BOF: Promoting ColdFusion to Education

I now have the results on "Promoting ColdFusion Outside the ColdFusion Community" which focussed on Education, and it was well worth the wait! Here are the results:

1. Find areas outside of traditional Comp Sci programs to promote within education. - How depends on the type of school.
2. Get user groups and community members involved with local schools.
   
   • Teach younger. Target high school students.
   • Encourage ColdFusion User Group managers to contact local schools and let them know about ColdFusion resources in the community.
   • Find dates for "career days" and present.

   Awareness - Schools are teaching students PHP and/or ASP at the high school level in many districts. As in all other areas of CF promotion, awareness is key. We should communicate the benefits of ColdFusion to the education sector in order to increase the penetration of ColdFusion in the Enterprise. This will not only help to improve the public perception of CF, but will also increase the number of junior-level developers available over time, helping to alleviate the current shortage of talented developers. So, how do we go about doing this?

   Microsoft - One of the largest barriers to entry at schools is the fact that Microsoft has a very active education evangelism program for their technologies. Most school districts have a district-level technology coordinator who is in contact with a Microsoft Education Evangelist regularly. User group managers or active community members need to get in contact with the district technology coordinator and discuss the benefits of using ColdFusion; Ease of use, low learning curve, declarative language, runs on Java, etc.

   Educational Pricing - We also need to highlight the pricing that is available for educational institutions. Current educational pricing saves around 50% per server license, so around $850 for the standard edition. Hosted ColdFusion accounts are a minimal-cost alternative to installing servers that can be offset by lab fees per student. We should contact hosting companies to see if any of them offer discounted hosting for educational institutions and help to disseminate that information.

   Curriculum - There is already courseware available for teaching ColdFusion. What resources are available for teachers to use without having to jump through hoops? The current Certified Instructor program is not feasible for most teachers, simple because of the monetary and time constraints they have. Are there other options? Can we develop a curriculum geared toward students in high school / college that would be available for a reasonable price?

3. Job training programs and continuing education, Economic Development Councils
4. Social Networking - Students use social networking sites. Find a social networking site to tie CF apps to early in the adoption cycle and build CF stuff on top of their APIs.

Since (it appears) that Buzzword does not yet you publish a document (that might be inaccurate), I have posted the results in this Google Doc:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_12hgh7gm

A big thank you goes out to the group that tackled Education. This team included fellow user group managers Zach Stepek, Mike Cooper (who now runs the Cleveland AUG), Nick Kwiatkowski and Adobe Community Expert Rob Brooks-Bilson, among others. Thanks for these great recommendations!