Transcript [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
