EXCLUSIVE PRE-LAUNCH INVITE
Secure Your Spot for the 2019 Online PDC 2.0
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What’s Included in the Course?
# 1
A Generous 28-week Pace
# 2
750+ Instructional Modules
Blackboard-style instructional presentations, rich animations, detailed PDFs, Knowledge Checks, Learning Objectives, Activities, Brief Overviews, and Key Takeaways: A set of these will be released weekly, as per the curriculum schedule. Study them, ask questions 24/7, then prepare for the weekly video question & answer session.
# 3
Weekly Q&A with Geoff
After watching the core video modules (blackboard and supplemental animations), you’ll have a chance to ask Geoff follow-up questions; all sessions will be recorded and made available to you in your student portal. For your benefit, we've included recordings from the previous course, featuring several hundred Q&A.
# 4
Daily Help from
PDC-certified TAs
You’re never alone: A team of fantastic teaching assistants (TAs) facilitate lively discussion, offer insights, and provide timely, helpful answers to your questions. Each of our TAs have been rigorously vetted and are passionate about permaculture.
# 5
Official Permaculture Design Certificate
Upon completing the course and the final project, you’ll receive the official PDC certificate -- the same certificate that Bill bestowed on Geoff more than 30 years ago, and that Geoff has presented to over 15,000 qualified students in the decades since.
# 6
A First for Permaculture: Digital Accreditation
We are honored to be the first permaculture institute anywhere in the world to issue digital certificates that are cryptographically secured by blockchain. 1-click social media sharing (LinkedIn, Facebook + dozens more) is built in, as is "anytime printing" in ultra-high resolution.
# 7
Cloud-Based Portfolio
We often hear the phrase, “show, don’t tell,” and our digital, cloud-based portfolio feature helps you do just that. On your PDC certificate website is an area to showcase your course projects: photos of your garden or farm, your course design sketches, or related videos that you’ve shot. This is another “first” in online permaculture instruction, one that we are encouraging other instructors to adopt.
# 8
24/7 Community Town Hall
A sleek, modern discussion area powered by industry-leader Disqus far exceeds outdated commenting tools; a clean and easy-to-use platform fosters meaningful interactions with course teaching assistants, Geoff, and your peers (professionals, aid workers, NGO staff, etc.). In our last course, this platform facilitated over 6000 pages (!!!) of comments, so we know it works :)
# 9
Private Facebook Group
A dedicated members-only Facebook Group gives our student community an additional forum for vibrant interactions. While the Disqus area focuses on questions and comments around course material, the FB group widens the net to a more expansive set of topics. The diversity and talent of our student body will fuel friendships and working relationships that last well beyond the course.
# 10
Student-Centered Instructional Design
We believe that learning involves not just a presentation of information, but a transfer of knowledge, perspective, and skills. To facilitate this, we go quantum leaps beyond just having you watch videos. Our instructional design team have added Knowledge Checks, Learning Objectives, Activities, Brief Overviews, and Key Takeaways throughout the course.
# 11
Interactive Permaculture Activities
Our instructional design team has created 42 interactive and action-oriented mini-activities that will help you put the concepts and information you’re learning to use right away. By the time you get to the Final Design Exercise (FDE), you’ll have built — bit by bit, piece by piece — the knowledge and skill-set to tackle the FDE with total confidence.
# 12
Video Projects That Build Community
Question: What’s better than just doing projects? Answer: Sharing them with your classmates! We’ve partnered with one of the most innovative video platforms online to help you share with your peers how you’re using activities to connect concepts to real-world scenarios — all in just a couple of clicks using your laptop or phone camera.
# 13
Credential Directory
The digital PDC certificates are a “first” in the permaculture community, but why stop there? We’ve taken this one step further by creating a comprehensive directory of everyone who has earned their PDC 2.0 certificate from Geoff. NGOs, people looking for permaculture consultants, prospective employers — anyone wanting to quickly find qualified PDC graduates of his online course can now do so in a single place by viewing our Credential Directory.
# 14
Job Insights
Why wait for prospective employers to find you when in addition to this you can find them? Our credentialing partners have connected with almost 65,000 database sources to match PDC graduates with relevant employment and consulting opportunities. Though the project is still in beta and currently limited to the US market, it is already being updated monthly. All graduates of our program are invited to view these opportunities at their convenience.
# 15
“FDE Flow”
The Final Design Exercise (FDE) required in most PDC classes unites all the knowledge and insights learned during the course. But it is rigorous, intensive, and demanding. To help with this, we re-imagined the process from the ground-up to help innovate the “FDE Flow” — an approach and platform that nudges you toward a completed project, step-by-step. And for inspiration, we’ve added exemplar samples from previous PDC graduates.
# 16
Attentive Student Support
Chat and email support from our dedicated Student Care team is just a click away, and an always-accessible Knowledge Base provides instant answers for commonly-asked admin and technical questions.
# 17
Catch-Up Sessions
During the course, 5 weeks will be set aside for catching-up and reviewing course material. These breaks will be spaced out. During these weeks, Geoff will continue doing video Q&As, and TAs will be on hand to answer questions.
# 18
Extended Access
After the 28 course weeks are over, you will have continued access through December 31st, 2019 to all the videos, recorded Q&As, animations, and PDFs. Watch, listen, and read as many times as you’d like.
Exclusive Benefits for “Early Bird” Students
Early, Guaranteed, Hassle-free Enrollment
We will cap the course, but taking advantage of this “early bird” offer means that you are 100% guaranteed a spot in the class, with no “launch day drama.” Web traffic is less, no congested servers, payment processing, etc. It’s effectively a gentle, “side-door” into the course.
Discounted Rate
When we do our public, worldwide launch, the course tuition will be close to $1500 USD. “Early Bird” tuition is discounted deeply, so your investment today of $1247 represents a discount of approximately $250.
No Further Action Needed on Your Part
All 2018-19 students will start at the same time. After enrolling today, there is nothing further you need to do to confirm your place in the course. With the holiday season now in full swing, we plan on starting after everyone is back and ready to go, i.e. immediately after New Year’s holiday. We will contact you with exact details once general enrollment is complete and the start date announced. The first batch of modules will be published to the student portal on Day # 1 of the course.
A Collection of Exclusive “Early Bird” Content
But we know that many of you have been waiting for this (some as long as 9 months!), so we want to give you something ASAP. Here’s what we’ll do: At the end of “early bird” enrollment, you’ll receive an email inviting you to access your student portal, where you’ll find special videos, the option to participate in an exclusive, small-group “Ask Me Anything” video Q&A with Geoff, and some other surprises. This will keep everyone engaged and “warmed up” before the full course begins.
Special Pricing on “Project X”
Once we go live with this, I’m optimistic that it will fill a big hole left by most PDC courses. Among other things, it will include unprecedented access to me and my senior staff, and help answer the question, “After the PDC, what’s next?” Early bird enrollees will receive a charter rate (a 50-75% discount) resulting in substantial savings. More on this in the months ahead, and we intend to go live before the end of this PDC.
Money-back Guarantee
As always, we have a generous, no-questions-asked, 30 day, 100% money-back guarantee. And if you decide the course isn’t for you, you’re welcome to keep all the bonus content.
"In the early 1970s, it dawned on me that no one had ever applied design to agriculture. When I realized it, the hairs went up on the back of my neck. It was so strange. We’d had agriculture for 7,000 years, and we’d been losing for 7,000 years — everything was turning into desert. So I wondered, can we build systems that obey ecological principles?"
- Bill Mollison, Founder of Permaculture
Permaculture is that system, and the PDC course is the quickest way to master it, step-by-step. It is the absolute foundation for all that comes after it.
THE PERMACULTURE DESIGN CERTIFICATE COURSE 2.0
Our Innovative “FDE Flow” Takes You From This...
To This...
The Final Design Exercise (FDE) is a staple of PDC courses throughout the world, serving as a capstone project that unites everything learned during the course. However, after teaching for 30+ years, Geoff noticed that the standard approach to the FDE left a number of students confused, frustrated, and even intimidated. The form of the FDE was clashing with its substance.
The FDE Flow is our answer to this: a breakthrough approach that takes students by the hand and teaches how to think like a permaculturist, while detailing a step-by-step framework to capture and give expression to this thinking. Remarkably simple yet flexible, recent graduates have raved that the FDE Flow will be part of their permaculture toolkit for years to come.
The Digital Permaculture Design Certificate
We are honored to be the first permaculture institute anywhere in the world to issue digital certificates that are cryptographically secured by blockchain. 1-click social media sharing (LinkedIn, Facebook + dozens more) is built in, as is "anytime printing" in ultra-high resolution.
Frequently Asked Questions
I’ve detailed some of the main course elements above: over 750 pieces of instructional materials, weekly questions & answer sessions with me (recorded and made available for everyone), a 24/7 digital community town hall, daily access to the teaching assistants, special animations and illustrations to help convey some of the more difficult principles, and ultimately, the PDC certificate itself.
We are currently in a pre-launch phase, during which we are offering early, discounted enrollment to alumni and other members of our community who have been especially active and engaged, and asked to be notified as soon as the course was open for enrollment. We will have our public, worldwide launch later this month. Once the public launch is complete, we will begin the course by releasing the first batch of instructional material. This will be immediately after the New Year's holiday. In the meantime, all early-bird enrolls will be given immediate access to TPC materials and -- as soon as early bird enrollment closes -- additional bonus content.
Once the course formally begins, we will release anywhere from 5 to 14 content modules every Friday. These modules make up the heart of the course. We suggest that you use the subsequent 3-4 days to view the modules and post any questions you have under the relevant video. Our certified teaching assistants will monitor questions and answer these on a daily basis. Any questions that are particularly difficult, have wide appeal, or are especially interesting, I will handle directly. I will note these questions, answer them all, record the Q&A and put these in your student dashboard. This cycle of spending half the week watching videos and asking questions, and the second half viewing the answers and posting any follow-up, will repeat for the duration of the course, i.e. 28 weeks. The upshot is that you will have support on both a daily basis (via the teaching assistants, me, and the private Facebook community of your peers), as well as a weekly basis (via the video-based Q&A with me, directly).
The face-to-face PDC is a full-time intensive that is taught over two weeks. Some who have taught an online PDC have tried to do it in as little as 8-12 weeks, but invariably students ask for more time. Based on my 30+ years of experience, and having done it both online and offline, I’ve decided to pace the course at 28 weeks. I believe that anything much shorter than this is simply too fast. Moving at this pace allows the material to really sink in and lays a solid foundation for all future permaculture work. The material is voluminous, dense, and takes time to absorb. Going through the material at a faster pace may be emotionally appealing and is certainly possible (and we may provide options for those of you who want to do this), but we’re confident that the ideal learning sweet-spot is 28 weeks.
After the 28 weeks of the course come to an end, we will grant you continued access to all the course materials, videos, PDFs, animations, and other instructional materials through December 31st, 2019. This gives you about a year’s worth of access to all the course materials. If additional time is needed, just let us know and we’ll do all we can to help.
Yes: Your heart, attention, and any internet-enabled device (computer, iPad, phone, etc.) Chrome and Safari work splendidly well, as does Firefox once you clear your cache and update your browser and plug-ins. No farm, land, bulldozer, shovels or anything else of the sort needed :) If all you have is a windowsill, a little passion, and some imagination, you’re ready to get started.
That’s really up to you :) If all of this sounds like a good fit, scroll to one of the enrollment buttons and click away. If on the other hand you’d prefer to wait until later in the month to sign up, that’s fine too. But please remember that the discount, early bird content, and special pricing on “Project X” when it launches will no longer be available. And if you just want to ask a couple of questions before jumping in, please click on the little red circle on the bottom right of your screen and we'll do our best to answer your question(s).
If You’re Ready, Enroll Today and Get:
