Welcome! In this contributor's guide you learn what Offcourse is about and how you can contribute. The contributor's community is there for developers, designers and writers around the world who are looking to contribute to an open source project in order to grow their skills.

## What is Offcourse

Offcourse is an open source platform for crowdsourced learning and knowledge sharing. We believe that if we share what we know, and collect that knowledge in one place, we all learn from each other and we can grow our skills in the area we want. That is why we support open source and open knowledge.

## Purpose

Our aim is to help people grow as professionals. Offcourse focuses on 21st Century Skills, such as design, entrepreneurship and programming. We don't believe in 6 year curricula, long, boring lectures, and one-size-fits-all courses. Instead you assemble your skills bit by bit.

## Features

* Course creation
* Forking/ Copying courses
* Editing course material
* Course storage on profile
* Social sharing

## How to use Offcourse

Anything you find on the web can become part of your personal learning course: blogs, video tutorials, podcasts, you name it. Create collections of learning resources, store them in one place, and share them with like-minded people around the globe.

* Pick links to the best online resources. Make use of knowledge that is already out there as opposed to starting from scratch. It is like Pinterest in that sense. You will need to create a profile first to be able to store these resources later. Once you have created your profile on the platform, go to ‘create course’ to do so. You need to fill out the goal of what you want to learn here and the checkpoints then contain your sources for each bit of information that helps you grow the skills you want. Have a look at the courses \(cards\) curated by Offcourse for some inspiration.
* Tweak course material to make it suit your style. This means you can take someone else’s card that holds a skill you’d like to master. Click on one of the checkpoints \(subtopics of the course\) and choose ‘Edit’ in the left side bar to make your own copy \(fork\). The card is then saved on your own profile.
* Push your course content to the platform and externally. Share knowledge with the crowd. You do this with the Twitter and Facebook share button at the bottom of a card, or click ‘get url’ to send the url source to a friend or colleague.

Voila, this is how it works. Have fun!

## Asking questions

If you have a question about the Offcourse platform, your account, bugs or feature requests, please check our FAQ first to find an answer. For questions not listed on our FAQ and that are other than technical issues or feature requests, don't create an issue on our GitHub repository, but [contact](mailto:contact@offcourse.io) us.

## Authors / Maintainers

The authors and maintainers of this website are
* [Jan Hein Hoogstad](https://github.com/yeehaa123)
* [Loek Hendriks](https://github.com/loekhendriks)
* [Kelly Sinterniklaas](https://github.com/kellysinterniklaas)

## Contributing

Offcourse is a not-for-profit organization. The learning platform we build is continuously under development. You can help us **build** the Offcourse platform and its community through **code and design contribution**. If there’s a feature you’d like to work on to grow your coding skills, please do so. It doesn’t matter if you are new to programming or advanced, we welcome all levels and backgrounds to our community. The same goes for design work. The features and design elements that are up for development can be found at our online Contributor's Guide. We manage the Bug Database from our [GitHub Repository](https://github.com/OffCourse/offcourse-next).


Before you start, please read the 'Contribute' section containing our guidelines to work together smoothly and pleasantly. 
