Fixing Our Education System

[PNWMan]

This was referenced by me in post #7 at https://forum.openredstone.org/showthread.php?tid=10263. This poll lists possible solutions to multiple issues that have been recently brought to our attention. Please only vote for 1 solution per topic (topics are in caps at the start of each option. You can read more about the topics in the link above.) Please give careful consideration when voting. This poll is for everyone, from visitors to staff. Hopefully this poll will encourage staff to take action to make ORE even better than it is now!

[Nickster258]

Below are responses to your thread here.


Should school and build be merged, and how so? (1)
The Staff team has no plans at the moment to merge the servers, and already agree that them being separate is more beneficial.

How should chat be merged? (1)
The Staff team has no plans at the moment to merge chat. This has also been discussed and the majority of Staff does not want to see private channels.

How will the website guides be updated? (2)
We have a tutorial subforum that doesn't seem to get too much activity.

How will students learn redstone? (3, 4, 5, & 6)
Ideally through our education system, however lacking it is. I am not opposed to ditching the Teacher rank, but I want to have a substitute. If Teacher gets ditched, then it really won't be a School server. 

I have often fiddled with the idea of replacing the School server and re-naming it to another name, making sure the community and those applying to it know that it isn't necessarily a School, but an alternative to the Build server.

Where will tutorials be, and where would the list of them be? (3)
On a website. I'd imagine it wouldn't be hard to program a search function into Bottery to return top 5 results for said tutorial search.

I'd also like to mention, we have a tutorial subforum that doesn't seem to get too much activity.

Where will students go to find out about scheduled lessons? (4)
I'll write my idea on this bellow all else.

How would internships be initiated? (5)
I like the idea of internships, but it may be a bit tricky to implement. One step above Testificate, one bellow Builder. 

Where would internships take place, and how will permissions be adjusted? (5)
Build. Permissions would not be a mix between the permissions given to a Testificate and a Student. Will have essential build perms like a Testificate, but also the ever-so-little benefits of being a Student.

I'd like to mention here that I would like an Internship to require Student rank status, so any not just anyone can hop in and build on a 256x256x256 plot.

What should we do with the Teacher rank? (6)
I would like to remove it, if the replacement is renaming the School server to Starter or Beginner server. In order to have a School you need a teacher, so....

How should trials be reformed? (7)
Trials should stay the same, for the most part. It would be beautiful if the user could tell us when they want to trial, but with time-zones taken into consideration, that would be hellish.

Even then, telling someone to go to X site, enter their town so it returns their time-zone, then go to Y site so they can convert their time in one time-zone to another may be difficult enough considering how often people don't understand that you have to "copy and paste the questions below with your answers".

Should students users be able to trial on their own time? (7)
No. Staff are there to ask questions and trying to prove one's intellect.

When and how should we take action? (8)
I would like to have a formal protocol, but in the past, saying to the Staff team in slack "let's do it X time UTC on the 19th" usually works fine.

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Similar to the idea of trials, I have considered adding a subforum within the School subforum so Students can ask questions and for other help.

Let's say a Student has trouble understanding 2s complement. Said Student posts on the subforum "Help understanding 2s complement?" and people (should) respond with help. Responses can link to University dialogues of professors talking about 2s complement and its importance, can link to a tutorial written under the Tutorials subforum here, and can even provide help themselves by trying to explain.

If push comes to shove, a Teacher or someone who knows what they are talking about can "Schedule" a time to teach it to them in-person, on the server. This, again, introduces the issue of time-zones but I would imagine it may not be too hard to implement after finding a nice API for it.

[PNWMan]

Me and Nick were talking, and I just wanted to put out what ideas we had:

Nick said he liked the idea of adding ranks like on the RDF (not to throw him under the bus), which could be used to encourage innovation and show who really knows their redstone. I guess instead of [Builder] or [Member], the RDF had ranks like [Engineer], [Scientist], and [Guru] or something like that (I was never on the RDF).

Possibly more universally appreciated was the topic of auto-promotion: Once an Apprentice's application was accepted, a code would automatically promote them on the school server.

Also discussed was reopening freebuild. It would likely be located on the Build server's POL2 since there is an extra unused plot. It would be used to keep visitors at bay while they are waiting to get their application accepted, and it could also be used to practice trial builds or something. Many visitors come with the hopes of being able to build right away, and while we want patient people, I think it would be beneficial to have a freebuild so visitors can have a way to instantly build.

I just want to say with all these changes, we need to have them all put into the website guides and spawn so newcomers actually know about all these various aspects and so they don't have to rely on builders to get their information.

[Mar_Win]

Auto promotion is reallx important,  because some people have to wait 3 days or more only to get promoted and this has to change.

[tokumei]

oh, and nobody reads anything at spawn btw

[josh03222]

oh, and nobody reads anything at spawn btw