WordPress.com Launches Free Education Platform for Teachers and Students

A new initiative com, aims to bring website-building skills to classrooms around the world. The free platform, called WordPress.com Education, offers a full domain for each student, along with free domain names and plugin support.

Teachers can provide their students with access to the program for free during the first year, without having to pay a credit card or enter a trial period. This allows teachers to integrate website-building into courses that teach students how to build websites or for group projects that incorporate website-building.

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The platform includes 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plugins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. This means it's not a stripped-down version of the WordPress.com product, but rather a tailored suite designed specifically for classrooms.

Automattic is hoping to make inroads in underfunded schools with this free program, which will also help train the next generation of website professionals. The company has already piloted the program with 5,000 students across 27 countries, and the results are promising: 88.9% of educators said access to the program improved their students' employability, while 81.5% said it improved students' entrepreneurial capacity.