Technical Training Wants to Be Free

Posted December 20, 2011 by Jeff

jQuery Air: First Flight, our introduction to jQuery on CodeSchool is now free! Did you know that our text tutorials have always been free under a Creative Commons license?

Technical training resources naturally have a short lifespan, so it only makes sense for them to eventually enter some form of the public domain. The price paid for any knowledge, whether it’s an online course like this or a traditional book, goes to pay for the time invested in creating it, offset some of the time/cost of the author developing the expertise in the first place, and provide seed capital for further material.

Courses like jQuery Air: First Flight cost tens of thousands of dollars to create. But once that cost is paid then keeping materials behind a pay-wall limits their effect while the content is decaying.

Here at JumpstartLab, we believe in “Learning Out Loud” – we want to promote the spread of these skills, regardless of your ability to pay for our classes. To that end, we publish all our tutorials under Creative Commons licenses, allowing individuals to build their own skills for free.

Over the past years we’ve had the tutorials locked up in our CMS, which didn’t make any sense. Now we’re migrating them to Github, using a specialized version of Octopress, and opening up the source to the public. We hope that this setup will allow the community to pitch in and improve the tutorials.

And with our new program, announced in the coming days, expect to see lots of new content hitting the site in 2012.