So happy to see WordPress.com offering a pricing tier aimed at students that gives them free hosting for a year:
WordPress.com offers the Student plan free, so cost is never a barrier to learning web skills. The goal is for students of any subject to create and share their thoughts and work online, and to own their online presence from the start.
I also think it’s way overdue. As someone who teaches beginning web development, I find that building a WordPress site makes for a great final project to demonstrate the myriad skills covered over the course of a semester — HTML, CSS, design, hosting, etc. Hosting those projects has always been a roadblock though.
I’ve tried several othered things over the years: Shared hosting plans (which sets me back financially), WPSandox.io (gone bye-bye though there are alternatives), WordPress Playground (saving and sharing work is complicated), sponsored hosting (it’s a hard sell on a semester-by-semester basis), and on and on.
A student plan with a year-long leash straight from the source is the perfect solution. You might think that WordPress.com is too point-and-click compared to a self-hosted WordPress.org site, but dot-com offers all the same developer affordances for directly touching code these days.
It’s worth noting that the deal is only good for .blog and .art domains. Not a deal-breaker whatsoever when it comes to educational purposes. You can always point it elsewhere down the road if you want to spend a few bucks.
I do not agree. I think it an accident waiting to happen. Read my blog post here:
https://www.usecue.com/blog/wordpress-com-student-plan/
I read your post (nicely written!) but didn’t exactly see an explanation for why a student plan is a disaster waiting to happen.
Your core concerns appear to be: (1) limited development capability, and (2) security.
I guess I’m not as concerned as you are:
(1) The student plan still allows learners to touch code as you can any self-hosted WordPress site, complete with developer tools and access. I’ve said it in this post, but I’ve taught the core tenants of web fundamentals for years. It’s not about learning WordPress, but using WordPress as a platform for demonstrating those fundamentals. And if learners are capable of touching the code — as they can — then it’s capable of demonstrating retained learning objectives.
(2) WordPress is only singled out by those concerned about security because it’s the largest and most adopted CMS, by far. Every platform (minus static generators, I suppose) carry the same risks. WordPress aggressively releases security updates and I think it’s great that WordPress.com handles the updating overhead for users.
And I’m less concerned about plugin vulnerabilities as a whole, because the final project for my course does not rely on them. The project is designed to assess core web fundamentals rather than extending a CMS.
But that’s my course, specifically. It’s totally valid if you are teaching for different learning outcomes that would validate your concerns.