Below you'll find answers to the questions we get asked most often about the MDN Curriculum.
Creating a full-fledged learning course to take students from beginners to getting their first job is a huge undertaking. Many courses already exist to serve this purpose. Additionally, the most successful courses today, such as those offered by Scrimba, are dynamic multimedia experiences; MDN's core strength, on the other hand, lies in its written content.
MDN's main content itself contains most of the material you need to become a successful front-end web developer.
We decided it would be a much better use of our resources to create a curated, organized list of links to existing MDN pages (hence the MDN Curriculum) and partner with existing course providers. This approach allows us to concentrate on other efforts, such as further enhancing the curriculum and developing certifications.
The MDN Curriculum is not suitable for inclusion inside the main MDN content. MDN's core content is contributed to by thousands of community members every year and evolves at a rapid pace. This is suitable as the web platform continues to evolve rapidly.
The curriculum however is a carefully thought-out summary of what we feel is an optimal skillset for a web developer. It therefore needs to evolve carefully, slowly, and deliberately and should be curated by a smaller number of people.
You can still contribute to the curriculum by filing an issue or raising a PR against the curriculum repo.
Scrimba already had a great reputation before we started talking to them about a partnership. However, we didn't just take the community's word for it. We did an extensive review of Scrimba's Frontend Developer Career Path (FDCP) and provided them with feedback on possible improvements, focusing on increasing coverage of best practices and conformance to the MDN Curriculum Core modules. Scrimba implemented all of our feedback, and the FDCP is even better than it was before. Now that it conforms to our Curriculum Core, we are confident it aligns with MDN standards.
We prioritize user privacy and transparency. The only information MDN shares with Scrimba is user navigation to Scrimba from MDN, and this happens through their own actions by following a link that is marked as external.
In cases where we embed Scrimba content on MDN, Scrimba won't see user data until a user chooses to interact with Scrimba's content.
A lot of Scrimba's content requires a paid subscription, but they also offer several complete courses that are free to access after you register.
It is also worth pointing out that Scrimba's courses are not necessary to make use of the MDN Curriculum — they are an enhancement for those who wish to pay for a structured course that covers the Curriculum core. You can still learn all the topics in the Curriculum for free using the recommended resources.
Yes, once you complete all the topics in the Frontend Developer Career Path, you can access a certificate of completion to share with potential employers or include in your portfolio. See Where can I find my completion certificate? for more information.