Enroll
Free right now. Free for a year if you start now.
Fourteen courses, 274 lessons, 1,733 assessed questions and a verifiable certificate for every course you finish. The whole curriculum is open today. It moves to a subscription soon — and everyone who has an account before that happens keeps everything they enrolled in, free, for a year.
The foundation course stays free permanently, subscription or not.
What it costs, and why
Today, nothing. Every course is open with an account, and if you create one before the subscription starts, what you enrolled in stays free to you for a year.
After that, $25 a month for the online curriculum, or $250 for a year — two months free if you pay annually. That is not a change of heart about who this is for. It is what pays for keeping 274 lessons accurate as codes change, for the assessments, for the certificates being worth something, and for writing the next fourteen courses.
The foundation course does not go behind it. Regenerative Design Philosophy is free permanently, with a certificate, for anyone who wants it. If you only ever take that one, you will still leave knowing how to read a site and why an off-grid building is shaped the way it is.
And if $25 is the thing stopping you, say so. The scholarship fund exists for exactly that and the application is three minutes long. The housing shortage is not waiting for anyone's tuition to clear, and the people most likely to build their own home are often the people least able to pay to learn how. What changed is not that principle — it is that subscriptions from people who can pay are now what keeps the door open for people who cannot.
Field sessions are priced separately, and a field session includes online access. Travelling to Taos to pound tires for a month and then being asked for a subscription to read about it would be absurd.
How to work through it
Three sensible routes, depending on why you are here.
New to all of this
Start at the foundation
Regenerative Design Philosophy assumes nothing and explains why an off-grid building is designed the way it is. Everything after it makes more sense for having read it.
Begin the foundation coursePlanning to build
Take the core track in order
Twelve courses arranged in the order you actually build: site, permits, structure, thermal, water, waste, power, food, then managing the job. Each one ends with an exam and a certificate.
See the core trackSolving one problem
Go straight to the system
Every course stands on its own. If what you need is cistern sizing or a botanical cell that works in a cold climate, open that course and ignore the rest.
Browse by systemProfessional certification
COBOD BOD2 3D printer operator
A professional training course for operating the COBOD BOD2 construction printer: five modules, module quizzes, a cross-module final examination, legal acknowledgment, certificate, and a gate to Level 2. Built from the manufacturer's own documentation. This one is not part of the open curriculum — it certifies you to operate a machine that can hurt somebody, so places are limited and handled directly.
When the fee is not the obstacle
For a lot of people the barrier to learning a trade was never the course fee — it is time, travel, tools, and being able to stand on a real site next to someone who has done it before. The scholarship fund covers both: the subscription, for anyone it would otherwise shut out, and campus immersions and field study, and getting people to them.
Working with a partner organization, a tribal program, a workforce board or a relief agency and want to run a cohort? Say so directly. We publish rather than license, and that kind of conversation is the point of the place.
Questions people ask
Do I need building experience?
No. The foundation course assumes nothing. The Level 1 courses assume you are willing to do arithmetic and read a drawing, and they teach the rest as they go. Tradespeople retraining and complete beginners both do well.
What happens to my account when the subscription starts?
If you have an account before the change, everything you enrolled in stays open to you, free, for a year from that date. You do not need to do anything to claim it and you will not be asked for a card to keep what you already had.
What happens to certificates I have already earned?
They stay yours and they stay verifiable, permanently, whether or not you ever subscribe. A certificate that stopped verifying when somebody cancelled would be worthless to them and to whoever is checking it, which would defeat the point of issuing one.
What stays free afterwards?
Regenerative Design Philosophy, the foundation course, permanently and with its certificate. Every course page, syllabus and appendix list stays readable without an account. And the scholarship fund covers the subscription for anyone it would otherwise keep out.
Do I have to take them in order?
The core track is arranged in build order and reads best that way, but each course stands on its own. Where one depends on another, the course page says so.
Is the certificate a license?
No. A certificate records that you completed a course and passed its assessments. It is not a contractor's registration and it does not authorise work that your jurisdiction restricts to licensed trades. Course 2 covers how permitting and licensing actually work.
How are the quizzes marked?
Multiple choice, marked the moment you submit, with an explanation of why the right answer is right. Eighty percent passes. You can retake any quiz — the point is that you know it, not that you guessed well the first time. Each course also has short-answer questions that are not graded; they are there for your own reckoning, with a model answer to compare against.
Do the online courses include field time?
They are priced separately — campus immersions and month-long field study are booked on their own and do have real costs, because somebody has to feed you and there is a building going up. But it runs one way: booking a field session includes online access, so the reading, the drawings and the appendices are all open to you before you arrive and after you leave. A subscription does not include field time.