Tutorial: Refactor the online tutorial in difficulty steps and content covered

[j-opatz]

Describe the Task

This task will cover the bulk of the tutorial updates and major overhaul of the tutorial.
As a beginning to the list of improvements, we need to included appropriate references to outside tools for file previewing (ncview, ncdump, wgrib2, etc.) and examples of accessing multiple file types with those tools and METplus. Examples need to progress in difficulty when covering the same topic following the “teach me, show me, let me try” approach. The “let me try” phase should be simple modifications from the “show me” phase with 1 or 2 steps the user has to do. Hints need to be made available so users can solve it if they get stuck.

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5+ days

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[j-opatz]

Part of today's (7/11/2023) METplus engineering meeting was spent discussing the placement of the METplus training videos and RTD presence. Because this area quickly falls out of date and is not as easily updated as text, there was concern of how to proceed with this material.

From the focus group feedback, there were 2 points of input: the first is that most users didn't even know this resource existed. This was due to no advertisement and no links from any of the more known sources (website and User Guides). The second was that while videos were useful, they were seen as better fit for introductory and overview material. Videos that went in depth or over 5 minutes were not useful and difficult to search even with the video text provided.

However, there is a requirement that we keep these videos, in one form or another. Many of the team members believe that the tutorial should be relocated to RTD (a separate issue), as well as keeping the videos out of the website. This could potentially be done, but would require more links and hence more checks to make sure those links don't become broken/outdated.

My preferred route is to migrate the video's material into new videos that outline the beginning of the tutorial sessions, providing an overview and a potential second attempt to reach viewers on a topic. Keeping them isolated in a RTD, even if the embedding aspect can be "more difficult", is part of the problem that leads us to the disparate sources method we're currently in.

[briannen]

We don't need to do the whole thing at once. We can just refactor one completely from top to bottom (including other issues as needed) as an example.