Guest blogger Yvonne Chen of Dayvin Internet Solutions shares the results of the Shanghai Global Training Day event this past March.

Following-up with the Global Training Day series, we were glad to be able to organize the Drupal Training Day on March 15, 2013 in Shanghai.

We were pleasantly surprised when receiving the 10th signup for this training event, which is nearly twice more than for the previous edition that was held on Dec 14, 2012. Overall we received 13 participants, 11 coming from the GDO/DO community. Two called us directly, but 2 of them desisted at the last minute for professional reasons.

Throughout multiple events carried over months before (Contribute Workshops and Training Days), we managed steadily improving our training materials to be enriched with more tutorials, tips, Chinese translations and our talks to be even more adapted to welcome newcomers interested in the Drupal world. Being fervent advocates of Drupal in China, we strongly believe the Global Training Days are meant to also help us further bridging the gap between the local and the international community, mostly due to the great language barrier, which is probably one of the greatest obstacles to Drupal's adhesion in China.

Therefore, we have been putting an increasing emphasis on communicating for the event through local channels, sites and community hubs, as well as providing complete training in Chinese, with translated materials.

Not to forget our local attachments to the international community, we decided this time to provide two different training sessions in parallel:

• The English training course was entirely carried by (David Suissa) DYdave who has also been a great actor for this initiative to move forward locally.
• The Chinese training course was entirely carried by (Zhang Wen Tao) zterry95 who worked steadily over months on improving the translations and contents of the Chinese curriculum.

Overall, we tried to stick with the basics as much as possible, and more particularly the defined curriculum for the Introduction to Drupal (basic concepts, core modules, Drupal lingo and jargon, etc...). Additionally we had very interesting hands-on Q&A sessions, with a very active participation which allowed us to provide practical use cases to participants in order to directly apply to their immediate requirements what had been covered.

One very interesting case was brought up by Ms. Tong (specialized in web design) and Mr. Bao (specialized in embedded systems) who were able to concretely apply what they had learnt during the sessions, for the construction of a simple content presentation website: zterry95 took this opportunity to run them through the creation of content types and arrangement of blocks in regions, moving towards intermediate level topics with Views pages/blocks and basic theming.

We were delighted to hear attendees were generally "Very Satisfied" when collecting training feedback, which is certainly greatly encouraging for our next edition of the Global Training Days. On top of the positive feedback, we received other very constructive and interesting comments, among which:

• providing tiered training to people with different levels
• adding more "samples and practical issue solution" (Perhaps more practical use cases, less theory/presentation)
• offering printed materials for attendees to prepare questions in advance (We've make sure we prepare printed materials for the next events)

Concluding on a good note filling us with enthusiasm for the next event and hopefully a very positive trend for the future of the Global Training Days in China and thus the growth of Drupal in China:

To the question: Will you attend this event next time? Most replied:

Surely if available. I think it’s even better if I could join in more similar events with practical questions.

We couldn't hide our pleasure, when we saw most participants, including Ms. Tong and Mr. Bao, had decided to get further involved and attented the following event organized the next day for the monthly Drupal Contribute Workshop in Shanghai (on March 16, 2013).

We are all very much looking forward to our next session and in the meantime we'll keep steadily working on improving our materials, local communication to hopefully help further bridging the gap and ultimately overcoming the language barriers for a wider adhesion in China.