How do you plan WordPress training for people with different roles, learning styles, languages and accessibility needs at once? Chris Badgettcolleague asked me that on LMScast, episode 345, the LifterLMS podcast. I’d been a long time listener, so being the guest was fun.
🎙️ Episode details
- Show: LMScast, episode 345, from LifterLMS
- Host: Chris Badgett
- Guest: me, Courtney Robertson, linked to my old site, CourtneyEngle.com
- Published: the video went up on February 26, 2022, and the episode page on March 3, 2022
- Topics: WordPress training with no barriers to entry, and what Learn WordPress is for
- Listen and read along: The WordPress Education Ecosystem Challenges and Opportunities, with a full transcript, on LMScast
The captions come from a machine transcript I generated, and I haven’t proofread them yet.
🧭 WordPress training with no barriers to entry
First, to Chris’s list of user types, from beginners to agencies to product companies, I added learning styles, human languages and accessibility needs. After all, if the software is open source, I said, training should be as available as reading a P2 post or joining a Slack channel.
Still, there’s no shortage of resources. Instead, the gap is sequence: what to learn, in what order, from “somebody built my site and I need to make a post” to “I’m a senior developer training a team.” And because the software keeps changing, the training has to keep changing with it.
📚 What Learn WordPress is for
I shared the Training team’s mission: helping people learn to use, extend and contribute to WordPress through live and self paced learning, plus downloadable lesson plans for instructors, all via learn.wordpress.org.
Learn first launched at the end of 2020. Then, with fewer in person WordCamps during COVID, the team added video workshops with discussion groups on Zoom or Slack. Since then, meetup groups have shown the videos during meetups, and programs like Girl Develop It have used the lesson plans. I’d used them myself in high school and bootcamp classes.
🧪 What can you take from this WordPress training talk?
- Course creators: curation and sequence are where you add value, not raw information.
- Instructors: Learn’s lesson plans are free to use in your own classes.
Also, more conversations like this one live in my podcast and speaking archive.
🗓️ Archival note
Later, on November 9, 2026, I expanded this post from the publisher’s episode page and transcript; it had held only a sentence and the video. The video went up February 26, 2022, and the episode page is dated March 3, 2022. I couldn’t confirm when the audio feed released it, so I left this post’s date of March 2, 2022 unchanged. However, I reviewed the transcript, not the audio.