Overview
IOG Academy is a free video course library that teaches people how to write blockchain applications, from the programming language up. Courses arrive as numbered lessons with homework, downloadable code, and recorded question sessions. It is published by Input Output Group, the engineering company behind Cardano1.
The subject is Cardano throughout. One set of tracks teaches the languages used to write smart contracts, the small programs that run on a blockchain and enforce an agreement without a middleman, while another walks through installing and running a Cardano node, the software that keeps a copy of the ledger, and registering a stake pool with it. A large Spanish-language track teaches the same developer material as an original course, not as translated subtitles.
Key Features
- Code you can run alongside the lectures. The Plutus Pioneer lessons ship with matching code, exercises and a written textbook in a public repository the course points readers to2.
- A way in for people who have never written Haskell. A separate Haskell course starts from zero and runs its exercises in an in-browser notebook, so you can write and check code without installing anything first3.
- A full developer course taught in Spanish. Nine days of sessions cover writing on-chain code in Aiken, price feeds called oracles, and wiring a browser wallet into an application.
- Node and stake pool operations, command by command. One track builds a Cardano node from source, registers a stake pool, tunes its networking and monitoring, then retires the pool.
- A route for finance people, not only programmers. A Marlowe track teaches building financial contracts from ready-made templates and is aimed at people with little or no coding experience1.
What to Expect
The IOG Academy videos and the course material that goes with them are free1. You pick a track from the playlists page rather than watching whatever sits at the top of the videos tab: the material is organised as courses, and the lesson numbering tells you where each video sits in its sequence.
Where you start depends on what you already know. The Plutus Pioneer Program says plainly that it is not a course for coding beginners, and recommends prior Haskell or functional programming experience before you begin4. If you do not have that, the Haskell course is the intended first step, written for self-taught coders rather than computer science graduates3. Someone arriving from finance rather than programming is pointed at Marlowe instead1.
The pioneer courses ran as live cohorts, with weekly videos, exercises and question sessions, and Input Output Group offers them according to demand rather than on a fixed schedule1. The recordings stay up afterwards, so most people work through them as a self-paced archive, and registration is a standing interest form rather than open enrolment4.
Governance has its own strand. A DRep Pioneer Program teaches people to serve as delegate representatives, the people ADA holders pick to vote on their behalf on network proposals, and is built so that graduates go on to teach others5.
How current a track is varies. The written companion repository is maintained: the fourth-cohort contracts exist in Plinth, a Haskell-based language, and again as an Aiken translation on a parallel branch2. The video lectures were recorded against the earlier tooling. The channel's About tab carries no description and no links, so orientation comes from Input Output Group's documentation6.
