Suggestions for Practice Projects for Paratext Training

Question

I’m looking for suggestions for how others have handled practice projects for Paratext training.

When we’ve run Paratext Courses in the past, we’ve used a few different methods to distribute practice projects:

Backup/Restore: This is not ideal because it removes any existing users, etc
Convert Project to create a unique practice project per individual: This works, but is time consuming because you need to create a project for each individual in the training
Distribute the same project via Send/Receive: This can be dangerous, especially for novice computer users, because if multiple people edit the same verse, you’ll get conflicts when they Send/Receive

I’d really like to try the last method of distributing the same project to everybody, but they WILL be making changes in the same verses as part of the training. It might be possible to have them ignore any conflicts in those verses, but I’m not sure it’s the best idea for novice computer users…

In this course, Send/Receive will be done only with a small team, not the whole class. And where the changes really matter, individuals in the team will be working on different books. But there will be conflicts if we distribute the same project via Send/Receive.

I’m just not sure what to do. Thoughts appreciated.

Thanks,

james_post

Answer 1

We do a training project with send/receive. There is one main project. Then for each workshop, we create an identical (at the beginning) auxiliary project specific to that workshop. We send it out to the students with everyone’s role as Administrator because we are teaching things that require that role. But once everyone has received it, we turn them into Observers. This means that they cannot do send/receive online without losing their permissions but if they do, they will not hurt anyone else. They can still do send/receive to a flash drive. If they do not need to do send/receive with the project for the workshop, then you can direct them to turn off send/receive for that project only so that it doesn’t impact their other projects. To turn of send/receive for a project, initiate send/receive from the main Paratext menu. When it has presented the list of projects for you to choose from, hold down the alt key and click on the project that should not be considered for send/receive. It will turn grey and small and go to the bottom of the list. It can be turned back on again by selecting it but it won’t be included when you tick the “Edited” button.

Blessings,

Answer 2

We often create a test project which may have a certain amount of text in it already (for playing with), but also lots of empty books (already created with verse numbers), and we will assign (with Tasks and Advancement) one small book to each of the participants. There are lots of small minor prophet books, but those might be more challenging if you are actually going to ask them to translate some verses… the small epistles might be better for that exercise.