinking:

• "Why can't I just go through the Learning Area? Isn't it the same?"
• "What is the point of reading through the Curriculum and always being linked back to the Learning Area?"
• "The Learning Area is structured to follow article by article (step by step), and I like this approach more as a beginner than searching for the right modules by myself." (personal preference; maybe it's just my learning type)
• "When I work through the curriculum, I feel like I have to open a lot of links in new tabs, which I don't like, because it feels like a checklist, but I can't check the items I've learned, so I quickly lose track. This stresses me out as a complete beginner." (again, personal preference and perhaps just a matter of personal learning style)

Personally, I think I understand the purpose of the curriculum now, but I also think it's not clear enough for everyone, especially new web developers.

Possible reasons for this issue that I can think of are:

• A missing key fact/explanation on the Curriculum Overview page and/or a better introduction on the About page.
• A missing note in the Learning Area itself
• The linked resources are (still) mainly MDN (Learning Area; /learn) articles and not external resources. (I think this will change in the future as appropriate resources are found and chosen)
• Learning Area articles that do not teach the ideals described in the curriculum module. (AFAIK, there are content issues in mdn/content regarding structuring, wording and relevance)

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In summary, I feel that the MDN Curriculum is a kind of structured checklist for articles in the Learning Area, at least for now.
Don't get me wrong, this is just my first impression after reading the "Getting started" and "Core" module articles.

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Overall, I hope my feedback is helpful and that this issue is the right place for it, or should such feedback be posted in the general MDN discussion forum? If so, feel free to move it there :)

[jlduchaney]

Thanks, all!

After reading your responses and skimming through both resources, my impression is that Curriculum is like the syllabus and MDN Guides/MDN Learning Area is like the actual textbook itself. (My brain likes analogies.)

As a side note, this is my first-ever post on GitHub, so I don't know the proper etiquette. Let me know if there's any action I'm supposed to be taking on my end to keep the forum neat and tidy (e.g. mark an issue resolved). Cheers!

[chrisdavidmills]

Thanks, all!

After reading your responses and skimming through both resources, my impression is that Curriculum is like the syllabus and MDN Guides/MDN Learning Area is like the actual textbook itself. (My brain likes analogies.)

@jlduchaney YES - that is a really good analogy for this situation. I like it, and will probably use it elsewhere ;-)

As a side note, this is my first-ever post on GitHub, so I don't know the proper etiquette. Let me know if there's any action I'm supposed to be taking on my end to keep the forum neat and tidy (e.g. mark an issue resolved). Cheers!

No further action needed right now; you are doing everything right. At the point where we think this issue is resolved, we can close it, but I want to read @glmvc's post first and make sure any other points that come from there are addressed.

Thanks for the useful conversation.

[chrisdavidmills]

@glmvc I think you have highlighted some reasonable concerns here. It seems to me that:

1. We could maybe add something to the curriculum to explain how to use it (e.g. keep it in a pinned tab and open other resources in other tabs, maybe keep resource lists in bookmarks, etc.)
2. We could add some more explanation to the learning area saying how it relates to/differs from the curriculum, and how to use the two together
3. We should add a feature to the curriculum that allows logged in users to check items they have covered so they know where they are up to, and maybe even add new custom resources they find, to their own personal view of it. This is something we've already discussed as a future feature.
4. We should review the learning area articles linked from the curriculum for points where the teaching deviates from the recommended best practices in the curriculum. Do you have any specific examples to call out?

Anything else you think is missing from the list?

[glmvc]

Thanks for checking my feedback, @chrisdavidmills.

1. That would certainly be an improvement, I think. I also like @jlduchaney's analogy. Maybe it should be added somewhere too :)
2. I agree + it would be very cool if the /Learn overview article had an article header similar to the one on the /curriculum overview page (see my image below for an idea). I don't know if this is technically and design-wise possible (in a simple way), but it's just an idea. It would create a "connection" between the two parts on MDN, and I don't know if that's wanted in this case... What do you think? Is this idea too far-fetched?
3. This would be a great feature, IMHO! As far as I understand you, it would be some kind of checklist (which I addressed earlier) / personal notebook / personal reading and learning list that I would like as a beginner.
4. I think to remember that there were issues and discussions about this matter regarding that /Learn is a bit outdated and not ideally structured. I am sure the content team has more input on this. But take the Environment setup module as an example. In 2.2 File systems, there is an item "File naming best practices for the web ..." that suggests using hyphens or underscores. The linked resource "Dealing with files" suggests "to separate words with hyphens, rather than underscores". This is probably just a small detail, but in my opinion, we should be consistent here. It is certainly not a bad idea to compare the items in the curriculum with the content in /Learn and assess whether all the information is available, correct, consistent and up-to date. This probably involves some work.

I believe that if all these points are implemented accordingly, there will be a significant improvement in terms of understanding the difference between /Learn and /curriculum and how to work with them. Also point 3 would improve working with the curriculum a lot, especially for beginners.

5. "Add more external resources" is one to add, which I think will automatically resolve in the future, and I understand that it's not so easy to find appropriate ones ...

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Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with :)

[caugner]

See also: https://github.com/orgs/mdn/discussions/736