Pathways aims to be the roadmap for learning any skill. It is a curated and opinionated collection of tutorials.
The internet is full of amazing and free resources of varying qualities. However there is no guide to decide which one is best or relevant for a particular skill level. Not free ones anyway. Pathways solves this by collecting the best tutorials into steps. Steps that form a comprehensive guide for learning any skill upto a desired level.
Suppose you're a complete newbie to software development and want to learn Django, you might end up doing something like this -
- You google "Learn Django"
- You read an article that tells you what Django follows the MVT pattern.
- You google what MVT is. You find out it stands for Model-View-Template
- You now google what Model means.
- What does a view mean by the way?
- And what the guck is a template?
- Oh, so a template is like a frame in which you put data.
- Where's this data coming from again?
- It's coming from the models. So models = database?
It can go on and on till all those articles push you around like a pin ball and things finally begin to make sense. If only you knew what to read first. Or even what to read at all. That's what we want Pathways to do for you - tell you what to read first, and what to leave for later.
Pathways does NOT create new resources for learning. It arranges existing resources into steps. Each step introduces a new topic and adds to accumulated knowledge. A sequence of these steps will be called a pathway. Following a pathway to the end is sure to let learners to gain a skill, topic-by-topic without having to google around too much.
Every pathway is supposed to be comprehensive. The pathway should show the user how to go from level 0 to level 100 in that skill, the less assumptions it makes the better. For example, a pathway to learn django should not assume that reader already knows Python.
Does this mean a writer creating any pathway will have to rewrite all the tutorials from absolute beginner level? NO. Pathways helps the writer harness the experience of others by including their pathways and steps.
This means if you're writing a Django pathway, you can include the Python pathway someone else created as the first step in your pathway. The advantage to using a different pathway as a step in your pathway is that you can just focus on the actual content instead of the pre-requisites.
You can even include individual steps from other pathways, as steps in your pathway, if you feel they are well written or relevant. For example, suppose Python Advanced pathway has a step for network IO in Python. If your pathway only needs the user to know about network IO in Python, you can include that particular step ignore the rest.
From the readers' point of view the experience will be seamless and engaging. Pathways will track and show readers' their progress and help them decide what they can learn next.