Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:03)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack Today's episode features a segment from my interview with Isotta Peira head of the WordPress Credits Program. Isotta filled me in on the educational initiative aimed at connecting students with the open source community. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:33)
For those of us that don't know a lot about the WordPress Credits Program, how does that work? Who is it for?
Isotta Peira (00:41)
The WordPress credits program has been created for institutions. Originally, was college level, higher institutions, and now we're also opening up for ⁓ high schools and younger students. Let me tell you about the flow. What is the journey?
The interested institutions sign an agreement with the WordPress Foundation where they basically commit to recognise the time spent on this programme as either credits if they use a credit system or just recognise it as a part of the curriculum. Then we start receiving students. We don't limit the participation to computer science or text studies.
we were open to any type of studies that can find a way to train their skills in our community. And once we have an agreement with the institution, we prepare onboarding windows for the students. Currently, the students ⁓ usually are onboarded the first two weeks of each month. we as students have to sign up on a form. We assign them to a mentor.
and they receive instruction via email on how to create the WordPress profiles and how to start the first connection with the mentors. We have a platform for them created on learn.workpress.org. So it looks like a course. can, students who registered, gain access to the course and then they have a step-by-step program to fulfill. The program is meant to be
150 hours with the possibility to expand it. And students experience ⁓ three phases. The first one is the onboarding part, where they learn about WordPress as a community, open source and WordPress skills. And they get to create their personal website.
They will have a website on WordPress. We have sponsors who provide ⁓ hosting a domain and plugins that they might want to use. And once they have published their website, they start learning about contribution. So they jump into the project phase, the biggest one, the second. They get to know everything about the contribution teams, how they work, where they meet, the tools they use.
and each student will have to pick one or two contribution teams they want to contribute to, depending on how long it's going to be the program for them. And at this point, they will start connecting with the teams and working on their project. The mentor is there to guide them along the way. They will have weekly check-ins with the mentor, things, and then more conversational things.
But what we really want to achieve is for the students to also experience the real contribution journey in our community. ⁓ they are asked to participate to the contribution team meetings, to attend events in person, if there are any, or online. We encourage them to create their own student's club on campus, which is another of the programs that we...
that we launched last year. so, depending on the students, 13, 18 weeks, they're supposed to keep working on the contributions. They will use their website to, of course, publish their content, personal.
⁓ personal interests and passions, but also they are required to ⁓ publish once a week a recap of their contributions as a way to ⁓ encourage them to post more and so get more familiar with WordPress itself, but also as a way to teach them how in a remote tech environment we usually work. So you own your project, nobody is micromanaging you.
but still you are expected to share updates with the other stakeholders. And also, this also provides ⁓ the program administration a very easy way to see if students are progressing. And at the end of the program, they are asked to create a final presentation about their journey and their contribution, which they will upload on WordPress TV.
With the final post on their website, we can consider the program. ⁓ The program completed, they will download a certificate of completion from the platform itself, a certificate from the WordPress foundation signed by Matt Mullenweg, and they will get a WordPress credits graduate badge on their WordPress profiles.
In addition to their contribution activity and their profiles, the school can also see two additional proofs that they have successfully completed the program. And this is how their journey goes.