Free Course Designs
===================

Smarter comes with 19 complete, ready-to-teach course designs, from prompt engineering for
non-programmers to Kubernetes for platform engineers. Like Smarter itself, they are free and open
source, published with Smarter's source code under the same license, with no license fees, no
seat counts and no sign-up forms. Each course design comes with turnkey course plans, with schedules,
graded assignments and rubrics, capstone projects and reading lists, so that an instructor can
take a plan, set the dates, and teach it. Paths in the courses are relative to the root of the
`smarter <https://github.com/smarter-sh/smarter>`__ repository.

The course designs come in two kinds:

- :doc:`micro-courses`: 18 short courses, each on one subject, for students who are new to it.
  Every micro course comes with plans in three formats: an eight-hour classroom bootcamp of
  45-minute lectures and labs, a two-week online course with six hours of instruction, and a
  four-week online course with twelve. Each online format pairs 30-minute recorded lectures with
  a weekly 90-minute live session. :doc:`micro-courses/course-formats` explains the formats, the
  grading scale and the course policies that the plans share.
- :doc:`master-classes`: longer courses that take experienced practitioners deep into one
  technology. The :doc:`master-classes/django-master-class` has 18 hours of instruction, as a
  three-day classroom course or a six-week online course.

The :doc:`Smarter Instructor Guide </smarter-instructor>` explains how to get Smarter running and
how to set it up for a class before you teach any of them.

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1
   :hidden:

   micro-courses
   master-classes