Back in April, we introduced the WordPress Facilitator Training Program: a free, open, community-powered path for anyone who knows WordPress and wants to teach it. There’s no application or gatekeeping; just a course, a facilitation guide, and the confidence to run your own workshop.
Five months in, here’s where things stand.
What’s Actually Happened
The program launched with one course, Leading WordPress Education Programs, and the plan was always to pilot it at one campus, then validate at two more. That’s exactly how it’s played out.
- @devmuhib (Muhibul Haque) ran the first pilot, delivered online to two schools in Bangladesh: Ahmad’s Education and Kishoreganj University, 7 attendees across both sessions. Ahmad’s Education has since grown into a full WordPress Credits program, 5 graduates so far, with one, Atikur Rahman, now leading the school’s student club. Kishoreganj University is now a part of WordPress Credits.
- @webtechpooja (Pooja Derashri) delivered our first official in-person workshop at D.Y. Patil School of Engineering & Management in Kolhapur, India (July 23–24). The Kolhapur visit opened conversations with the HOD, Dean, and Vice Chancellor about bringing WordPress into their curriculum, which is exactly the institutional buy-in this program is meant to unlock.
Both Muhibul and Pooja are facilitators who’d never run this program before, working from nothing but the course and the facilitation guide. That’s the whole premise working as intended, and the loop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop keeps tightening: Pooja’s feedback after her workshops added a way for facilitators to flag technical issues, an open-ended comment field, and a “would you recommend this” question, which all now live in the form. Muhibul’s feedback opened up the online delivery format, and both shaped the program language to allow for Facilitators to be flexible with the teaching content.
A Note on Program Leadership
@webtechpooja is stepping in as lead for the Facilitator Training Program going forward. If you have questions, want a workshop scheduled, or are thinking about facilitating for the first time, she’s the person to reach.
How to Get Involved as a Facilitator
Two topics are available now, listed on the handbook’s How the Program Works page:
- Leading WordPress Education Programs: a 9-module self-guided course plus a full 2–3 day facilitation guide This course is aimed at teaching educators how to own the WordPress Education Programs within their own educational institutions.
- AI Literacy through WordPress: a 3-module self-guided course plus a full 2–3 day facilitation guide. This course is aimed at university students and early-career professionals, no prior AI or WordPress experience needed. This will also be the program’s first credentialed course, a portfolio- and credential-ready complement to the AI Leaders micro-credential, and the model going forward: every new topic we add to this program should carry or work toward a recognized credential, not just knowledge for its own sake.
Come in as a learner and start with the course, or come in with existing expertise and start from the facilitation guide directly, see the handbook’s “Two Pathways In” for how that works.
What’s Next
More workshops, more campuses, and a tighter feedback loop between the people delivering this program and the people building it. If you have expertise to contribute a new course topic, the Training Team’s Creating a WordPress Facilitator Training Program Course guide walks through the whole pipeline, and #training on Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ is always open for questions.
Thank you to everyone who’s put this program into practice this year, especially Muhibul Haque and Pooja Derashri, for running these workshops and telling us honestly what needs to change. 🙂
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