Sort of breaking, well because no one has talked about this yet and there is no official press release. Welcome to WordPress.com’s blogging and podcast training solution WPCourses.com! WP Courses was silently launched in November at WordPress.com/learn. Still definitely in the soft launch phase since some links act strangely but a very interesting direction for WordPress.com and curious how this will expand and its broader effects on the training community.
Blogging for Beginners is a text-based course, Podcasting for Beginners will be a video-based course. Each of these courses includes:
• A series of lessons that can be taken at the students own time
• The ability for students to leave comments and questions throughout the course lessons, which our Happiness Engineers help to answer as well as other community members
• A community blog (using p2) where students interact with each other and our team — from sharing their blogs, writing tips, discussing the course material, etc.
• Virtual office hours over zoom — 30-minute sessions for our students to ask any and all questions to our Happiness Engineers
The course is a deeper dive into blogging content than Blogging University and includes these added elements of the dedicated community, office hours, meetups, etc.
I am not aware of any other hosting company offering paid training for their users and I’m curious how the greater trainer community will react. My guess is that the level of training is geared to end users who need a jump start into WordPress and that the greater training world will be able to offer much more advanced training at better price points. Also, this program is interesting because it does set a base line for price and expectations that many people will see and potential be the rising tide that raises all boats.