Last week, the 15th semester of Drupal Career Online concluded, and we're proud to announce 10 new graduates of the program! Congrats to Aida, Ashley, Avery, Carla, Jada, Kim, Matt, Micah, Tonderlier, and Tyler!

Drupal Career Online is a 12-week, live-instructor, online Drupal training program designed to teach best practices and sound fundamentals for Drupal developers. 

The course includes not only (virtual) classroom instruction, but also a number of other experiences designed to provide students with various opportunities to learn and practice the material. 

• Community mentors - each student is (optionally) introduced a volunteer Drupal community mentor. The mentor and student decide how best to work together to achieve the student's goals. Thanks so much to this semester's mentor volunteers: Ofer, Doug, Adam, Philip, Andy, Brian, Albert, and Corey.
• Office hours - each week during the 12-week class, in addition to 7 hours of classroom time, there are 4 additional (optional) office hours. These operate much like traditional college office hours; we open a Zoom room, student show up and ask questions, or just hang out and listen in on others. 
• Screencasts - in addition to dedicated, produced screencasts for each lesson, every classroom period (all 3.5 hours) is recorded and provided to students as raw video. This way, if they have to miss class for any reason, they can watch the recording. Many students who attend class also take advantage of these videos to rewatch portions of class that they need additional practice with. 
• Weekly activity reports and evaluations - both the students and the instructor provides weekly feedback. This allows us to ensure that each student is getting exactly what they need to succeed in the DCO. 

While the DCO has been around for over 6 years, that doesn't mean that our curriculum is stale. In fact, just the opposite - every semester, the curriculum is updated with the latest best practices. In the Spring 2020 semester, for example, lessons were updated to include the new drupal/recommended-project Composer template, our module development lesson was updated to avoid Drupal 9 deprecations, our class project was updated, and best practice layout tools were update (with more of an emphasis on Layout Builder). These ongoing curriculum iterations ensure our graduates are learning current best practices!

Perhaps the most important aspect of the DCO is the fact that our alumni have access to weekly, office hours - each and every week throughout the year. These office hours provide an opportunity for alumni to re-connect, ask questions when they get stuck, and sometimes just lurk to hear what others are asking about. We feel that it provides a level of comfort to our alumni - that we are as invested in their future as they are.

The next semester of Drupal Career Online begins August 31. Interested in learning more about it? Come to one of our free, 1-hour Taste of Drupal webinars where we'll tell you all about the DCO and you can ask any questions you may have.