🐣 Today I had the chance to participate in an early iteration of an egghead Course Club. I once briefly mentioned that I was part of an Adventure Club. That was my first introduction to the concept and was a great success and a lot of fun.
🍿 We’re beginning to plant the course club seed within our community at egghead. Today was a baby step in that direction by way of a course watch party. We watched WordPress as a Headless Content Management System (CMS) and GraphQL API.
🤩 I need to preface my review of this experience by pointing out that the author of the course, Kevin Cunningham, was present. This made a tremendous impact on the efficacy of the session, and for obvious reasons, not every egghead course club will enjoy the privilege of having the course creator present. Many might, however, especially as we continue to test and refine the format. Kevin, besides having a delightful accent (if you pronounce poor as “pur”, your accent qualifies as delightful), is a career educator. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference it makes when the author or instructor has experience in education. Their ability to explain concepts to learners in a way they can understand is like magic.
🏔 egghead is heavily invested in creating solid educational design bedrock for each course we create, primarily by guiding our instructors through a design process based on Understanding by Design, and also by applying our collective decades of experience in creating high-quality online content.
🧐 I came into the watch party only to observe how it went so that I could more intelligently contribute to conversations about how to iterate on future events. I do know a little bit about both WordPress and headless CMSs, having had a career-long interest in the CMS space, but I was not particularly interested in the topic, per se.
🤓 What I found was that as we watched the lessons, engaged with the material, and engaged with each other throughout the two-hour session, my imagination lit up with the potential applications of this particular piece of tech. Of course WordPress was a mature content management platform, and marrying that to a modern frontend via its robust, flexible APIs (via its robust, flexible plugin infrastructure) makes so much sense. Regardless of if I choose this stack for my next project, my mind was opened to more possibilities. And that was due to some extent to having had the experience of learning with others.
🤯 egghead is much more than a website with developer videos. It’s a community of practice that provides numerous opportunities for its members to engage with all that is the modern web development landscape. At $250 a year, it’s a total fucking steal.