GEOFF LAWTON'S 2022 ONLINE PERMACULTURE DESIGN COURSE
Secure Your Spot for the 2022 Online PDC
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE COURSE?
A Generous 28-week Pace
750+ Instructional Lessons
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.
Weekly Q&A with Geoff
After watching the core video lessons (blackboard and supplemental animations), you’ll have a chance to ask Geoff follow-up questions by email; 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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A sleek, modern discussion area powered by industry-leader Disqus far exceeds outdated commenting tools; a clean and easy-to-use platform fosters meaningful interactions with course teaching assistants, Geoff, and your peers (professionals, aid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 :)
Private Discussion Group
A dedicated members-only Facebook discussion group gives our student community an additional forum for vibrant interactions. While the Disqus area focuses on questions and comments around course material, the optional Member Discussion 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Catch-Up Sessions
During the course, 4 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.
Extended Access
After the 28 course weeks are over, you will have continued access through December 31st, 2021 to all the videos, recorded Q&As, animations, and PDFs. Watch, listen, and read as many times as you’d like.
Bill Mollison, Founder of Permaculture
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?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.
"What I didn't expect doing this course was that I would change my life [...] I increased my food production such that I'm covering my own needs and have surplus that I'm selling and giving away.
"We stumbled across this permaculture homestead and [...] it just completely changed my way of thinking. Everything just started clicking and making sense."
My goal is to [...] help foster the local food movement in the Toronto area, get us working with local farmers, household owners, and leveraging a lot of public land here that are just sitting vacant."
CRACKING THE CODE:
THE PERMACULTURE DESIGNERS' MANUAL
Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designers’ Manual is *the* definitive book on permaculture design, providing a framework so flexible and comprehensive that — to this day — I continuously refer to it in my own practice. There is simply nothing else like it, and it should be the first book on any serious permaculturist’s bookshelf. However, precisely because of the PDM’s extraordinary detail, many that try going through it without first doing a PDC find it challenging.
This PDC took us 2 years to create precisely because it was designed from the ground-up to harmonize with the PDM. With 50+ hours of instructional material (and another 40+ hours of Q&A), the PDC 2.0 deciphers, interprets, decodes, and illuminates the PDM, chapter by chapter. So the benefit is synergistic: The course clarifies the book, and the PDM then becomes a reference tool that can be used throughout your life as a permaculture consultant, teacher, and practitioner.
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 via blockchain, making them instantly verifiable by prospective employers, universities, and other academic institutes. 1-click sharing (LinkedIn, Facebook + dozens more) is built in, as is "anytime access" to a hard-copy version. An extensive list of skills learned, a comprehensive community directory, and a “digital portfolio” that enables you to add photos, design sketches, and documents to your PDC hub page advance things a quantum leap forward from a paper-only certificate.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What's included inside the course?
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You mentioned Bill Mollisons book? What is that?
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