[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how WordPress education programs are growing.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we are joined by three WordPress Education Initiative leaders, Destiny Kanno, Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski.

Together, they have spent years at the heart of WordPress training and outreach, working in roles spanning community education management, plugin development, and credit program administration. Their efforts have helped shape student engagement and university partnerships across the globe, introducing thousands of learners to WordPress.

The conversation focused on the current landscape of WordPress education with particular attention to three key initiatives, the WordPress Credits Program, Campus Connect, and Student Clubs.

Each initiative is designed to provide unique entry points for students of all ages and education levels. From high schoolers building their first site in a library to university students earning official credits for open source contributions.

We discussed the different approaches these programmes take. WP Credits ties student work directly to academic credit and mentorship. Campus Connect provides flexible, community driven, events in diverse locations and Student Clubs foster sustainable, peer led, learning within schools and other institutions. We explore how these models feed into each other, building a sustainable ecosystem for ongoing growth in the WordPress community.

We also get into the importance of repeat campus partnerships, the need for scalable facilitator training, and the role of recognition, certificates, badges, and public showcases in keeping students motivated and validated in their journey.

If you’re curious about the growing movement to bring WordPress knowledge to the next generation, or are looking to get involved with education in your local community, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Destiny Kanno, Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski.

I am joined on the podcast by Destiny Kanno, by Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski. Hello, one and all. Nice to have you with us.

[00:03:29] Destiny Kanno: Hello. Thank you.

[00:03:30] Anand Upadhyay: Hello.

[00:03:31] Maciej Pilarski: Hello.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: So a few months ago, back in, I think it was September 2025, I was joined by two of the three participants on the call today. I was joined by Destiny and I was joined by Anand. We were also joined at that point by Isotta, but she’s not on the call today. We’ve obviously got a wonderful replacement, Maciej who’s going to do a fabulous job explaining the bits and pieces here.

But the intention of that episode, which you can find on the WP Tavern website, it’s episode number 183, was to find out about all of the overlapping education initiatives in the WordPress space. And it was born, I think, largely out of a sense of curiosity on my part, but also a somewhat sense of confusion, because there were lots of things which were going on. Some of them seemed to be slightly overlapping. There was a conflict of names in some cases. So that episode was laying out the groundworks of what has been happening in the WordPress space.

When that conversation finished and we’d click the stop record button, I said, that was absolutely fascinating. This seems to be moving at such a rate, wouldn’t it be good to revisit this whole subject in about six months time?

Well, we missed that target, but here we are, maybe eight months later. I think my intuition at that point was correct, because being a close observer of what’s going on in the WordPress community, I think it’s fair to say that the educational space has been somewhat turbocharged during the last eight months.

And so today’s episode, with the help of the three people I’ve just mentioned, is to describe what’s going on, what’s changed, maybe some things that have been mothballed, but certainly a lot of things that are new and interesting and have gained a lot of momentum.

But I think, dear listener, the intention of this episode is to get you involved. Is to get to the end of this episode and for your curiosity to have been turned into action. To have gotten you out of your chair, written an email, turned up to an event, helped organise a thing.

So please have that in the back of your mind. If you’re sitting listening to this in a car, at your desktop, there is actual action that could be taken at the end of this. I think the intention of all four of us on this panel would be dearly for that to happen.

Okay, let’s establish the credentials of the people that we’re going to be talking to today. So we’ll just do a little potted bio of you one at a time. So we’ll begin with Destiny, if you could just tell us a little bit about you, your relationship with education in the WordPress space, I suppose would be apropos.

[00:06:01] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, absolutely. So again, Destiny Kanno. I’m currently working as an education program manager sponsored by Automattic. And I work directly with the Make WordPress Community Team. And I also work adjacently with the training team as well, because education training materials, they go pretty hand in hand. And I’ve been doing this now for about four years and, yeah, it’s just evolved since my original time working on Learn WordPress, and that relaunch that happened, to now, yeah, these wonderful programs that are spreading like wildfire as you said.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Okay, we’ll move over to Anand for the same sort of introductory moment.

[00:06:43] Anand Upadhyay: Yes. So my name is Anand Upadhyay, and I run the WordPress plugin development company, WPVibes. Apart from that, I’m very much involved in the WordPress community and I contribute in multiple ways. It can be documentation, it can be Core, Polyglots. But I’m also keenly involved in the community part, and specifically I can say with the education initiatives, I started with WP Campus Connect in WordPress Campus Connect in 2024. And since then, after that we started joining hands with Destiny and we started evolving this program in a much bigger shape. So that’s it.

[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you so much. And last, but by no means least, Maciej.

[00:07:20] Maciej Pilarski: Yeah. Thanks for having me. My name is Maciej Pilarski. So I’ve been doing anything related to WordPress pretty much since 2007, so that’s been a while. But the biggest breakthrough for me was 2014 when I actually volunteered to WordCamp Europe in Sovia, Bulgaria. That opened my eyes to the whole community, everything that is happening around WordPress.

And since then, pretty much I’ve been working for multiple companies from the WordPress ecosystem. I joined Automattic in 2016. For many years I’ve been a Happiness Engineer, and since October last year, I’ve joined Isotta as one of the admins of the WordPress Credit program. And since that time, I will have been helping her out to grow that initiative.

And Destiny mentioned, it spreads like fire because at that time we had six universities onboarded, now we are at 21. The 21st, we got it after WordCamp Asia actually through a connection made there. And it’s our first institution from Africa, from Uganda. A huge shout out to Stephen Dumba, who I connected with during the event. And after that, pretty much a week after we signed our first partnership from Africa. So we’re actively growing and getting new institutions on board.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. Gosh, there was an awful lot in there, wasn’t there? That was really interesting. We’ll try and unpack quite a lot of that.

Firstly, a sort of slightly personal message from me. I don’t usually reveal much about myself on this podcast. I take the position that I’m a, kind of like an interested party, but don’t really give much of my own thoughts. However, this is different because I cannot think of a more interesting, meaningful, moral, let’s go with that word as well, use of time than educating people. It simply is the most profoundly useful thing to do with your life.

Now, obviously people will have different opinions about that, but the juxtaposition of free open source software, in this case WordPress, and education is a real sweet spot for me. I just think that is such an amazing thing to be involved in, to have going on in the background.

If you think about it, an open source project, like how many open source projects have this level of stuff going on in the education space, this real international footprint. Things going on which we’ll find out about in a minute. It’s really fascinating.

And I am sure that the listenership to this podcast, the vast majority of people listening will never have encountered much of this before. Maybe they’ve seen stuff on Learn because they want to technically learn about WordPress in an online capacity, but we’re going to be delving into real world events affecting real adults, real youngsters.

And so anyway, that’s my little bit at the beginning, just how curious it is that the project is so big that we’ve got this international footprint of education. And so I suppose what we should do right at the beginning is lay out the different initiatives and just name them, and try to figure out how they differ from each other. Just so that we’ve got some kind of awareness.

So I don’t know which one of you wants to take that, but if maybe you take one each or something, I don’t know. If we just want to lay out the, just erect that tent basically so that we know what the initiatives are called, and how they differ from one another. So I’ll open that up. Whoever wants to step in.

[00:10:48] Maciej Pilarski: I can start with the Credits Program. So the Credits Program is based, it’s a contribution based program, internship, initiative by the WordPress Foundation that connects higher education students with the global open source community. So basically it’s an opportunity for the students as part of the educational curriculum to contribute to the WordPress community.

There are two types of courses that the students can do. One of them is 50 hours, the second one is 150 hours. Usually the students do that during a full academic semester. And as part of that, students are first onboarded into the WordPress ecosystem and the wider open source ecosystem where they learn not only about WordPress, but open source as a whole, and how crucial it is for the internet.

Then the second phase is picking the contribution area to which they would like to contribute. All the contributions areas basically are the ones that are listed at make.wordpress.org. So any team that is listed there, students can pick from that area. During that phase, they work on a particular area that they have selected.

And finally, during phase three, they wrap up the whole achievements, the contribution, what they did, they publish a final post. And what is also very important as part of the credit scores, students have also assigned a mentor from the WordPress community that guides them through the whole process. We don’t leave them alone. We connect them with actual mentors from the WordPress community that are vetted by us, that guide them through the whole journey into the contribution and the whole WordPress ecosystem.

So it works on multiple levels. For me, this connection is also special because it builds this bridge between the previous generation of WordPress contributors to the new one where they are introduced and can start working on any fields of contribution.

What is also important is that this is not limited to technical universities. Pretty much any type of university can participate in the program. The first university that we started with was University of Pisa, and it was the humanity studies. So the students from humanity field were the first group who started the Credits Program. There’s room for pretty much anyone from any field.

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. There’s a lot there. Wow. I’ve just been taking notes and I’ve almost filled an entire A4 page. So WP Credits, the WordPress Credits Program, I guess the name sort of gives it away. The idea here is that you trade time for university or higher education credit. So credit being, I suppose if you were to atomise your three year degree, you might do, I don’t know, 12 modules or something like that. The idea is that one of those modules, perhaps it’s more, becomes something in the WordPress, but also curiously the free open source software space as well. I didn’t actually know that.

The idea is that you link up with real world institutions. So the first one was Pisa, and maybe we can get into which other ones have come along. And in exchange for 50 hours or 150 hours, you will be given that credit, which can then go to the overall awarding of a degree or whatever it is that you are hoping to get.

You’re then linked up with team members, WordPress community team members who will mentor you and shepherd you through this process. And the idea is that it culminates, I think you said in a final post, which I suppose in a sense is a bit like a dissertation or something like that, you sum up all the different bits and pieces. Yeah.

[00:14:29] Maciej Pilarski: Once that happens, the students also receives an official certificate from the WordPress Foundation, signed by Matt himself, that certifies that they completed the course. And what is also important to know, the whole progress through the course and what they did during the course, it’s also stored on the wordpress.org profile. So any contributions that they did, for example, photos that they’ve uploaded, this all will be visible on the wordpress.org profile. And they also receive a special badge dedicated to students who graduated from that program.

So it really gets them started into the WordPress ecosystem, and at the same time creates something like a small portfolio for any future company that would like to, for example, hire them. Because they have a proven history of contributing to the ecosystem.

[00:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s an interesting quid pro quo, isn’t it? So the idea is you do all this work, which on the face of it, I suppose looks very philanthropic, you know, you’re giving up your time, but you get a real thing at the back end of it. You get a certificate. You can then presumably apply for jobs and indicate, okay, I’ve done this, I’ve contributed in this meaningful way.

What I think is really interesting there, and it kind of gets lost, I’ve worked in education in the past and I know the red tape that’s involved in doing anything in the education space. There is so much red tape. And I can only imagine what’s happened in the background to enable these kind of things. You know, the back and forth, the tennis of emails that go on and on and the proof that’s required to categorically show that this thing that we are doing is worth something. You know, it’s not just this Mickey Mouse. We use that expression, Mickey Mouse kind of qualification that really, it doesn’t actually require any hard work. It’s just there, nothing really in it, but you get an accreditation anyway.

I can only imagine the hard work that has gone in every single time you touch a new institution, trying to convince them that this is legitimate, that this is real. You’ve just kind of glossed over all of that by just describing what is in existence, not necessarily what has gone on to make it happen. I know that there’s probably more than the three of you involved in this, but my profound thanks for all of that hard work, which presumably is utterly and completely invisible. And I can only imagine what’s going on there. So yeah, thank you for all of that.

[00:16:54] Maciej Pilarski: Thank you for that.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So that was WP Credits. So that was one wing of the things that we’re going to discuss today. Should we move on to another one and maybe somebody else wants to take the helm?

[00:17:03] Anand Upadhyay: I think Destiny can take Campus Connect and then I will take Student Clubs.

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Destiny, let’s move over to you and see what you can tell us about something different.

[00:17:11] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, so I’d love to tell you more about WordPress Campus Connect. And the way we ended with WordPress Credits, I think is also very critical to the story of Campus Connect because, you know, it started with Campus Connect first, and that’s how organisers such as Anand and Pooja like were able to get those connections with the universities through being boots on the ground, you know, having those relationships. Proving through action that these activities that we’re doing with the students are having real impact and are showing real results.

Slowly building up these kind of case studies in a way has helped open a lot of doors, especially with Campus Connect now, we’ve done a lot of events, especially since we last talked. Like I think this year alone, we’ve already had 22 Campus Connect events. So, like it’s not even half the year and it’s quickly becoming one of the biggest run events, WordPress official series.

But these events are like a way of opening the door, right? Hey, here’s a free learning opportunity for your students. And as you said, like the red tape is there. A lot of institutions are like, wait, so what’s in it for you? Why is, there’s a little bit of dubiousness sometimes in the reaction, right? You’re going to give your time to educate our students, why? But once they see, it’s like, no, we really are just passionate about spreading WordPress, showing students what’s capable with their website, how it applies to different skillsets as well. Like it’s not just for coders, it is for marketers, it is for designers.

You know, there’s so many career opportunities that once we just get the foot in the door and we’re able to showcase that, a lot of institutions are like, okay, now I get it. I do want to highlight in Anand’s case, like they’re going to have their third WordPress Campus Connect in Ajmer this year. You’ve got repeat institutions. I’ve heard you also have institutions that are like, when are you going to come to our place and teach WordPress? You know, once the fire is lit and people see how bright and shiny it is, like people want to get involved.

But as you said, like getting it to click for people, that is like the most difficult part. And I’ll give an example of, right now in Japan, we had our first WordPress Campus Connect event on the 9th of May. So I’m like, woo hoo. Like it finally happened. But we have this community in Japan that is like very passionate, very active. So when I first was like introducing the concept of Campus Connect, people were like, okay, but like how do we do this? What’s it about? It takes like a lot of presentations, a lot of going to people in person and talking. Helping them even shape the conversation that they’re going to have with the institution to sell this amazing gift of WordPress on their campus.

And after this one on the ninth, like now we have a case study in Japan that others can now use to be a starting point for those conversations going forward. So I think, once you have that one step, the gate just slowly opens until it’s just, the doors bang open in each way. But yeah, we’ve seen really great success with Campus Connect and it’s just like honestly, it just keeps growing.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask a quick question? So I just want to draw a very clear line for everybody that’s listening to this, what the difference may be between Campus Connect and WP Credits. Because from the description that we’ve had so far, it may be that you’ve fallen into the trap of thinking, well, they sound like they might be the same thing. So could you just, Destiny, just tease out where Campus Connect differs? Maybe in the nature of the event, the timing of the event, the availability, the age group, those kind of things that separate WP Credits from the Campus Connect initiative.

[00:21:02] Destiny Kanno: Yeah. Thank you, that’s like a really great distinction to make. So whereas WordPress Credits is geared toward higher education, Campus Connect is geared toward, honestly any level of students as long as they’re able to browse the web safely, and enjoy and participate.

So that means, Elementary school students now are pretty good at devices. High school students, college students, vocational students. We honestly kept the door pretty open in terms of what a campus means. We’ve even had a Campus Connect event in Uganda in a library, the Lira Public Library because students were able to go there right?

We were trying to make it as barrier free for students wherever their campus is. And so that’s, I think, the main difference. It’s more wide ranging in terms of who can participate as a student. And then also the fact that it could be a one-off event, so a one day event. A lot nowadays are multiple day events, they’ll maybe go two times out of a month, or a couple days consecutively. And then after that it’s up to really the organisers in the institution whether or not we have another addition on their campus the same year, or the next year.

[00:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to tease out a few things. I just want to point out to, me as an English person, that is to say, not an English speaker, but somebody from England, campus has a really defined definition, and it’s usually bound to a university. Whereas it sounds like the description here, campus literally means the place where education happens, not it’s 18 years old and older, you know, people doing degrees, bachelors and PhDs and that kind of thing. Basically, if there’s an institution somewhere, that’s what the campus is in this case. Okay.

So the WP Credits program sounds like you forge your relationship with the university, and correct me if I’m wrong, it sounds like it takes place inside that institution, and it’s part of that program and what have you.

The Campus Connect initiative is much more ad hoc. It could be a one-off, it could be monthly, it could be inside a library, it could be inside the school, it could be an inside an institution. It feels a bit more like, I don’t know, a WordPress Meetup, but geared towards a younger audience or something like that.

And the minimum age requirement is really driven by your capacity to type on a keyboard and hold a mouse and those kind of things. And that’s kind of curious to me because I think my educational experience was always younger children. It’s really interesting how patterns are laid down at a very, very early age. Patterns that go on into much later life get laid down, typically at incredibly young ages. So this is fascinating for digging into that.

And it’s not just about, say, the code, it sounds like code is on the menu, but it could be about marketing, it could be about design. Basically the gamut of anything online, CMSy, those kind of things. Okay, is there anything you want to add? Did I misunderstand anything there, or misstate anything there?

[00:24:02] Destiny Kanno: No, I think you’re completely right. We’re trying to convey that WordPress isn’t just a blogging software that I think is still a lot of people have a mentality of. Like there are many ways to utilise it that goes beyond that.

And one thing I did want to add are a couple numbers. So since WordPress Campus Connect became official in May of 2025, an official WordPress event series, I should say, we’ve had 42 completed events, with 71 participating institutions, and over 5,500 students have been reached.

[00:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: That’s something else. 42 events, 71 institutions, and I think you said five and a half thousand individuals. Good grief. I don’t know what the measure of success is for this, but that feels like success to me.

I mean, imagine turning up to a WordCamp, like a flagship WordCamp and five and a half thousand people descending on you. You’d feel slightly overwhelmed. That’s a lot, isn’t it? Gosh, that’s pretty remarkable. Wow. Congratulations.

[00:25:05] Destiny Kanno: And the majority, the outcome, the students make a website. So we could almost count those students as also new WordPress websites that are live now on the web. So within a year, organisers around the world have been able to make that happen.

[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: Could I just perhaps draw another distinction as well, just very quickly, because it sounds like the WordPress Credit system, because it’s binding itself to institutions, it sounds like there might be more paperwork going on there, and maybe more high level meetings that need to take place. Whereas Campus Connect feels much more community driven. It’s the kind of thing that, quite literally, anybody listening to this podcast with a fair wind could have one of those going in a handful of months. If they’ve got the right initiative and they can find the audience for that.

Again, is that about right? There’s sort of more opportunity to become involved with the Campus Connect initiatives. You don’t need to have that academic background or have a point of contact at a university. You basically just need a building, some interest and a bunch of students.

[00:26:02] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, the key thing is, you know, having a real connection to the campus that you’re going to present at. But you’re exactly right. We tried really hard to lower the barrier to organise these events. Because I don’t know if you’ve organised a WordPress event before, there’s kind of a lot of hoops you have to jump through. And we’re like, okay, how can we think about this in a different way?

And I think that also has positive repercussions for how we organise other events too, that are, changes are being thought about too so that we can enable people and empower them to put these events, instead of bogging them down and process and a little bit of bureaucracy to say.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s really curious about that as well is we’re all in different parts of the world, aren’t we? People on the call today are in Japan and I’m in Europe and, Anand, are you in India? I think.

[00:26:47] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah.

[00:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Each of those events, I guess would look quite different. The kind of nature of the attendees, the nature of the kind of building it might be in, the institution. And it really is, you just grab what’s around you I suppose, and work with that. If you’ve got a connection to an institution, you can go for it. Maciej, I feel like I crosstalked you. I think you wanted to say quite a few times and I’ve just interrupted. I’m very sorry.

[00:27:08] Maciej Pilarski: No worries about that. So I wanted to add that those initiatives set backgrounds for each other. Because in some uni institutions, the interest sparks with a Campus Connect event, and that gets the institution interested in those initiatives, which sets background for WordCamp Credit.

And it happens also the other way around, where we start with an institution that starts credits and then we get the students interested in WordPress in general, the community, which leads to a Campus Connect event during the Credits Program. What is important is that those initiatives don’t compete with each other. They support each other.

[00:27:51] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so there’s a lovely virtuous cycle there, isn’t there? Where the two things can be going on in harmony, one promoting the other and they’re definitely not in competition. Okay. That’s really interesting.

One final question on Campus Connect, and I’ll direct this at Destiny, just because she’s been handling that. With the WP Credits thing, there is this moment where you hold the certificate in your hand and you go, yay, did it.

Is the same thing true of Campus Connect or is it more of a show up to the one event, you know that you did that, that was great, you can file that away in your own head as a thing? Or is there some sort of accreditation, or certificate giving, or badge giving, or profile updating that might go on on wordpress.org? Is there any sort of thing that the attendees receive, and I suppose that the people that are organising might receive as well?

[00:28:37] Destiny Kanno: Yes. So we do have a certificate of participation that students can receive signed by WordPress Foundation Executive Director, Mary Hubbard. And that just needs to be requested by the organisers ahead of time, because we need to get the signature and all that. So yes, they can come away with that. And we’ve heard really positive things about that, like it motivates them. They’re like, yeah, I did something, which they did.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. That was WP Credits and WP Campus Connect.

Can I just say at this point, dear listener, if at this point you’re thinking hang on a minute, there’s a lot going on here, don’t worry, there’ll be show notes. If you go to the WP Tavern website, there’ll be show notes. I’ll try to list out as many sensible links to get you to the root of each one of these initiatives, so that you can begin your journey and fan out from there.

I’m not sure what episode number this will be, but if you just go and search for, oh, I don’t know, Destiny or Anand or Maciej, you could probably find the episode that way. And all the show notes will contain all of the links.

Right, in which case, I think it might be Anand’s turn. What have you decided to take on Anand?

[00:29:39] Anand Upadhyay: So I will be sharing my thoughts on the third part of this whole education initiative ecosystem. So that is a Student Club. Just a few minutes before you were giving the analogue of meetup with this Campus Connect. So I would like to share the same analogue with us because we are more accustomed with like other terms of WordCamps and Meetups and contributer days.

WordPress Campus Connect is kind of like a WordCamp happening in the campus, because it’s like a big day event that holds everything happening, different kind of sessions, maybe workshops happening. So I would compare it with that thing.

And same way, credits thing, Credit Program is kind of like ongoing contribution series because more focused on the contribution part because the student devote 150 hours of their program. A lot of period goes to the contribution.

And now the same way we, if we talk about the Student club, it’s similar to like the Meetups that we have. But these are the in campus meetups for the students and by the students. How do things get started? Like the Campus Connect introduce the WordPress to those campuses and to those students, but since most of the campus, it’s a once in a year event. So once this event has sparked something about the WordPress in the students. So keeping that momentum going on, that’s where the Student Clubs come in.

So with the Student Club, it’s kind of like, as I mentioned, it’s like an in campus meet program. So a student can gather themselves, they can form a club and a couple of students can be nominated as club organisers, student club organiser from their campus. And then they organise the in-campus events, maybe like once in a month or twice a month, depending on academic calendar. There are a lot of hurdles in doing those things continuously.

But they usually do once or twice a month. They do a kind of a meetup in their campus. The students gathered together. They learn from variable resources available from WordPress. And from those resources, they share with the other students. It’s kind of a group learning, group study, that we use. Education live, we always do that. It’s kind of a group study. They’re learning from themselves. If someone has learned something, they are helping others to learn those things.

So I would just like to give some of the examples from my city. There are multiple Student Clubs are going on. When we went to the campus, we just taught like a small group of students about the WordPress, because we’d have some limitations of the resources, of the setting arrangement. We cannot call all the students of the campus and, okay, come together and I have a amazing workshop. So we have given the WordPress walk through to the limited number of students.

After that, they form a Student Club in their campus because they got very much interested. Then the first session they did was like, they started teaching to their juniors, like the students who have just entered the campus. They took a session for them. So they told, whatever we have told them, they have taught the same thing to the juniors.

After that, in the next few session, they experimented different things. Like in some session they’re just doing a fun quiz around WordPress. And in some sessions they are doing a kind of like a, I would say like a hackathon kind of thing. So they are just picking up a website. Or you can, just similar to the speed build challenge that Jamie do. So they have just one website open on the screen and everybody’s like cloning that website.

So there are different ways students are engaging through those student clubs. So it is helping to keep the momentum going on so that the student keep learning about WordPress and they are also connecting with the community members for the guidance about how they can learn more. What should they learn next if they are sharing their experience. Like we have covered these things and, what should we go next?

And in the recent WordCamp Asia, they’re also one of the Student Club lead from my city. She joined the event and there are conversation with the, like other community members who has offered them like, okay, we can come to your campus, or we can do, have a webinar for your campus where we can teach you particular subjects, particular topics. Maybe they can talk about SEO, maybe they can talk about plugin development.

So this is also opening the horizon for them, to learn from people across the world. So that is how the Student Clubs are happening. The examples I’ve gave, again, from my own city because I’m closely mentoring them, but there’s similar things are happening across the world.

So it is helping to create a kind of sustainable environment for the long-term sustainable environment in the campus. So the next time when we go to that campus, we are not going to teach like the basics of WordPress, because we want like, the ecosystem should be built within the campus, so every student know about the WordPress. Because last time when we went to the campus, we have to tell everything about WordPress because why you should learn WordPress.

So the Student Clubs, my ambition is that, wherever the Student Club is from, next time a Campus Connect event is happening, next time we should not tell them about what is WordPress and why they should learn this thing. There should be already a sustainable ecosystem.

And I feel that all these three programs are like very much interconnected. And the real impact of these programs, we will be able to see in the next two or three years. And there will be a regular ongoing activities around WordPress in the campus.

And these are also kind of a balance program as well. Like the Campus Connect is introducing WordPress to the students, Credits Program is motivating them more towards like the contribution part. And I would say that Student Clubs is more inclined towards getting new users to the WordPress. Because if we keep on focusing on the contribution, contribution, but if we discard the like increasing the number of new users, so we are not going to win. We need a balanced state.

The Student Club is trying to, learning how to build website, how to mastering the skills of the WordPress. And later on, many of them are going to join the contribution part as well.

So this whole ecosystem is built around bringing more people to the contribution, bringing more people to use WordPress, build websites, as in, for the individuals as a business as well. So that’s how all these three programrs are very much interconnected, and growing together fast.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like, of the three things that we’ve talked about, so WP Credits, Campus Connect, the Student Club, this final one that you’ve just covered, it feels like that’s got a very flat hierarchy to it. In other words, there’s like this peer learning. So it feels like more or less anybody can show up and demonstrate anything, which might then lead to somebody else thinking, okay, that was interesting, I’ll take on next month’s one because I’ve now seen that’s doable. Less hierarchy, if you know what I mean? So a much more flat structure.

[00:35:45] Anand Upadhyay: Because when we started Campus Connect, we also get a lot of attraction in the local community as well. And people join our Meetup groups. But then it becomes difficult for us, how to plan about the topics for our meetup. We have some experienced professionals coming in. We have some students coming in, and we plan the topics that suits the professionals. The student will feel like, okay, what’s they’re talking, we are not getting anything in our mind. If we bring the topics, very basic topics and the professionals who are joining the community meetups, they’ll feel like, okay, these are very basic stuff, why am I coming here?

Student Clubs giving them their own platform, giving them a own opportunity. Okay, these are all the familiar faces. It is also giving the opportunity to come on the stage, come onto the stage and get out of your fear as well. It is also generating leadership qualities in them. Okay, we have to keep this momentum going on and we have to keep the activities going on. So there are a lot of ways, apart from learning WordPress, there are a lot of other ways it is helping the students as well.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: When you have to stand up in front of a bunch of people and deliver something, obviously there’s a whole bunch of us that are just really confident at doing that, quite happy to stand up and do that kind of thing off the bat. But equally, there’s people for whom that is just the most terrifying experience possible. You know, standing up in front of two or three people, oh boy, you know, anything above that is just off the books.

And I was just wondering about that, whether or not there’s, in this particular style of event, the Student Club, whether there is a growing corpus of, I don’t know, previously done topics or topic suggestions or slide decks or anything like that, which might enable people to feel that level of confidence? I don’t know if that’s something which is being put together. Just resources which enable somebody who doesn’t have the confidence, let’s go with that word, who then may gain that confidence. And I’m going to pass this to Destiny because she’s waving her hand.

[00:37:30] Destiny Kanno: I was really hoping I could shamelessly plug this project. This is like, you’ve said the most opportune thing. So I’m actually developing right now what I’m like tentatively calling the Meetup Activity Library. It comes with like kits on certain topics. So for example, WordPress Playground was the first one I built. But it comes with the facilitation guide, which is a doc. So the facilitator can read through, understand the steps they’re going to go through in the activity, how to pace it. And then a presentation deck which they would display, if that’s available to them, to the folks that they’re presenting to. And it’s a hands-on activity only. So it’s not only presentation. The facilitator of course guides and talks them through things, but then people are getting hands-on experience with that topic along the way.

[00:38:16] Nathan Wrigley: That is a beautiful remover of barriers, because I think just having that little document, that little crutch, you don’t have to feel that you, okay, I’ve got to come up with a topic. Not only have I got to come up with a topic, but then I’ve got to research the topic, deliver the topic. If you can have it all on a thing that you can crib from, I don’t know, it just arms you with that confidence as you walk in. I think that’s such a brilliant topic. And, Maciej.

[00:38:40] Maciej Pilarski: Both Destiny and Anand mentioned two keywords, sustainability and facilitator. The goal of also getting all those educational initiatives going is also create in a sustainable way. We’re not pushing for numbers, but growing them in a smart way where we don’t get too many students so we get overwhelmed. We need to have enough mentors to accommodate those students, and also enough facilitators to be able to scale the program, to grow it in the future.

And it’s exactly what Destiny is now doing, the Facilitator Training Program, which gets more people from the educational sectors, community organisers, everyone on board, to jump on those educational initiatives and help us to grow. Because the number of every, all those students involved in participating in those programs is increasing and we need to be able to accommodate them. And through the Facilitator Training Program, this allows us to do that.

[00:39:42] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting in open source software spaces as opposed to corporate spaces. I suppose the metric of success for anything like this in the corporate universe would be how many people showed up and gave us money in exchange for this knowledge or, you know, something akin to that. Basically a metric of humans in a room and money gained. And of course, the measurement of this is so not that.

I did wonder, Destiny obviously very proudly rattled off the statistics for Campus Connect, you know, the five and a half thousand attendees and all of that. I wondered if there were success criteria of some kind in the background, which guide you. You know, it’s not like, okay, well we didn’t meet that we’re going to abandon it all. But more, things like you would like to see happen, so aspirational goals. It sounds from what Maciej was saying that maybe the attendance growing slowly over time is some kind of measure of success. Maybe there is none of that, but I’ll just open that one up to see if you want to take that.

[00:40:38] Destiny Kanno: I think one definite measure of success is repeat events on certain campuses. So if the campus is saying, we love that, please come back, or please come again soon. I think that is a really great indicator that, not only did the students get something great out of it, but the school believes in it. And that’s what we want to do. We want to create these systems that, not only bring people into WordPress, but also continue this cycle of, you know, growth within the community, but also ownership by the institution.

Another measurement of success is the institution is like, okay, great, how do we learn how to do that ourselves? So we have some folks now working in the institution that are organising WordPress Campus Connect events that are helping facilitate these Student Clubs. So the faculty and educators themselves, they’re directly getting involved. And that for us as community members too, whose volunteer time is quite limited, as Maciej was saying, like it is a great multiplier that makes everything much more sustainable.

[00:41:45] Maciej Pilarski: So from the WordPress Credits perspective, we don’t hope all the students to turn into contributors. That would be amazing but that might not happen. I can share with you some numbers. So currently we have 450 students globally enrolled. For the whole program so far, 75 graduates.

We hope that some or as many as possible of those graduates who completed the program will stay and become active contributors to the WordPress community, stay engaged.

That’s one of the goals we are aiming for the Credits Program, to not just get this done, but this is building the next generation of contributors. We know that like we are ageing, we’re getting older every year. We are not getting younger, unfortunately. Getting those students staying in the community allows us to build those next generations of WordPress contributors that will also have completely different perspectives to how the community functions, how it was built.

What brought us here might not move us forward. So these new students will bring us this new, fresh perspective of how they would like the community to function and move it to the future, to be current, to stay up to date with what’s happening globally.

[00:43:00] Anand Upadhyay: That’s why it’s very difficult to like measure the impact in numbers because how it is impacting in the longer term. But yeah, it’s going to impact. And I would say also, like Destiny mentioned, one of the metrics is like this campus is willing to have the Campus Connect again and again in the campus.

So I just want to share one more. Like I just recently got a call from one of the faculty coordinators from one of the campus where we have a Student Club. And now they have like two months of vacations. And he called me like, okay, now the vacations are going on, students will not be here, so what can we do for the students to keep their involvement with the WordPress in those two months? So can we do something online? Can we do something like this?

When we get these calls, these kind of communications, that these are interactions that we have, this gives us a sense of like accomplishment. Okay, yeah, we were able to create some kind of interest in the students. Because we cannot expect that if we are going to like any campus and 100 or 200 students are participating in our Campus Connect, they are all going to jump into the WordPress. They are getting a lot of different kind of opportunities as well.

There are other technologies as well, which are, some students are going into that, some students are going into that. But we are showcasing the WordPress as one of the career opportunities. And they have a choice of multiple options, so they will choose what they do. But yeah, the impact will be seen in the next few years. Just like Maciej said, mentioned that he went to the WordCamp as a volunteer and it’s bring him into the community.

And the same is with me. I attended the WordCamp and just after coming out of the WordCamp, I started the Meetup group in my city. So I got inspired from that. So that is a result of that WordCamp. And that cannot be measured in the numbers. That can only be sensed when we are doing this kind of conversation. Okay, that WordCamp helped me, that WordCamp helped me.

The same way in future, these students who will join the community or the WordPress industry, they will be talking about, okay, I got first introduced about WordPress through a WordPress Campus Connect event or I got introduced to the contribution through WP Credits Program. So when these conversation will be happening in the future, then we will say that those are the real metrics that we are looking for.

[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting, and I like that. It sounds like there’s not so much a focus on statistics, you know, literal, brutal numbers, more kind of playing it forwards and measuring the impact over many years, not, you know, a handful of months into the future.

[00:45:15] Destiny Kanno: So yes, we’re not like, okay, here’s our KPIs, you know, and here’s our hard metrics. But one thing I really noticed that our community is, it could be better at doing, is just talking about what happened. Because then you hear all these success stories and there are numbers in that. So like for example, Ajmer again, Women’s Day event this year. 50% of tickets sold were to students. And that’s directly because of the involvement in going to these campuses and teaching WordPress. And I’m like, that’s amazing, that’s direct injection of 50% youth into the WordPress community.

[00:45:52] Anand Upadhyay: And they sold out so fast.

[00:45:53] Destiny Kanno: And they sold out really fast, yeah.

[00:45:55] Anand Upadhyay: The organisers were hoping like, now we have to pitch out to sale our tickets. And they have planned a social media campaign around that. Okay, we will be periodically pitch a student on the social media to encourage the ticket purchase. And within one day, we sold out. And the whole social media campaign was like their whole planning was gone. We don’t have tickets.

[00:46:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really interesting that there’s all this success going on, and yet, as Destiny said, it is hard to get that discovered. Maybe it’s a case of shouting louder about the previous success. Maybe things like this podcast will help in some small way for things like that.

But I know what you mean. There’s a lot of people talking about the code, and there’s a lot of people talking about the plugins and the themes and whether or not we’re going to get collaborative editing in version 7 or 7.1. All of that seems to suck up all of the oxygen in the room. And yet, without a throughput of, let’s go for young adults, coming into the WordPress space, there’s not really a great deal of hope for a project over decades unless we get people of a much younger age beginning now. And I’ll just hand the torch to Maciej because I think he’s got something to add.

[00:47:05] Maciej Pilarski: But this is also changing because at WordCamp Asia, we were able to introduce the educational table during the contributor day. And I’m also organiser of WordCamp Europe that’s going to happen really soon in two, three weeks, beginning of June. And during WordCamp Europe, we will also have a contributor table, dedicated to education, but for the first time also educational track.

During the second day, we will start the whole day with topics related to education. We will have a discussion panel rethinking learning in WordPress that Mary will be participating. And later in that afternoon, we will have actual students, who take part in the program. Sharing the experience, presenting the results. Not only students from universities, but I’m also leading a group of high school students who’ve been working for the whole past semester with a teacher on some projects related to WordPress building websites. So they are super eager and excited to show them.

We will also showcase some students, teachers stories, how both of those sites motivated each other, learn from each other, and basically help us keep growing the community.

So WordCamp Europe definitely will feature some of those things. And we’re slowly introducing more and more those things into those flagship events and into the broader community.

[00:48:28] Nathan Wrigley: Really nice. Yeah, that’s really nice to hear. I think it’s a difficult circle to square, the idea of making this stuff visible so that everybody’s aware of it. Even if they’re only interested in running their agency, or writing code or whatever it is. Maybe to realise that this is some version of the underpinnings of the WordPress community without which the software ultimately doesn’t exist.

And it is quite curious. I don’t know if I’m reading between the lines here, I think I’m not, but I get the impression that, I’m going to use the phrase like, I don’t know, from higher up, let’s put it that way. It feels like education is taking a more central place. It feels like for example, Mary Hubbard, it feels like you’ve got a real advocate there. Again, I could be reading between the lines, but it feels like the words coming out of her mouth, I hear the word education coming out of her mouth quite a lot when she’s on stage.

So it feels like you’ve got some big hitters, let’s go with that. I don’t know if you’ve got anything you want to add to that, but it feels like the importance of this is more profound this year than it was a few years ago.

[00:49:33] Maciej Pilarski: You are correct. Mary is a big supporter of that and she also created this space for us to grow those initiatives that like allows us to grow that. Isotta started the first Credits Program at the Pisa University as an experiment. And from there it was proven that this actually works. It gets us universities and new contributors.

And then on the other side, there was those Campus Connect events that also organically grew up on their own. So basically there was a need. It feels like there was this hive mind somehow that worked also for all of us. All of us felt this need to introduce those things. It looks like we’ve reached a certain growth level for the community that we organically felt that that’s the direction that we should start heading.

[00:50:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What’s interesting there as well is that it very much overlaps with maybe a concern. So we’ve touched on this at various points without saying it out loud quite. If you go to, and I’m going to exclude WordCamp Asia 2026 from what I’m about to say, because that event was very different. If you go to a typical WordCamp, the age skews, and I’m doing air quotes, older. You don’t typically look around and see a bunch of teenagers.

So that’s a concern. There’s this, like a pyramid, like a reverse pyramid, and if we don’t get the younger people coming up, the edifice of this entire project kind of becomes a lot more shaky. And we’ve lived through 22 plus years of WordPress, and I think quite a lot of those people began, a lot of the people who’ve been involved in the community began their careers using WordPress and they’ve kind of moved through WordPress as it’s evolved over those 22 years.

And not to, I don’t know quite how to say this. At some point they’re going to stop contributing. Their age will become something, you know, they want to retire or they want to move on or do some other things. Unless we build the scaffolding and put things in place so that young people feel they’ve got a place here, feel that, I don’t know, some proprietary system is not the way they want to go, they want to support the ethic of open source.

Unless these building blocks, these educational building blocks are put in place, then that’s going to be a bit of a concern. So to your point, Maciej, it organically grew. And what a nice thing that it did kind of organically grow because it’s sorely needed at the same time. There isn’t really a question in there. But anyway, there’s my observation. Anand, did you have something to say? I think you did.

[00:52:04] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah. So just want to add that thing you have raised recently. So the way that we want to teach the students about the open source as well, because if you go to the WP Credit curriculum, so the initial lessons, they learn through the, given to them to learn from the learn.wordpress. So it’s all about like open source ethics, and how the WordPress community, WordPress project works.

So this opens up their mind about the open source. Because in the education system, it is something that is not clearly mentioned. There are simple, just simple definitions around the open source. But open source is much more than those definitions.

And especially the open source community like WordPress. It’s more about the people. So the students also learn about how the community is working, how the people are working from the different time zones, people are joining hands for running the bigger events like WordCamp Asia or these Credits Programs. The students will learn all those things as well, and I’m sure when they will join as a contributor in the future, they will have lot of experience before joining as well.

[00:53:02] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I love that expression, by the way. You just dropped it in in the middle of a sentence there. You said people are joining hands. What a perfect summation of the entire enterprise being discussed today. Maciej, you raised your hand.

[00:53:14] Maciej Pilarski: Yeah, and besides the community goals and keeping it going, I have also a very personal goal that also is behind all of those things that I do. From my own experience, I had a pretty difficult and bumpy educational path, let’s call it. Unlocking those possibilities for those students, helping them out, making it easier for them, it’s one of my very personal goals, because I know it does not need to be very difficult or crazy when you study, especially when you are young. You’re not sure fully which direction you would like to go. So creating for them, one of those opportunities that might click for them is also something very personal and close to my heart. Because not everyone needs to struggle or have like difficulties, so.

[00:53:58] Nathan Wrigley: I am so glad you said that because that encapsulates all of it. That’s the entire point. It’s got to be that, right? So we’ve spent a long time talking about the minutiae of this, that, and the other thing. It all goes, like they’re spokes on a wheel. And the whole point is that little bit in the middle, which is the child, the adult, the human being somewhere who just wants to make use, wants to grow, wants to learn things, wants to figure things out.

With open source, with this kind of learning, there is potentially zero impediment, or at least very few impediments to actually get that learning underway. And so I think maybe we lost sight of that in this conversation a little bit. So I’m glad that you grounded it there, Maciej, right towards the end. That’s perfect. Destiny, was there anything you wanted to say? I don’t know if you were indicating that you did.

[00:54:48] Destiny Kanno: I know we’re like probably over time, but there’s still so much to share. Like even thinking about keeping WordPress relevant, right? For us and then also for youth. I think about the new AI Leaders Credential that was announced and is being worked on. And how tying WordPress to AI is like really helping students engage more, and see like the relevancy of it in a different way. Not even for the students, like for me, that’s challenging me and I think other organisers and learners of WordPress to be adaptable and think about WordPress differently in a new way of this year as AI keeps advancing.

And then you were also talking about wins, right? How do we celebrate that? I did want to surface, we have the Education Buzz Report, which goes out every month, which aims to try to surface all of these educational wins that are happening in the community. And I just have received some further collaboration from marketing to hopefully also broadcast that on our socials going forward so that we do get the word out.

And lastly, like celebrating the students too. There was a post that went out about the Student Clubs and the success. And we just want to make sure that in this, that they feel seen, right? And that this feels like a space for them. And I know WordPress Credits, we’re working on something to showcase, no, something went out recently. A post went out recently to showcase some of the successes of the students. And we just want to keep highlighting that as well. Because their work and the way they operate, especially because they’re coming in with different lenses, is really important to showcase and highlight and make sure that they feel like they deserve that.

[00:56:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was a post, I’ll try and link to it. I think it was like a week ago about the Student Clubs. There were three or four images, three or four photos and there were so many smiling faces in those pictures. It was absolutely lovely. Lots of people gathered in classrooms. I couldn’t exactly tell where, but it was just so nice seeing people kind of enjoying WordPress, having a nice time, bit of camaraderie, hanging out with each other, learning things. It was absolutely wonderful.

Unfortunately, I think time might have got the better of us. Hopefully, dear listener, what you’ve gained is an understanding that there’s so many layers to this educational initiative. It doesn’t appear to be in any way standing still. It’s growing. It’s interesting. There’s a lot going on, and you can be involved.

I will put links in the show notes to any of the places where I feel you would be best making a start with that. Maybe the contributors to this panel can drop some things, you know, if they’ve got a particular link. So again, wptavern.com. If you want to go over there, we will look for the links.

This giant edifice that you maybe know nothing about, and maybe at the end of this episode, some parts of you is tuned in and thinking, I would like to be involved in that. And the truth is, you can be. It’s all available to you to get involved and you could start today.

So there we go. With that said, I’m just going to say a great big thank you to Destiny, to Anand, and to Maciej. It kinds of feels like we need to come back. Let’s do it again in six months or so, and we’ll see where we’re at. Oh, I’ve got a lot of nodding faces. That’s nice. So maybe we’ll revisit this in a few months time.

But seriously, from the bottom of my heart, Destiny, Anand and Maciej, profound respect to you and all of the different things that you are doing. Thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:58:13] Anand Upadhyay: Thank you.

[00:58:13] Maciej Pilarski: Thank you.

[00:58:14] Destiny Kanno: Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how WordPress is shaping the future of education for students worldwide.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira, and Anand Upadhyay.

Destiny is the Head of Community Education at Automattic. Isotta is the leader of the WordPress Credits Initiative for students, and Anand is the founder of WordPress Campus Connect.

This episode is all about how WordPress is not only powering websites, but also empowering the next generation of learners and creators. You’ll hear about the growing movement of education focused WordPress events happening worldwide, from hands-on workshops on university campuses in India, to student clubs designed to keep the momentum going after introductory events.

Anand shares how WP Campus Connect is bringing WordPress directly to students, reducing barriers to entry, and helping bridge the gap between academic learning and real world tech skills. We also explore the challenges of organizing these events, from convincing institutions of the value of open source, to fostering genuine community involvement among both students and educators.

Isotta then introduces us to the WordPress Credits Program, an initiative that lets students turn their contributions to the WordPress ecosystem into recognized academic credits at universities like, Pisa in Italy. It’s a win-win. Students gain practical resume worthy experience, while educational institutions get a transferable, skills focused, program that prepares learners for the jobs of the future.

Whether you’re an educator, a WordPress enthusiast, or just someone who cares about open source and community, this episode is packed with actionable insights. The guests share how flexible and resilient these education initiatives are, how you can get involved, and why engaging the next generation is not just important, but essential for the continued growth and sustainability of the WordPress community.

It’s a truly inspiring episode, and is at the intersection of so many areas of profound importance.

If you’re curious about how to bring WordPress into your local school, university, or community, or if you just want to hear how WordPress is making a difference far beyond the web, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira and Anand Upadhyay.

I am joined on the podcast by Destiny Kanno, by Isotta Peira, and also by Anand Upadhyay. Welcome all three of you. Thanks for joining me today.

Now just before we begin this podcast, we’re going to be talking about education, the education landscape, and how WordPress combines with that. I hope during the course of this conversation, you will get an impression that this is something which is very dear to my heart. We don’t need to go into that, but this is about the most profoundly purposeful use of a CMS that I can actually imagine. I mean, I’m sure there’s other scenarios for other people, but for me, this is the perfect sweet spot. Education, WordPress, open source software. It doesn’t basically get better than that for me.

So with that out of the way, I think it would be good to go round the houses one at a time and just give a little short biography of who you are, where you work, what your history is with WordPress, something like that. You can make it as long or as short as you like, but if we keep it under a minute, maybe something like that, that would be good. So let’s go to Destiny first.

[00:04:46] Destiny Kanno: Yes. Hi there, I’m Destiny. I’m currently head of community education at Automattic. I’m a sponsored contributor in the .org space. And yes, before working on the exciting new initiatives we’re going to chat through today, I was working alongside the training team, two years as a training team rep, helping build out content, like online workshops and courses and learning pathways. And I was part of the group of folks that brought that new relaunch live last year. So yeah, exciting stuff, and that’s what I’m up to right now.

[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Thank you so much. We have some context there, that’s lovely. And okay, let’s go to Isotta. Do you want to give us your bio next?

[00:05:30] Isotta Peira: Sure. Thanks a lot Nathan for inviting us and, yeah. I’m Isotta, I’ve been around the community since, WordPress community since 2022 when I joined Automattic, and I’ve been a sponsored contributor since then. For the past year, three years, four years, I’ve been contributing full time to the community team. And recently this year I switched on to the educational initiative, and I’m currently leading the WordPress Credits program for students.

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you very much. And finally, Anand.

[00:06:04] Anand Upadhyay: Hi, my name is Anand, and I am running a WordPress plugin development company WPVibes. I am a user of WordPress from the last 15 years, since 2010 I’m using WordPress for various purposes.

I have been contributing to WordPress through much multiple channels like Core, docs, polyglots, jumping from one team to another. And from the last year, I have found like my new passion. Just like you, I am also passionate about education and teaching. So from the last year, I found this idea of WordPress Campus Connect, and currently I’m very much involved in trying to bring it to the broader community.

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So I think we’ve established that the panelists today, there’s a lot of really meaningful contributions in all of your past, especially around WordPress and education. So let’s dig into that a little bit. As I said at the top of this show, I can’t see a more meaningful use of WordPress, frankly.

I mean, I don’t know what it’s like in the places where you live, but in the UK where I live, education is one of those things where we like to talk about it being a priority, but the finances kind of don’t really match up to that aspiration. And so things like ICT, websites, coding, all of that, it’s a nice thing to have, but I think often it gets left in the background a little bit.

And because of that, things like open source platforms, I feel there’s a really great use of that, not only from the educator’s point of view, you know, people that can use those platforms to help with their class education, maybe set up a community website, maybe set up a school website or something like that. But also from the point of view of learners, people who wish to get a leg up in life, and figure that maybe learning technology and learning how to build on the web is a credible place for them to start.

So let’s just go through, where is WordPress at the moment in the educational landscape? I know that’s incredibly broad because we haven’t sort of pinned it down to any of the projects. Where are we at? What are the initiatives that are going on at the moment? So, again, anybody that wants to jump in, if we do a bit of crosstalking, so be it. But anybody that wants to jump in, just go for it.

[00:08:13] Destiny Kanno: I’ll start from like what I’ve observed a little bit. I’m pretty new to the Community Team itself and this event space, but I have seen that there have been a few education related events happening throughout the years, regardless of WordPress Campus Connect.

Like in Africa, they recently had their, I think it’s annual event, I believe in Uganda. And that has been going on for a while. It just hasn’t been under like the name WordPress Campus Connect.

And then I believe as well, and correct me if I’m wrong, there was, with Sebastian in Poland, this like WordPress Academy, like they’re also doing like education type events and initiatives. But when it comes to now this WordPress Campus Connect, it’s an official event series, like do_action. It has like more intention around that. And I think because when you go in and you, you know, apply to organise, and now there’s this way to do it through WordPress Campus Connect, it’s just going to bring those initiatives that are already happening into like a more streamlined funnel of people seeing that it’s happening, I think, in a more, how do I say it?

[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: Cohesive would be the word.

[00:09:22] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, cohesive way. Thank you.

[00:09:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I guess what you’re saying there is that there’s a lot of people out there in the WordPress community, many of whom might be educators or, you know, working in a school or what have you, and that they’ve rolled their own thing like we all have with WordPress. And that’s great. That’s one of the benefits of having open source software. You download it, roll your own, what have you.

But it’s also, it’s nice, it’s meaningful, it’s impactful if everybody can see, oh, there’s a bigger, kind of more organised piece somewhere. And it may not fit exactly what I’m doing, but at least I can see that it can be deployed this way. Maybe I can talk to those people, get some intuitions and ideas from those people and what have you, yeah.

[00:10:01] Isotta Peira: I wanted to jump in and connect with what Destiny was saying because this is exactly what happened from the community perspective. So talking about events, a few years ago we were seeing the Training Team doing a lot of great progress around education and the Community Team around events. But we weren’t that connected between contribution teams. And we’ve also, as like project wise, we were seeing also the need to bring a different type of audience to the WordPress events.

And we weren’t exploring at all the education field. With all the students around the world, we weren’t like taking care of them in our programs. So from the Community Team, they kind of encourage organisers all over the world to come up with new diverse format for events. And in 2023 it was launched this, it was called at the time next generation of WordPress events.

And one of the formats that stood out was exactly the Campus Connect brought up by Anand and the community. And other events like the Website challenge, and the others that’s been mentioned. And as he was saying, then we have had the time now to come back, connect the pieces between different contribution teams, and be able to offer something recognisable, standardised, something not as overwhelming as sometimes open source programs are.

And so we hope not just to reach a wider audience of students, but also to empower more teachers, more trainings, and anybody else in the community into bringing WordPress in any different type of education at different levels. With the support of course of the community.

[00:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: We will get into the bits that WP Campus Connect do in a moment, but just coming back to something that you said there, it feels to me, if I browse around in the WordPress landscape, and trust me, I browse around in the WordPress landscape rather a lot. It always feels to me as if, how to describe this, initiatives where companies sell WordPress on, they build things and there’s a fee involved. You know, so you’re a web agency or what have you, you build the thing and you sell it on.

That seems to dominate the conversation. And the more philanthropic side of things, the education piece, the bit where you’re just, you’re doing the work because it’s meaningful, and perhaps you are not getting remunerated for it. That bit somehow gets, well, it gets ignored. It somehow is the silent relation of the for-profit things. You know, you hang out in Facebook groups and you hang out on Twitter, X, whatever, online, it’s always the for-profit bit, which seems to be making the noise, you know, the plugins, the themes, and rah, rah, rah.

And this kind of stuff seems to get left. And I don’t know why that is, but it’s, hopefully this podcast is addressing some of that.

Anyway, sorry Anand, I think it’s your turn to have a little bit of a chat with us. Tell us about, yeah, the same question really, your experience in the education space and where you think WordPress is at at the moment.

[00:13:02] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so just as you explained about the state of education in the UK, so the same is in our region, India as well. So students in the academic life are slightly disconnected with the, what is happening in the industry? So there is like a gap between the academics and the industry. So through these kind of events, we are empowering the students to come closer to what really happening in there.

And we are also helping them to make aware about the various carrier opportunities that WordPress ecosystem can bring to them. It’s not like about just one thing, it’s also about if someone is interested in programming, someone is interested in designing, SEO, content. So there is something for everyone, right?

So with this program, we are trying to connect the students with the various career opportunities, and also trying to bring some fresh energy to the WordPress ecosystem. They can become the contributors, they can bring their own fresh perspective. Because I have read somewhere the WordPress community in many areas is aging. We need that new fresh energy. So this kind of program can also address that problem.

It’s always good to have more people getting involved in the contribution, like sort of just started with the WP Credit, which is bringing actually students to the contribution. And the Campus program is trying to introduce them to the WordPress. So all these kind of programmers combined with working towards getting more and more people getting involved in the WordPress ecosystem, and trying to make the project more sustainable in the long run.

[00:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, I attend quite a lot of WordPress events, and particularly the flagship events so, you know, the WordCamp Asia’s and Europe’s and US and what have you. And, I think you’re right about the demographic. The demographic definitely skews older. It’s hard to see anything above, I would imagine 10% of the crowd that would be under the age of 20. I have no data to back any of that up. I’m kind of putting my finger in the air a little bit.

But it feels like that. It feels like the demographic is, I don’t know, 30, 35, 40 and above. And if that were the only reason that you were doing WP Campus Connect, that in itself would be a credible reason, you know? But obviously there’s a lot more to it than that. But just that alone would be significant and important.

And I think also, in a world dominated by proprietary platforms where everything is siloed, you don’t own your own data, the experience is exciting because there’s some kind of algorithm trying to hook into your brainstem, then we need to get these young people. And because we don’t have the marketing budgets of a Facebook or a TikTok or what have you, then we have to do it in different ways. And attaching an event to a campus, to a university, to an educational institution is a great way I think of doing this.

So firstly, bravo, for getting this thing off the ground. Perhaps this one is for Anand again. I don’t know if he wants to take this question, but can you just describe what WP Campus Connect is? What’s involved in that? What’s the age group? Where are you doing it predominantly? How long has it been going? As much or as little as you like. And depending on what you give back to us, we can take it from there.

[00:16:09] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so WordPress Campus Connect, there is no like fixed criteria on to whom you are going to deliver this. So the only thing is we are going to the students, we are going to their campus. We are not creating a kind of WordCamp kind of thing, or centralised workshop where everybody is coming to our venue and we are delivering them the knowledge, but it’s about going to their campus. And because this will reduce the friction, like if we are going to organise an event, centralised event, we are inviting everyone to join, then there will be a friction. A lot of people might not going to join. Maybe there were some valid reasons as well.

So with Campus Connect, we are going to their campus and delivering the WordPress knowledge to them. And so far we have done this in the universities, postgraduate colleges, undergraduate students. And we are helping them to understand the WordPress, how WordPress can be a career choice for them, and how WordPress can be useful for whatever their interest is.

Because as I already said, that there is students, if we are going to a college or university, that every student might have different kind of interests. Maybe they are enrolled in the same course, but still they have, might have some different kind of interests.

So we are trying to explain them that they are with various career opportunities available so you can jump in. And we are doing it through the hands-on workshops. It’s not like that we are just doing a kind of seminar or lecture kind of thing. We are doing it in form of a kind of a hands-on workshop, like five to six hour workshop where we will help them to build their first website.

And it’s not about like we want to make them expert in six hours. It’s not possible. So what we want to do is, we want to give them a feeling of accomplishment. This is something that is something interesting and this is something that we can use and build something.

So this way, if they get some, after six hour workshop or five hours workshop, if they’re coming out with kind of feeling of accomplishment that this is interesting, we should explore it further, we should explore it more. So that’s our win.

[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask, in the part of the world where you are, is there a real hunger for this? Is there a real appetite for this? Because with the best will in the world, I think there might be a geographical divide in terms of interest and hunger for things like WordPress. And again, there’s no heuristics behind this, this is me supposing from what I’ve heard and conversations that I have had.

It feels like in your part of the world, and you only have to look at plugin contributions, contributions to Core, events that are taking place in your neck of the woods. It seems like there’s a real appetite for it, that there may not be quite in the part of the world where I am from. So first of all, can we speak to that? Is that the case? Is it like, you know, you put this stuff on and people show up? You build it and they come?

[00:18:56] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so there is a quite hunger. India is like a kind of a very large country and if you count the number of WordCamps that happening in India every year, it’s quite big. Right now, these are like two, three months where we don’t have any WordCamps because it’s mostly the rainy season in everywhere. Otherwise every month you will have one or two WordCamps. And the communities that are organising WordCamps struggle to find a date that is not conflicting with another WordCamp in the same country. So that’s how the things happen.

If you talk about the beginning of this year, first three weekends have WordCamps in India, and all were very successful. So there is a kind of WordPress community is very engaging in India, and so the way everywhere.

And also if you talk about the hunger in the students, so it can vary about what they are learning, what their background is, where they’re located. But, yeah, students from what we have interacted, because we interacted with the students who doesn’t have any knowledge. We got a very good response. We saw them talking about like, oh, this is great. We can do something amazing with this. We have a lot of ideas already. This is something that we can use to implement those ideas.

So there is surely a hunger, but we just need to give them a path like, this is the path, and you can follow this. And we need to ensure them, there’s big opportunities, big market opportunities are also waiting for them if they excellent with some skills in this segment.

[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it’s true to say that more or less every young person, let’s go, child or young adult or what have you, has some sort of insatiable appetite to learn. But given the education that they’re presented with, given the opportunities that are put in front of them, their experience of life later on will be very different. And so if WordPress never comes on the menu for them, if nobody ever suggests, well, have a look at this thing, then they’ll never know about this thing. This whole wonderful world of online publishing and all of the myriad things that you can do around the WordPress ecosystem. And so WP Campus Connect, I guess is facilitating that.

Now, curiously though, you said that you go to where the educational institution is. How does that work? How do you connect, so again, this doesn’t have to go to Anand, this can go to anybody. How do you connect the educator, let’s say, or the institution that wishes to put something on because, you know, their students might like it. How do you connect the educational institution with the people who then go in and provide this WordPress workshop and training? How does that work? How does that get paid for? Is it all voluntary? There’s a lot in there to unpack, but I hope you get the thrust of my question. How do all those jigsaw pieces fit together?

[00:21:37] Anand Upadhyay: The first thing is it’s all voluntary. So just like in a WordCamp, we have an organising team, a team of organisers and speakers. Nobody’s getting paid for this. We are also doing it voluntary. We have a team of organisers, not specifically to me, every WordCamp has a team of organisers, have a team of volunteers, workshop facilitators who are organising the workshops. So it’s all voluntary, nobody’s getting paid.

And also it’s free for students as well. There is no charge for students from the WordPress Campus team. So it’s not like we are putting a kind of a ticket to them. It’s completely free. Going to your question about getting the institutes convinced for letting us do the workshop in their campus, so it’s kind of a tricky thing.

The first time we reached out to the institute, so it was very tricky. I get to the college with a pitch deck. So I pitched the complete idea, complete presentation to show them what is WordPress, what are the kind of community thing? Because every institute has this question like, why you are doing this? What are your benefit?

And It’s the same thing that you said, we have to pass that bureaucracy before getting to the better benefit of the student. We have to go to the bureaucracy. And it’s a genuine question in their mind as well, because, not a lot of such communities exist that are doing these kind of free things voluntarily. For the students. So the first question we were asked is, why are you doing this? What are your benefits? And don’t expect anything from us.

[00:22:58] Nathan Wrigley: It rings so bizarre in the world in which we live. Everything about that screams, hang on. Wait, where’s the catch? Where’s the sales pitch? What’s going to happen after the fact?

[00:23:10] Anand Upadhyay: We have to work on with this way and we have to explain like complete things. We showed them that these are the big events that in the WordCamp ecosystem happens, and we are trying to create a unique initiative for students and we’ll be delivering everything free to them. And we were not going to charge, we just need you to provide the students and the required infrastructure.

So the pitch is really tough. In some institutes we got very understanding people who understood what we are saying. Within the next 15 minutes, we got them convinced. In some places we have to discuss a lot of questions. But yeah, it was again, interesting experience as well. We got some general feedback from them as, because last time it was the very first time we were doing this kind of thing. We don’t have any reference, like we just have an idea like we are going through this thing. So we also brainstorm with them like, what are the expectation of your students? They also gave us some suggestions.

So because in every institute you’ll find different kind of students, you have to plan your workshops, you have to plan your workflow according to the interest of the students. So that’s how we approached, yeah, to convince the institute is the most tricky part. Because other than that, if you have to do workshop, we have our facilitators who are already working in WordPress. So it’s not difficult for them to deliver the same knowledge to adults. The only barrier that we have is to convince the college and universities to join and become a partner.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: And has that journey, that, I guess bridge that you’ve got to cross, has that now become more straightforward? In that, you’ve got a history of things that you’ve done. So it’s now more a case of, look, here’s the testimonials. Here’s the things that have happened. We have credibility, we’ve done it before. This is not brand new. Has that become an easier journey? In other words, the door is more open than it was the first few times around.

[00:24:54] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so the last year it was very tough. We have to reach up to them, take appointment, go there and spend some time there. And this year in the institute where we have done this last year, I just sent them a message like, we are doing it again, and if you want to be a part, just fill this form and we will discuss further.

It works. So it’s much easier. And to those who are not a partner last year, but they have seen our post on the social media after the event, and they reached out to us like somehow we missed it, this time connect with us whenever you are doing it again. So once you have done this thing, you have a credibility and you can just showcase them.

After that event, we have got a lot of the students joining our meetup. Before that, I’m running our city meetup from 2017, and we barely get 10 to 12 members in every meetup. Right now we are doing the meetups of 40 to 50 members. And it’s a kind of amazing thing. And it’s not only about having a lot of the students only. After seeing the students joining in, after seeing our pictures and the sort of local community going on, some professionals are also jumping in to join the meetups.

Because they see that there is something valuable going on. So they’re also joining. So this is something amazing, because this is a byproduct. You’ll be able to grow your local community. You’ll be able to strengthen your local community more.

[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: I have such profound respect for what you are doing. It is almost bringing tears to my eyes. It’s incredible. Everything that you say there is just so philanthropic. It’s just philanthropy all the way down. College students probably don’t have a great deal of money to throw around. They would want to consume education, which will make their life prospects better. They would like that to be as affordable as possible.

And you show up, like here’s a bunch of stuff and it’s completely free. Okay, that’s great. And then there’s this virtuous cycle of, okay, we do it each year. That becomes easier, because the testimonials work, and presumably you can spread out and the ripples will move around where you live. And then hopefully maybe hop through jurisdictions and borders and international, who knows? We can get to that.

But then also this knock on effect, which was maybe unexpected, a consequence that was unexpected of the WordPress community, the meetups that you offer, the swelling there and swelling in the, we talked about the demographics earlier, it’s skewing younger. And if you can attract a percentage of those, and keep them sticking around in the community, they can then take on these roles in the future.

And the whole thing kind of propels itself. What it needed was the prime mover, which was you, which is pretty incredible. So I don’t know if Destiny or Isotta want to add anything. I’m almost speechless.

[00:27:31] Destiny Kanno: I did have like a few points I wanted to add to what everyone’s saying. Reducing barriers has been a huge factor of setting this up. Originally we were using like the previous event organisation form and were like, actually there’s a lot of stuff in here. It doesn’t make sense for this use case. So we really paid a lot of attention to just thinking differently for this, and treating it differently. We don’t have to use the same things as we had before.

And Isotta said before, like it’s standardised in a way, but it’s flexible too. So even though we have this framework that people can come to, we don’t say, you can only do the event in this way. You can have a one day event, you could do a half day event, you could have event series over a couple weeks like Anand is doing, and that is totally cool. Like, however you want to run this, we are open to that, and we’re also here to mentor you and support you in that.

And then I, a thought came to my mind as Anand was talking, and you Nathan as well about like, you know, what’s in it for the volunteers? And I’m like, I think it’s an opportunity for volunteers just as much as it is the students, because they’re also getting exposure to these universities. And I don’t know, maybe someone has an ambition to teach at university someday, or like at least teach about WordPress at a university. So, you know, as you go into these, yes, there’s a hundred percent the philanthropic aspect, but it’s also like a learning experience for you as well as a volunteer to be in that space with the students too.

And then lastly, I wanted to say as well, like going a little bit back about the current climate and how it feels like we are kind of like aging, I’ve also noticed in my experience it’s like, we are all also just, this is probably very like, duh, but we’re all professionals, right? So we’re not really looking to talk to students most of the time. We’re looking to sell something or network or like talk to other professionals. So I do think that this is a great way to bring in that new batch of folks that are going to become professionals, hopefully in the WordPress space. But yeah, it’s just that renewal instead of like just trying to sell or buy from whoever’s there based off of whatever you’re currently working on in the WordPress space.

[00:29:46] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Isotta, anything you want to throw in at this point?

[00:29:49] Isotta Peira: Of course. I want to add one point about the aging discussion that we were having, because also, in my opinion, it is true what you, Nathan, said at the beginning that just only the fact of reaching younger people is a way to make the project more sustainable, long term. But also I would love everyone to think about the other way around, because what is WordPress giving to all these younger generations?

Because wins are much, I mean, for how I see it, I see like a winning opportunity everywhere. Because it’s not just about reducing the age of the people involved in the project. If we reduce the age, but people are not engaged. If they’re not getting what they need, learning opportunities, networking opportunities, even just opportunities to understand that they have a whole world around them, they didn’t even know that it existed, which happened to me before I learned about WordPress community and WordPress, this is huge.

So this is a real, like all this initiative are core of the service that will be giving to millions of students. For now, we are at thousands of students already, but, this would be available for any students worldwide. And this is a pretty big deal, I believe, for younger generation and their futures.

[00:31:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s, on every level this is just so remarkably interesting, and the growth of it hopefully we’ll get into the millions. Right now you say you’re in the thousands. It’s still remarkable.

I want to sort of drill into it a little bit. So it feels like there’s this sort of double fronted marketplace aspect to it where WP Campus Connect kind of sits in the middle, and so you’ve got WP Campus Connect in the center, and then on the one side you’ve got the students and the institutions that those students attend. And then on the other side, you’ve got the educators who will come into that institution and WP Campus Connect is sort of like the fulcrum, the center, the spokes all lead into WP Campus Connect, and they do all the connecting and what have you.

Let’s talk about the educator side. So this is people who already are familiar with WordPress. Are there any constraints on who you would welcome into WP Campus Connect there? Like, is there any level of expertise that you’ve got to have, or any kind of proof that you’ve got to go through that you, yourself would be a credible educator? I don’t know, so that’s open to anybody. Is there any kind of barrier to entry if you are an existing WordPresser and want to be involved?

[00:32:20] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so far we have not planned any kind of a specific requirements or the limitations or criteria. So far we have picked from the local community members, like we just opened the call for facilitators, and all those who are interested in teaching. And they responded to it and we just picked them.

We are doing a kind of a series of event to, I think five to six colleges in this time and going every weekend to one college. So we have a pool of four workshop facilitators and we’ll be rotating them to multiple colleges. So this is how it is working. So there is no kind of barrier kind of thing.

We are just thinking about if they are ready for the community work, because there may be many educators, but there may not be everyone who will be doing it for free because we are not going to pay them anything. So if they have the community feeling, they have the community vibes and they can come forward for this. So that’s the only criteria we have. You have the WordPress knowledge, you have the love for community. Just come forward and join us for the event.

[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Great to hear. So staying on that side of things then, I remember my forays in education, one of the things that was kind of drummed into me was, failing to plan is planning to fail. And so there was always this aspect of, if you’re going to stand up in front of a bunch of people, you have to be ready. You can’t necessarily, I mean you can, right? A workshop environment maybe maps to that pretty well, where you stand up and it’s led by what the audience, the students in this case, would like to hear.

I’m wondering if there’s a curriculum which you have planned or do plan, or if somebody can kind of like drop in and just pick up the pieces of paper if you like and say, okay, here’s the lesson plan, if you like. WP Campus Connect has put these plans together, and we’re going to go and show these students how to do this.

So that is my ignorance. I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing that you do. Do you provide materials for wannabe educators to deliver, or is it very much you create your own curriculum on the fly or however you wish to do that?

[00:34:16] Anand Upadhyay: So we just meet together and just plan, just think about like how we can go on ahead, like what are the things that we to teach? And we just brainstorm it together. It’s not like we are giving the, because there is not much different between the organiser and workshop facilitators here. So we are all the community members, so we have just divided the roles, but we are all, they’re working towards the same goal.

So we just all sit together, brainstorm the ideas, like what should we give to the students? So for example, last year we helped them to build a kind of a business website. So all the educators plan together. So we will follow this workflow, we will follow this approach. And we went to one college, we tried to do the same thing. We came back and then we again said what went wrong? What was difficult for the students to follow? How we can overcome them in the next college? We repeat, we improvise and deliver the same thing.

This year we, again, we are planning, so we again sit together. And then we thought about, last year we helped them to create a kind of a simple business website, but we found that students were not connected with that. They built the same thing, but they didn’t utilise it later because it was not connected to them. So this year we are planning to help them to build their personal portfolio website, a kind of a resume, where they can showcase their projects, they can showcase their resume, they can showcase their work or learning what they have done. So we are planning that kind of website.

So again, our workshop facilitators are working together, all those educators, and working together to create a kind of a reference website. And then we will guide them to recreate this, the same thing, adding their own touch because this will be more personalised thing. They will get attached to this, and maybe we can have some of the students to put their websites live. So it’ll be, again, a good chance.

And we are also getting some support from the hosting companies who are offering some pre-hosting accounts so we can do kind of a competition kind of thing, or someone who has done incredible work during the workshops and post workshop, we can provide them those free hostings and they can get the chance to put their website live.

[00:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a real kind of project based education then. So you walk into the room, you interact with the educators, you ask questions, I’m struggling with this thing, I can’t make this work, and they come and step in. So you described it as a workshop and maybe the audience, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that kind of setup, but education often felt like to me, person at the front with some kind of display, whiteboard, blackboard, whatever. They talk, I listen, I fall asleep.

But this is not that. This is, okay, we have a project, we’re going to design a business website, a personal portfolio, resume kind of website. And the idea is that you interact with that and by the time you’ve left, you’ve got some useful knowledge. You’ve done a thing, not just listen to somebody talking about possibly doing a thing hands on. Okay, that’s brilliant.

Is there any kind of age restriction? Because obviously if I was to bring along a 3-year-old to this, we would question the utility of that. You kept talking about colleges and I think you mentioned universities a couple of times. So it feels to me as if we’re 18 or something is kind of where this goes, yeah?

[00:37:28] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, most of the students we interacted with are around mostly 17 plus we can say, 17 or 18 plus. So that’s the age group. And this year we have got a student, we have got a request from one of the high school as well. So they want to, their approach was very nice. They want to give the students kind of exposure to what they are going to face after completing their high school. So they’re running kind of a program so they’re also interested in if we can just go to their school and give their students some kind of a short introduction about any skill that is relevant for them. So we’re also getting that kind of request as well.

[00:38:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and that’s such an interesting age as well, because you haven’t yet kind of formulated your path. And I think maybe by the time you get to 16, 17, 18, you’re more funneled. You’ve made decisions which have led you in a certain direction. You know, I’m going to be a, I’m into agriculture, I want to do whatever it may be.

But if the high school level, everything’s wide open still, isn’t it? And if you can get them and expose somebody that’s never been on a computer even, and, oh look, I put something and people nowhere in me can suddenly see it, that may open up a completely new pathway.

But what you’ve got going at the moment, what do these students get in return? Is there like a quid pro quo? Is there some, sort of leading question here really. Is there some credit that you might get on the other end of this? Do students get to walk away with, apart from obviously the knowledge, which is now in their head for life, do they get to walk away with some kind of accreditation to say, I did this, here’s my certificate, or whatever it may be?

[00:38:59] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah. So we are again providing them certificates for the completion of attending the workshop. And, yes, obviously they are getting some amazing knowledge, amazing exposure to the community. Yeah, but as a proof of thing that they have done something, we are providing them certificates.

[00:39:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And obviously, you know, if they then continue that participation in the meetups and what have you, you get the bit which is way more important than the certificate, which is the actual exposure to the people out there in the real world who can give you that leg up or point you in the right direction for the person that you need to help you on that first career step.

So I’m just going to the panel, I’m just going to say. Did you want to add anything to that? So I was talking about this sort of double fronted marketplace, you know, students, one side, educators on the other. Anything to add?

[00:39:43] Destiny Kanno: Well, I did want to add in general that we’ve been very careful to say in all of the handbooks and landing pages, educational institutions. So that could be colleges, that could be high schools, that could be technical schools or different business schools, boot camps, wherever you’re getting educated on something that WordPress can maybe be hand in hand with.

We would love you to run a WordPress Campus Connect event, so I wanted to like make sure we clarify that. And then also, anyone could put this on. A request to organise could come from like a teacher, for example, or a student even. We’re not like limiting it to local community organisers or anything like that. So if there is direct interest as well from a campus, then that’s even better because, you know, they’re going to have a venue and all they really need is like mentorship and maybe some facilitators.

And then to plug in just a bit, you were like, what kind of curriculum do they have? Don’t forget, there’s Learn WordPress, you know, .org as well where folks can definitely use the materials there to craft their own curriculum or a series of workshops or whatever they’re going to put on as well. So I do want to ensure folks know that there are resources available that are free to help you with that part of the programming too.

[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to read this into the record. If you are, I don’t know how podcasts are consumed, I just know that they’re consumed in a wide variety of ways. If you are driving the car or you are walking somewhere and you think, I’ll get to this later, stop. If you know an educator somewhere, make a point to mention this to them at some point. You know, tomorrow, get home, phone them up. They’ve probably never heard of this. They’re probably not in the WordPress space. They probably don’t have the slightest intuition that this freely available stuff could step into their institution, with what sounds like minimal work required on their part.

But it’s unlikely that they’re WordPressers in the same way that you are because you’re listening to this podcast. So that’s my request to you, that’s your philanthropic request of the day. Go and mention it to the people that you know, who work in these places and have connections with these places, because it won’t happen without those kind of things happening. So, sorry, Isotta, I didn’t allow you a chance to speak. I got all carried away.

[00:42:00] Isotta Peira: Don’t worry at all, Nathan. I believe that we’ve been saying a lot already, and there is just a good amount of information around for everyone who’s listening about how this program works, how to connect with us, and how to just launch their Campus Connect series events in their cities.

[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve spent a long time thinking about WP Campus Connect, but something that was dropped into the show notes, and I confess, I don’t really have a great deal of background on this, so you’re going to have to explain it in full. WordPress Credits. The name I guess suggests something, but I don’t really know what that something is. So, Isotta, if you fancy just running with that, tell us about WordPress Credits.

[00:42:39] Isotta Peira: Of course. Big pleasure for me to share more about it. WordPress Credits, in simple words, is a contribution based practice programs by the WordPress foundation open to students to just to bridge them in the Core of WordPress. Regardless of what they’re studying, their fields, their interests, what we want to do is take one step from the WordPress skills education and show them how they can enhance, train, and gain new skills using the WordPress ecosystems, regardless their interests.

And the word credits, as you said, yes, it’s just something because we want to partner with educational institutions, universities, schools, that will recognise the practice program into their students’ curriculum.

A clear example, we’ve just launched a pilot with the University of Pisa in Italy for the Department of Translation and Communication. And for them, we are offering 150 hours of practice for the students. They will be connected with mentors. They’re going to have their virtual classrooms, and they’ll be guided since the beginning until the end. At the end, they’re going to build their website of WordPress, we teach them how to do it. You are going to use the Learn platform to guide them through the whole process. And they’re going to be involved in practical work within the community.

They get to pitch what they want to work on. So this is open for designer, translators, developers, whoever wants to practice their own skills and position themself already into the job environment. Because we noticed, I felt like livid on my skin when I was studying translation at the University of Pisa, that I had to do countless hours of practice translating things that nobody ever read, used. It was very good for me. For me it was perfect to have things to practice on, and so I could become a great translator, but I worked on stuff that nobody ever used.

And the moment I joined the WordPress community in 2022 and I found out about the Polyglots team, I start thinking, hey, I could have been translating WordPress for five years and getting real life experience, exposure to a global community of professionals in the field that I’m interested, and also connection with companies with other fields that I couldn’t even imagine it existed for me as a translator.

So the goal of this program is exactly to enable students around the world, regardless what they’re studying, to become, to shape their future through practice. And we, when I say we, I mean all the volunteers and contributors who are participating into this project. We have designed a path for each student where they not only get to practice the skills that are more relevant to the fields of study, but also transferable skills.

Like, for example, organising, working independently in a remote and async environment while keeping stakeholders updated. How to design a project, because they will have to finish the program, presenting a project that they would’ve designed, developed, and worked on. Public speaking because they would have also exposure to presenting the work to the WordPress community.

And at the end of the mentorship, of course, from experienced contributors in our community, and at the end, at the wrap up, they will receive a certificate from the WordPress Foundation, certifying the hours of contribution within the program. And at that point, the educational institution they’re studying, they’re going to recognise these as a part of their curriculum.

For some universities and schools, it translates into credits. For example, for Pisa, 150 hours of contribution translating into six credits. So students can decide to skip a traditional exam and do this practice. And for other institution might look different. But the requirement for an institution to join this program is that they have to recognise this work into the students curriculum.

[00:47:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so, dear listener, you may have noticed we shifted gears. We went from talking about WP Campus Connect to WordPress Credits, and we’ve now moved into a very different arena.

And so now, I’ve never been to the University of Pisa, but I’m going to guess that, just the name itself, it’s an utterly credible institution, you know, with a long history of taking in students and requiring them to work hard in order that they get some kind of qualification at the end.

So this is very different. We are now talking about doing WordPressy things, and at the end of it, it’s equal to a proportion of the stuff that they would be doing at that university already. Now that then, I guess, implies that this is a more structured thing, that there needs to be more inspection of what’s going on, that there needs to be kind of hoops to jump through that you need to be able to credibly say, we know that this person did this. We can prove it. There’s a paper trail, and at the end of it you get, with the University of Pisa, six credits, which equals whatever that equals.

So presumably there’s more backwards and forwards. Rather than the WP Campus Connect, which is more philanthropic and, you know, more community based, presumably you’ve had to have fairly lengthy conversations and dialogue with the University of Pisa so that they know that you are not giving away six credits for nothing. What’s that been like?

[00:48:39] Isotta Peira: Yes, you are absolutely right, and this is the case, and it is understandably, because we need to show them what is the potential, and what the students will gain. For me, it’s been a wonderful experience. And now I’m also in conversation with other universities and other schools. And having myself lived, like felt this gap between, oh, I’m doing practice, but it feels like it’s just useful to me, but it’s not applied in the real world.

And seeing, hey, this could bring, just basically push all these students into creating something that not only they own, because I believe the ownership is very important because most of cases, studies are a little bit passive. So as you were saying before, we have a teacher, we sit, we listen and we do what we’re asked to do.

In this case is the other way around. It’s, hey, this is a playground of learning opportunities for you. We show you everything that you can play with, and then you get to design the project. You get to experiment all this exposure to real life that usually you don’t get at university or another, let’s say, formal institutions. And for the universities, this is going to be, basically a certificate for institutional excellence for them, because right now, only the University of Pisa is offering this. In a few weeks, also the universities Fidélitas in Costa Rica will start offering this.

So just, hey, to institutions worldwide, this is something that the university, once they understand what it is, they will want to jump on it. And so as you say, it’s a lot of back and forth. It’s always a very interesting conversation because every university has some similar and some different needs for their students. And for me it’s a huge learning curve because I’m getting to learn a lot about other institutions. But at the end, everyone who I’ve been talking to so far, they are like over the moon with the idea of offering this option, this possibility to their students.

What I’m doing right now is starting connecting with teachers, schools, universities, institution that I personally, I’m already personally connected with, like the case in Pisa. And the WordPress community is key because also, in this community, there’s plenty of teachers. Everywhere you look, there is, oh, okay, I teach WordPress, I teach this other WordPress related theme. Oh, I teach at this school, I teach at this universities. Or, hey, in my kids’ school, they were looking for something like this, and it turns out that maybe you’re not a teacher, but you have kids and they’re at schools.

So it’s been key, the connection with the community. And it’s actually one of the biggest needs that we have right now. Right now, there are three, including myself, contributors focusing on this project. We need more help, also to create this connection, to get into the institution and to have them understand the offer that we’re giving to them.

[00:51:59] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to read into the record a recycled version of the comment that I made a moment ago about WP Campus Connect. And that is that if you know anybody who could fit into this part of the jigsaw, you know, an educator or somebody that works in a university, whatever capacity that may be, I guess you are looking for that door to be slightly pushed ajar so that you’ve got these contacts wherever they may be. Obviously you’ve got Pisa, Costa Rica and what have you. But it would be nice to spread this a little bit further.

Okay. Okay, so that bit is now done. The bit that I want to ask with this is with the university students going through the WordPress Credit system, is this kind of a distributed thing? Is it something that they can do in their own time? Or do they need to, I don’t know, attend, be in a particular lecture hall at a particular time in order to prove that they’ve done a particular thing? Or is it entirely remote with, well, basically it’s a very open-ended question. How does it work from a student point of view? How do they achieve this?

[00:52:59] Isotta Peira: This is a great question actually. The values behind this program is to keep the open source experience as real as possible. So it is a hundred percent remote. We have built the virtual classroom for each student on the Learn platform, and they will be able to self onboard themself, go through the all the steps, but at the same time, they will be paired with the mentors.

So we strongly recommend, and for this first, let’s say, round of program, we are making strong suggestion to meet with their mentor once per week, so they can learn more about each other, the mentor can help them guiding their way, but they have to complete the hours. We want to, not just respect the principle of the WordPress ecosystems, but also put students in this real life environment that they will find in their job.

Because most of the roles in different type of companies, you just don’t have to like stay there and show that they’re doing the things. You work at your pace. You have your project. You have to share updates, of course, and show that you are progressing. And for WordPress credits, if students want to work on weekends, during night, this is up to them. They just have to complete the WordPress site and the hours assigned.

And there are couple of steps that will have them syncing at a specific moment with other parts of the community. For example, participating to a discussion on Slack, or a discussion on a blog post. Because also they’re experimenting different tool and different communication styles. And if there is a meetup, local meetup active in their cities, one of the step would also be participate to one of them. Or if there is no meetup, local meetup happening, to join an online meetup.

So in this way the success of this program would reach the most, the highest point, if they have not only completed the work they decided to do, but if they also have experienced all the different parts of the ecosystem. So this way they work out the program, and they have the new world possibility open. They can decide to stay, they can decide to just focus more on one particular thing and they would’ve learned how to upload and work on WordPress, TV. How to use tools like Slack, GitHub, WordPress, the Learn platform, everything. So this is what they will get.

[00:55:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I mean, set aside the fact that when I was at university, the internet just didn’t exist because I’m of a certain age, but I would’ve loved something like this. The capacity to just sort of do things in my own time, you know, fit it around, cherry pick the bits that I want to pick. For me it was much more, you pick a course, you show up to the course, you imbibe the content, you sit and exam and so it goes. And that was what was on offer. But this is so great.

And also, I don’t know if this is something that you do do but it just came into my head, the capacity for this to be an accreditation prior to gaining access to a university. So at the minute in the UK, all of the results are coming out for the examinations which children, well, young adults require in order to get to their place at university. And then when they’re at the university, they obviously get these credits and get the degree or what have you. But something like WordPress credits, it’d be kind of fun if it could count towards that onboarding process, you know, to get you in the door of a university to show up and say, I did the WordPress thing. I did something a little bit above and beyond what everybody else is doing. I mean, I don’t know if there’s any plans for that, but that struck me as a curious option.

[00:56:45] Isotta Peira: That would be the dream. Having WordPress credits embedded into like mandatory curriculum to get to a specific level of education, or to be able to end, to graduate from a specific level of education. This is going to be the dream. Now we’ve taken the first steps, so now we’ve built up the program, we are going to gather feedback, improve it, adjust it with all these first new batch of students that are coming. And also from the sponsors, the universities, and the mentors feedback. And then little by little, this is where we want to go. Ready to bring WordPress contributions everywhere.

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, gosh, what an episode this has been. I thoroughly enjoyed this. However, I don’t know if we’re done yet because on the show notes that I had, we had three points that we were to mention. One was WP Campus Connect, which we did at the beginning, and then we’ve just spent a few moments talking about WordPress Credits. But there’s this other curious bit that I don’t know much about, and I don’t know if this is something we want to delve into, WordPress Student Clubs. What’s that?

[00:57:47] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, so that is, you don’t have to have a WordPress Campus Connect event to request a WordPress Student Club on your campus. But it essentially was birthed out of this idea from Anand of like, hey, you know, now that we’ve got this captive audience of students, like where do they go to continue the WordPress activities after we’re gone? And so the, yeah, WordPress Student Clubs were born.

You can now request a site created for your Student Club when you request to organise a WordPress Campus Connect event, or you can just reach out to us directly. And right now, I believe Anand is working with the Sophia Girls College right now in Ajmer to set up their WordPress Student Club. I think they’re the first actually to have one.

And the goal is that they can continue on campus, their WordPress activities. They can connect still with the local community, potentially like invite them to their student club events. It’s just like a extracurricular circle or club that now is WordPress themed that will, I think, help them continue.

And also, sorry, I just wanted bring in like the Credits portion too. Like you might have folks from different majors, right, that are using WordPress in different ways. So it’s a way for also the students to intermingle amongst different majors within their campus as well.

[00:59:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of a way to keep the conversation going, isn’t it, in a sense? It’s more opportunities to kind of keep people interested and give them opportunities. And all of that is just so necessary. We talked at the beginning about the age demographic of WordPress and how all of this stuff is just such a real credible way of trying to tackle that.

And I think if you were to put somebody that went through, let’s say, WP Campus Connect. If you were to drop them straight into a meetup, maybe that’s too much, because it can get fairly technical. You know, the presentations are often about some fairly technical things, and so this feels like a really nice bridge. It keeps it more based around the students, so they’re familiar with each other. They’re in the same institution, presumably. It’s kind of like a club. We call them afterschool clubs in the UK. It feels a little bit more like that. So it’s much more based around where they already are and that kind of thing.

[00:59:59] Destiny Kanno: It gives them a sense of ownership as well, because it’s as you said, it’s a students’ club, so, you know, there’s going to be someone that’s leading it, and maybe a co-lead as well, and a faculty member who will also be there to advise or assist.

[01:00:13] Anand Upadhyay: It’s kind of an in campus meetup group, that kind of thing. So they can, just like you said, taking them to the local community meetup will be a little bit overwhelming from them, because whatever the sessions, whatever the topics that are planned in the meetups stuff, catering to the wider audience. So in the campus club they can decide their own kind of topics. What are the topics they are interested in? And they can learn, it’s kind of a group learning as well. Someone from them is learning one topic and delivering this knowledge to the other club members. So it’s a way to keep the momentum going on that is started with WordPress Campus Connect program.

[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m going to make sure, before we finally finish this call, although we’ll end the podcast recording in a moment, I’ll make sure that I ask these panelists to send me any links that may assist you. And so what I’m going to say is if you head to the wptavern.com website, and if you search for this episode, you could probably search for WP Campus Connect or WordPress Credits or what have you, certainly it’ll be there available in search.

Head to that, look at the show notes and the links. There’ll be a transcript of this and there’ll be some show notes where I just sort of summarise what’s going on. But right at the bottom, a little way down the page will be all of the links for everything that we have discussed. Maybe some additional ones as well for things that we didn’t have.

And when I attend WordPress events, there’s always a sense of this, there’s always a sense of look around, the community’s not getting any younger. We’ve got to do something about it. Complaining is the wrong word. People are not doing that, they’re just curious about that. Well, here, you’ve been spoonfed the solution. You now know what it is that you could do to skew the demographic younger. If the WordPress project is something that you believe in, and you would like to carry on, the only way to do that is to have a funnel of younger people who will become the older people, who will then teach the younger people. And so the cycle continues.

If you want that to happen and you don’t know how to make that happen, well, now you do. You’ve got these people to reach out to. You’ve got these projects that you know about. You can get involved in any of this, at any level.

And all that it remains for me to do is to say, wow, thank you to all three of you for being interested in this. Not just interested, being active and making the effort to get these things started, to get them off the ground, which is the hardest bit, I think. And hopefully now that they have got off the ground, they will fly with wings of their own. That would be really nice. So, Destiny, Isotta and Anand, thank you so much for chatting to me today. What an episode that was.

[01:02:55] Destiny Kanno: Thank you so much, Nathan.

[01:02:57] Isotta Peira: Thank you. It’s been a huge pleasure.

[01:02:59] Anand Upadhyay: And thank you for giving us a platform to share all these initiatives.