Mortgage can depend on type of house you want. Mortgage for modular house or prefab house can be different from traditional houses. You can ask any company from here http://ca.prefabium.com/ usually building companies help with mortgage info.
This is a good house for earthquake zones. Just needs some insulation I think. BTW shipping container homes are relatively cheap.
http://www.prefabcontainerhomes.org/2012/08/earthquake-resistant-container-home.html
If you will not find any free courses you can try to search online. There are a lot of opportunities now to learn almost any language in Internet at your own pace.