A new learning experience on MDN

We originally launched the MDN Learn Web Development section in 2016 with the aim of making MDN more accessible to non-experts and helping to take new web developers from "beginner to comfortable".

The content was pretty successful — by 2019 it was being used by over a million people per month to learn web development topics. However, it was noted that the structure was sub-par:

1. The content had become bloated with topics that weren't really suitable for beginner web developers — either they were too advanced, or they were out of scope altogether.
2. Beginners tend to want a robust pathway they can follow to get the knowledge they need, rather than being expected to figure out what to learn and when.
3. Learners these days tend to want interactive multimedia content, not just text.

To solve the second issue highlighted above, we created a resource to help guide people towards learning a better skillset, making them more employable, and enabling them to build a better, more accessible, more responsible web of tomorrow.

As part of this project, we did substantial research to find out exactly what skills are seen as essential in new hires, and what the most common knowledge gaps are. The resulting curriculum was intended to be useful as a study guide for self-learners, and a syllabus for educators to base courses on. We also used it as a place to experiment with including interactive multimedia content via our learning partner, Scrimba. We launched the MDN Curriculum in early 2024.

The curriculum was well-received by educators, but we quickly received feedback that users found it confusing having two learning resources on MDN, with the curriculum/learning pathway in one place and the learning content in another place.

In addition, the pathway was just a curriculum; learners still had to figure out what content to look at to achieve the learning objectives. And it did nothing to solve the first issue listed above — the content was still bloated.

To provide a less confusing, more streamlined learning experience, we decided to merge the curriculum pathway into the MDN Learn Web Development section, restructuring it in the process. The results can be seen at the following new URL — developer.mozilla.org/docs/Learn_web_development.

The most significant changes are as follows:

• The articles now follow the same structure as the curriculum, with useful background and environment setup information in Getting started, the web fundamentals everyone should know in Core, and optional extra topics in Extensions. There is a clear pathway to follow between each article in the first two major sections, so readers know what to learn next at each stage.
• In some cases, content was deemed not suitable for a beginner audience and has been repurposed as extensions/additional articles or migrated to other parts of MDN.
• The specific learning outcomes detailed in the curriculum have been added to the top of the Getting started, Core, and some of the Extension articles, to match the learning outcomes detailed in the Curriculum.
• Other features from the Curriculum have been migrated across to the Learn Web Development section, such as the About page and Resources for educators.

Initially, the Curriculum section will stay, however it will be merged into the Learn area over the next few iterations of this work and will be removed when it is felt the time is right. We will keep a downloadable version as a resource for educators.

Moving forward, we will continue to update the content and design to make Learn Web Development even more useful to learners and educators.

We are intending to give the article content a significant overhaul as we move into 2025. A lot of the content is timeless and does a good job of teaching the fundamentals, but the pacing is uneven, some of the articles are pretty long (which can be intimidating for beginners), and some of the challenges and examples have been around for a long time. Inspired by resources such as the content produced by our learning partner, Scrimba, we intend to shake our content up a bit to make it more fun, bite-size, and digestible.

We are also looking at improving the design of our learning pages, to echo the bright bold design we used on the curriculum and improve the experience further. You can expect to see regular iterative improvements going forward, so watch this space.

We hope you find the new Learn Web Development content structure useful — have a look around and let us know what you think.

If you still have unanswered questions or wish to report issues, please get in touch via the usual communication channels. If your issue concerns a specific piece of content, you might want to file a GitHub issue.