My current focus is Learn WordPress - a platform that exists to accelerate WordPress learning through high-quality and relevant educational content free to all users. I managed the launch of this platform in December 2020 and I am building a brand new team that is 100% focused on managing all aspects of it, and indeed all areas of instructional content for the community - this will be my primary area of responsibility for the foreseeable future.
Here's the full story of how this platform came to be:
At WordCamp San Francisco 2013, the WordPress Training Team began working on a platform to help people learn and teach about WordPress. Over a number of years, the team built up a sizable set of comprehensive text-based lesson plans that anyone could use to teach WordPress to others. These were hosted on GitHub with a view to moving them over to their official home on learn.wordpress.org in the future.
Early on in the COVID pandemic of 2020 - some years after the Training Team birthed the idea of Learn WordPress - it became clear to the Community Team that in-person events were not going to be returning anytime soon. This presented a problem in the WordPress community: Since WordPress events are frequently centred around education, people were no longer receiving the kind of useful instruction they had become used to from their local communities. As a team that primarily supported this events program, the Community Team needed to remedy this by finding another way to create educational spaces for the global community.
The team tried a few methods of supporting online events and, while they had some limited success, these events were never quite as effective as their in-person counterparts. It was clear that a new framework for delivering educational WordPress content was needed. WordPress users needed something focused, relevant, always available, and, most importantly, accessible to all. An excellent opportunity for cross-team collaboration presented itself.
Workshops had become increasingly popular at WordPress events over the preceding few years, so an idea was conceived to use that same format outside of the bounds of any particular event. With this idea, the Community and Training Teams discussed plans for collaboration and discovered a great opportunity for the teams to work together to provide an end-to-end learning experience for the WordPress community, combining asynchronous training content with the existing lesson plans.
After much planning and development, the two teams launched Learn WordPress in December 2020. This would serve as a home for up-to-date and relevant instructional content for all users of WordPress. Initially taking the form of video workshops and lesson plans, the platform is growing to include text-based content, quizzes, and complete courses with collaborative learning in discussion groups and cohorts, making Learn WordPress the primary location for educational WordPress content freely available for everyone to access.