As the lecturer for an upcoming Mises Academy course (Study Libertarian Legal Theory Online with Stephan Kinsella), I have to say, I like the idea of Grayson Lilburnd in this Mises Blog post 🙂

Just in time for the holidays, now you can purchase a Mises Academy course as a gift, and actually have a physical “Gift Enrollment Certificate” to give to the recipient! This option may be especially helpful to parents who would like to purchase Principles of Economics, a course by Robert Murphy (based on his middle/high school textbook Lessons for the Young Economist) for their son or daughter.

The one non-intuitive thing about gifting a course, is that to do it, you need to create an account for the gift recipient, that you then pass to him or her.

Here’s how you would go about it.

1. Go to academy.mises.org and set up an account with (A) the recipient’s name, (B) your own email address, and (C) a password that you can pass on to the recipient. Confirm the new account via the confirmation email that will be sent to you (check your spam folder, in case your filter catches the message).
2. Use the new account to enroll in the course that you’d like to give as a gift. See here for available courses.
3. After you enroll, you will be directed to the course’s “syllabus page”. Near the top of the syllabus page, you will see a “Gift Enrollment Certificate” link. Click on that to download the certificate as a printable PDF file. See the sample certificate below to see a smaller version of what it would look like.
4. Give the Gift Enrollment Certificate to your loved one. Also be sure to give them the web address of the course, the username, and the password. Tell the recipient that the first thing they should do when they log in is to click on their name to access the user profile settings, and change the email address and password on the account.

We at the Mises Academy wish you an erudite Christmas and an edifying New Year!