Across three terms of 2017 — winter, spring, and fall — I taught WordPress as a for-credit course at Sheridan College in Ontario. Not a workshop, not a pre-camp tutorial, but a real college course with a syllabus, assignments, and a grade at the end.
Teaching WordPress for credit changes the shape of the work. A workshop can stop at “here’s how to install a plugin”; a course has to keep going through the layer underneath — what a hook is, why a database table looks the way it does, how the template hierarchy decides which file renders a given URL. Students leave a workshop with a working site. Students finish a course knowing why the site works.
Sheridan students are a particular audience: many are coming through one of Ontario’s strongest creative-tech programs, with strong design instincts but variable code background. The course had to meet them where they were and bring them forward without slowing down the ones who were already comfortable in the stack.