Free Training Materials for Natural Builders

I’ve been corresponding with a long time reader about how to develop low cost natural building training courses. The idea is to provide a range of free and low cost training materials that instructors can choose from to develop training programs for students. Kelly and I have already made a pretty good start with our videos, free plans, online articles, blog posts and Instructables. Some of these are listed below for ease of reference. These free materials could be supplemented with my low cost Earthbag Building Guide and/or DVD.

One angle to this that’s particularly interesting is delivering digital content – ebooks, digital plans, videos and online content – to lower costs. Buying books for students in many areas is often cost prohibitive. And besides, students may actually learn faster and better with digital content and hands-on learning. For instance, they can watch short video clips of each step of construction, rewatch as many times as needed and then go and practice that step. For students who don’t have Internet access, the same content can be made available by DVD, PDFs, etc. Students could study the training materials on school computers or on tablet PCs. I believe tablets are the wave of the future. Governments are already buying hundreds of thousands of tablets so every child has an opportunity to link up with the world and access the bounty of digital resources. Here’s one news story: “Reuters reports that the [DataWind Aakash] tablet, launched today, aims to end the digital divide. [£22 or $36] It’s not going to challenge the iPad 2 for performance, but it will bring tablet computers into the hands of people who would never usually be able to afford such sophisticated technology.”

$300 Earthbag House Video (almost 350,000 views) Note: I plan to build one next year
$300 Earthbag House plans
More free house plans
Step-by-Step Earthbag Building (325,000 views)
How to Build an Earthbag Roundhouse (about 270,000 views)
How to Build an Earthbag Dome (about 535,000 views)
Kelly Hart’s dome building guide
More articles at Earthbag Building.com
Videos at Earthbag Building.com
Earthbag Solutions for Disaster-prone Regions
Natural Houses YouTube (about 1,700,000 views)
Low Cost, Self-sufficient Homestead YouTube

And let’s not forget this blog that has over 2,000 blog posts on every subject imaginable about natural building. The search engine here is bogging down (and the site in general because it’s become so large), so it’s now easier to search the site externally using your favorite search engine.