ERPNext University?

My fellow ERPNext’ers:

Many of you believe that Documentation, Training, Education, and Learning are a significant gap in our favorite ERP system. Both functionally and technically.

Why is this difficult to solve? Firstly, there is no clear/obvious owner of the problem. We all see the gap. We all post about it. We all mention ideas. Some people do their own documentation. But there is no Community Solution.

I want to help solve this. I am willing to commit time and effort.

I suggest we form a Working Group to address this problem. The goal? Improve the quantity and quality of ERPNext documentation, knowledge, and education.

I will write an initial Charter (which we can discuss/change). And I will help establish communications. If everyone is agreeable, I am willing to act as a facilitator for the group. This new Working Group will meet regularly to try and solve these education challenges. Everyone is welcome to join and participate. I will suggest that we alternate Meeting Times, to accommodate both sides of the globe.

All communication, meeting notes, and information will be transparent. The Working Group will share progress/success with everyone, especially the ERPNext Foundation.

If our community continues as we have, only posting complaints and ideas on these forums? Nothing will change. But if we form a specific group, with a specific goal? Together, we can make some real progress.

Standby for more communication from me. I will need some time to put this together…

~Brian

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  1. is this technical or functional content?
  2. let me know once you have translations ready, I’ll look into whether I could help creating some of the videos from it. *)

*) I’d probably not suitable for doing technical (programing) stuff, but if I had a functional script it would definitely be worth a try to transform this into a video tutorial.

Also, just a little general comment on video tutorials … make sure the sound is good!
Many of the tutorials I have seen (frappe youtube channel i.e.) are very hard to watch due to background noises and/or reverb making it very hard to follow the content.

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Wow… those are some passionate replies to your initial posting @Basawaraj_Savalagi
Even though it was an older topic, it still generates a great deal of interest. Maybe there is a glimmer of hope to get this off the ground in the near future.

I like your idea. And I also think some of the folks here bring up some good points:

@Not_a_countant - I chuckle to myself as read your input to this topic. It sounds very much like myself pulling my hair out in other parts of this forum. And all for good reason. I share your frustration. I think there still may be a path forward though.

@mulyadi_dw - You bring up the most important point in the whole debate. ERPNext is a fast moving target and it is nearly impossible to keep up with the changes from a user perspective, much less a training perspective. This is the main reason our documentation is in a dismal state. It is just not possible to keep up when the target moves so fast.

So… In the past day or so @rmehta published a proposal to make some stable long term version points that could be supported for as much as 4 years in some cases.
Read his thoughts here:

A general comment on versions, design and architecture changes

In his proposal, you will find the possibility to make this training idea come to life again. Once there are stable versions, THAT is the time to develop the training materials. They would be useful then for more than 4 to 6 months. They could be useful for several years.

Once you have that important threshold established, then it makes sense to create a community developed set of training materials.

I even think it might be appropriate for those courses to be sold to new users at a reasonable rate. Once there is a stable working point, it only makes sense for folks to want to learn about how to use it.

Suddenly, you not only have a happy community adding to the knowledge base of a stable version, you have the potential for even the newest of users to be able to adopt the product easily by means of a reasonable priced set of training materials.

It could be a win-win for all involved. Just not quite yet.

However, if you go about the planning stage now, then you might be ready to implement it once the stable versions are implemented.

I like it !!

BKM

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As far as I recollect, there are some notes and references to the ERPNext University in the last Frappe Open Day. I don’t have the link right now but it’s on Frappe.io/blog

I don’t know how much of this is read but it’s good dust for knowing what’s going on there . Nearly 150 pages too

I really support this idea. Everything will start with good documentation though. I am a technically savvy person, but I am unable to figure out how to write even simple scripts. I am not a programmer, but am usually able to solve my problems with examples. The problem here is that even the examples of custom scripts are not exhaustive. They leave a lot of gaps.
The functional side of things are a lot better though.

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Scholarships based on contribution to the documentation and source code :slight_smile:?

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Should the documentation be a prerequisite to setup the University or documentation should be one of the things the University would do?

I guess that there is no better time to set up some rules for publishing documentation than now, with changes to Release management that was presented here:

If there will be some regularity and periodicity in issuing new versions, if there will be list of changes/new features of the new version in advance, there should be a good chance to harmonize issuing new/updated documentation with new versions before release date.
And after there will be complete documentation available, next step could be University…

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If there is anything like what’s been discussed so far, I shall join in as an obedient student.

However, this idea needs to be publicized a bit before we can get an idea about how much an interest there is. I think there’s quite some demand for something like this, but there’s not much awareness of the existence of this discussion.

FYI, below an initiative to consolidate a group for non developer looking for frappe framework training, anyone interested please join discussion.

(Frappe Framework Training for non developer)

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As a newbie, I got an ERP Consultancy job 2 months ago and since then I have been looking for how to know and learn more about ERPNext even be certified. Any means of help will do right justice to me! Best Regards