SkillDisplay - Summing up the 3 Year Erasmus+ Project
Thanks to Christina from SkillDisplay for sharing!
The Erasmus+ project is coming to an end after three years and therefore, we wanted to honor that time with a blog post. We visited lots of events, created resources with our partners like the TYPO3 Editor Mainzific Rim Adventure, and further developed the SkillDisplay platform. We wanted to say a big thank you to our partners and everyone who supported us over the years!
Topics covered in this blog post include:
Education in the TYPO3 Sector and available resources
Development of the SkillDisplay Platform
Events; including TYPO3 Events and transnational meetings
Education in the TYPO3 Sector and Available Resources
TYPO3 SkillSets
“The Erasmus+ Program enabled TYPO3 to further advance the European educational sector, letting them reach out to a bigger audience and providing useful knowledge about TYPO3 CMS and the possibility to certify their own TYPO3 skills. This way people were able to showcase their knowledge in TYPO3 in an official way.”
- Mathias Schreiber, TYPO3 GmbH
In the course of the Erasmus+ project SkillSets for editors, integrators, and developers were created by the TYPO3 GmbH and the TYPO3 Association in cooperation with SkillDisplay. And the greatest news: TYPO3 v10 is now available on the SkillDisplay platform! You can access the TCCE, TCCI, and TCCD SkillSets here. The SkillSets are perfect for use in lectures and training or to prepare for an official TYPO3 certificate as the syllabus of each SkillSet matches the syllabus of the certificate. After studying and verifying all the skills with the Self Assessment button (the learner comes to a level of understanding where they are able to apply the skill) and optionally the Educational Verification or Practical Expertise buttons, you might consider getting an Exam Access Voucher for the official exam!
Starter Box / English
“The Starter Box is an excellent guide for jump-starting skill management within an organization. It covers all necessary tasks and even provides meeting and workshop schedules. Great Work!”
- Franz Stimpfl, HTL Rennweg
The starter Boxes are a product of SkillDisplay, the TYPO3 Association, the HTL Rennweg Vienna, and Liceul Tehnologic Grigore Moisil Braila. It consists of working sheets covering skills from the TYPO3 Editor, with additional resources by HTL Rennweg and the possibility to host a TYPO3 instance for a couple of months for free on the servers of jweiland.net.
The English Starter Box is publicly available here
Starter Box / Romanian
“Creating the TYPO3 Starter Box in Romanian language was a beautiful challenge for our team and I hope it’ll be useful for this successful project!”
- Prof. Ing. Alexandru Dita, Liceul Tehnologic Grigore Moisil Braila
Additionally, our Romanian partner school has translated the starter box to Romanian, making it a great tool for local schools and universities!
Mainzific Rim
“The Mainzific Rim Path offers great resources to gain TYPO3 editor skills with a playful focus for all dinosaur fans.”
- Katharina Joksch, SkillDisplay
The Mainzific Rim Adventure was created for educators, business persons, and learners to either teach or learn the TCCE v9 skills. Throughout the adventure, an emergency website needs to be created to warn the residents of Mainz about dinosaurs that attack the city. It consists of the following four chapters:
This chapter includes the very basic skills of the certified Editor, including an introduction to CMS’ (content management systems) and TYPO3, how to choose a secure password, and the difference between front- and backend.
Here, media formats and naming files are important, as a photograph on the main page needs to be changed from an “Everything is well” picture, to a picture relating to the dinosaur attack. Web accessibility is also very important in making sure everyone has the possibility to access the crisis management service website. To also inform bots, SEO techniques need to be included.
Now, a secure and secret page needs to be created for a specific user group. Access restrictions and backend users need to be learned and applied. Also, the usage of extensions is part of this chapter.
To accomplish the secret mission, the learner needs to translate the evacuation guide to Japanese, where one goal is to switch between the columns and the language view in the page module.
The adventure is publicly available to everyone and we hope you, your students, or your employees have lots of fun learning the TYPO3 basics in a hands on way!
TYPO3 Direct Mentorship Program
“We have experienced SkillDisplay and its Platform as a major enabler for our TYPO3 Mentorship Program that we are currently setting up. Since our first encounter with the Team at SkillDisplay we have found always open ears and excellent advice. We think that SkillDisplay is really offering a good approach to all education based use cases. We look forward to the continuation of our joint work.”
- Olivier Dobberkau, TYPO3 Association
SkillDisplay is very happy to support the TYPO3 mentorship program with the platform! If you want to get further information, you can read the typo3.org blog post by Daniel Homorodean and a getting started guide on how to use SkillDisplay for a mentoring session.
Development of the SkillDisplay Platform
UI Design
“The new user interface sets the focus on the main content with a minimalist and elegant design to fit into the landscape of modern applications.”
- Wolfgang Rumpler, UI Design / SkillDisplay
Everyone aware of the previous design of the SkillDisplay platform knows that it hasn’t always been like that. The first version was very dark and there was a lot going on with different shades of grey and verification buttons in red, green, yellow, and blue. In the second version, we replaced the dark colours with white and the verification buttons were matched with the greens and blues in the logo, which also hasn’t been optimal, as our users started to mix up the similar colours. The final design with the adapted logo shows a modern card layout in white and light gray with similar strong colours for the verification buttons as they have already been used for the first version.
Skills, SkillTrees, and the Visual Skill Editor
“The amount of skills can be overwhelming. With the Visual Skill Editor at SkillDisplay we managed to create a tool for the user allowing to manage even the largest topic areas with their single skills efficiently. Timesaver guarantee.”
- Markus Klein, Reelworx
A very important tool we have been working on for quite a while now is the Visual Skill Editor, that lets certifiers like TYPO3 create their skills and dependencies in a tree formation. Comparing two SkillSets like v9 and v10 of the certified editor, skills that stay the same and new skills can be visualised quickly. Find the differences from v9 and v10 for the SkillSets here: TCCE, TCCI, and TCCD. The Visual Skill Editor was also recently used by the TYPO3 GmbH and TYPO3 Education Committee to update all SkillSets to v10!
Events
“It’s hard to pick a favorite, as every event we visited with SkillDisplay had its own charm. Nevertheless, I think my favorite moment was seeing one of the attendees - a history student - at our 3-day TYPO3 Dinosaur Attack Adventure workshop [TYPO3 University Days 2018 in Mainz] succeed with official certification [TCCE] at this same event.”
- Florian Weiss, SkillDisplay
In the course of the Erasmus+ project, SkillDisplay together with their partners attended some TYPO3 events, including the following:
TYPO3 East Europe 2018 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
T3EE was a great event to introduce the TYPO3 starter boxes. We had a great time there and were happy about the positive feedback we got from the community! Read the whole blog post about T3EE here!
MEET TYPO3 Vienna 2018 in Vienna, Austria
At MEET TYPO3, Florian Weiss held a talk about the TYPO3 certificates that are available and why these badges are important.
TYPO3 University Day 2018 in Mainz, Germany
At T3UD18, the Mainzific Rim was used to prove that you can learn the TCCE skills in less than two days and get the official certificate! We of course would advise the use of a couple more days, but concluded that anything is possible, if you really wanted it! The whole story is available here!
TYPO3Camp Vienna 2019 in Vienna, Austria
We were very happy to be the educational partner of the event and held the talk “21 % - The new skills for TCCE 9 LTS”. You can find the recap of the TYPO3Camp Vienna 2019 here.
Another type of event was the transnational meetings which are further described in the next part of the blog post.
Transnational Meetings
“Coming from an ICT business background I greatly enjoyed working in an international team from vastly different backgrounds such as education, research and students, and with completely different working habits and perspectives on the challenges of the project.”
- Florian Schmitt, SkillDisplay
To better coordinate the different parties of the Erasmus+ project, transnational meetings were organized. The first meeting was great to get to know the representatives in person. It was based in Vienna and had the main goal to further discuss the goals for the platform, always keeping in mind how to support certifiers, educators, business persons, and learners. Read the full blog post about the transnational meeting here.
Another transnational meeting was held in Linz, where everyone was able to present their work including the SkillDisplay platform workshop. The workshop’s purpose was to show certifiers, business persons, and educators how to perform skill management and create their own skills, SkillTrees, and SkillSets.
Resume
“The final survey revealed that participants were very satisfied with all elements which have been assessed and that they are very keen on using the platform to address different educational, learning, employment, and networking needs.”
- Maria Georgiou, SYNTHESIS Center for Research and Education
We are very thankful for the hard work every party put into the project and are happy about the outputs we were able to achieve!
