Morphing the dev guide into teaching materials for 3 classes

[pbchase]

RC EM Dev 101 – A hands-on class all about installing and using the development tools. The audience would be REDCap Admins, Project Builders who can get access to a redcap.zip, and aspiring developers. I assert every developer we have in the community is a REDCap admin who wanted to make REDCap do more. We should enable these people. An experienced developer would only need to read the class notes, but a REDCap admin who wants to level up probably needs some help. This about 60 - 90 minutes of content.

The content would be what's covered in https://github.com/ctsit/redcap_external_module_development_guide/blob/master/docs/development_class.md with more explanation about how to use the dev tools Andy Martin provides in his docker environment. I would have exploratory exercises/demos targeted at the different audiences. We would discuss Control Center exploration (project builders and developers), external module installation and REDCap Repo exploration (everyone), deploying from github (everyone).

RC EM Dev 201 – A hands-off class discussing development concepts in REDCap modules. It would take some content from https://ctsit.github.io/redcap_external_module_development_guide/guide_for_admins_and_devs, but mostly add new content not yet written. The audience would be developers and aspirational developers. The content would be something like this:

• Open, collaborative development
  • Funding sources require sharing and collaboration
  • Sharing and collaboration require good tools and practices
  • Repo hosting in github
• Finding module code in GitHub
• Official dev docs: in REDCap and in GitHub
• Architectural concerns:
  • Enabling the consumer
  • Plugins
  • Hooks
  • REDCap Variables
  • Configuration management
  • Reading data: REDCap class vs SQL
  • Writing data: REDCap classes vs SQL
  • Logging activity: redcap_log_event, em log class, redcap_entity
  • Persisting data in the DB: em log class, redcap_entity, em config class, redcap_log_event

This about 60 minutes of content.

RC EM Dev 301 – A hands-on class with nothing but development exercises. The audience is developers and aspirational developers. Prereq is 201 class and a working toolset like that described in the 101 class. The content would be a refined version of https://github.com/ctsit/redcap_external_module_development_guide/blob/master/docs/guide_for_devs.md, but with a better intro. This about 90 - 120 minutes of content.

The 101 and 301 classes would be capped at 15 students each because of their hands-on nature. 201 would be uncapped, but targeted at group of 30. I can see where I would get students that wanted 101 and 201 or 201 and 301. I doubt anyone who needed 101 could handle 301. Most people who can handle 301 would be bored by 101—they could set up the software themselves before they arrived. I think hands-on training like that proposed in 101 and 301 requires an assistant except in the smallest classes.

[pbchase]

emd101.md and emd102.md added in Release 1.3.0. https://github.com/ctsit/redcap_external_module_development_guide/blob/master/docs/development_class.md is deprecated and unlinked, but not yet deleted.