Content has never been enough to help people learn. Sparking curiosity, lighting a motivational fire to pursue it, and supporting people as they put in the hard work is the essential and more difficult part to learning. Human connection is often the way to stoke that learning fire, even more than the most well-produced, premium content. This is why cohort-based courses and community-centered learning are now taking the places of content-forward or video-based learning experiences.

Three Ways to Prioritize Community Learning in Your Online Course

How to Design for Community Through Online Cohorts

If the Internet’s proved anything, it’s that we won’t arrive at a definitive course, lecture, tutorial, or version of anything. But why? By the end of the day, there will be 271,000+ more hours of video on YouTube, 2-3 million more articles, and about 7.5 million new blog posts. And again tomorrow mountains of new content will pile up beyond what we could consume in a lifetime. It’ll never be enough, regardless of the topic.

Content has never been enough to help people learn. Sparking curiosity, lighting a motivational fire to pursue it, and supporting people as they put in the hard work is the essential and more difficult part to learning. Human connection is often the way to stoke that learning fire, even more than the most well-produced, premium content.

This is why cohort-based courses and community-centered learning are now taking the places of content-forward or video-based learning experiences.

With that in mind, here are three ways you can grow a community of learners in your Path (or online courses, to use a more common term).

1.  Eliminate Distraction through Streamlined Design

Creating a focused online environment for your learners will help them connect with the material and each other. There’s a host of factors you can’t fully control when it comes to managing attention, but there are a few practical steps you can take to eliminate distraction.

First, demonstrate to people that the learning environment has been specifically designed for them. At every step (whether in the kitchen, the gym, the museum or online), remind your learners why they’re learning that idea or skill in that moment. You can do this simply by including a few sentences (or every now and then a video) on why this particular topic matters and how it’s building to something greater.

This builds “connective tissue” within your learning experience (or Path) that makes the whole journey feel cohesive. In fact, that focus on small steps toward a greater whole is exactly why we use the word “Steps” within Pathwright.

An essential step in your learning experience design process should be to cut, cut, cut. Minimize distraction by saving extra content and loads of questions for the end of each segment of the learning journey. As the old adage goes, less is more. That’s never truer than when learning something new.

The most essential way to eliminate distraction is to focus on community upfront. There’s a basic principle we use at Pathwright: “Show your face; say your name.” Front loading connection and community alleviates a traditional focus on content. You can do this by including simple, homemade (read “iPhone made”) videos at the beginning of your course. We’ve found that even a self-made, one-minute video can increase engagement by 20%.

But what do you say in a video like that? Start by reassuring your learner that they are moving through a designed environment. And, specifically, an environment that has been designed by a human and not an algorithm. (Take a moment to consider how rare that is in your own online journeys.) This principle is reinforced by that “connective tissue” we discussed above.

You can, of course, amp this idea up to 11 through entirely community-based learning. Community-based or cohort-based Paths are a newer evolution of  learning, emphasizing group learning and personal guidance rather than content.

In a cohort like this, a group of people with a common goal or destination move through a Path together, providing focus, social accountability, and unique perspectives to the learning experience through project or problem based learning. This method often requires a bit more time and planning (whether through in-person or virtual hangouts). But the impact on learning is significant.

A cohort moves together through the same path. Many community learning platforms have an entirely organic community structure with no progressive direction. But the majority of the responsibility is on the individual. Sadly, if you (the learner) want to make progress towards your goals, then you do that and tell us about it.

Community-based learning in a cohort is more like being on a sports team or belaying someone who’s rock climbing. Everyone is expected to show up, put in the work, kindly push one another to be their best and lend a hand when someone slips.

Again, this is best supported through project or problem based learning. Having your learners (whether the entire group or broken up into sub-groups) answer a question or build something together will strengthen community with your Path. Your learners, spurred on by you (the guide), will share a common goal, encourage each other through roadblocks, and will sharpen each other through insights they’ve gained individually.

Never forget that community engagement obeys the laws of motion. Unless something pushes on your community to keep going, it will eventually die out. Because of this, shift your mindset from “content curator” for a course to “community manager.” Community managers create moments, events, and discussions to grow and engage their communities. Plan accordingly to ensure your group doesn’t fizzle out. The effort will be worth it.

If you’re used to a content focused learning environment (whether through making or taking them), the above may sound like a monumental task. The beauty of community based learning, however, is that even a small community meeting for a moment can make a significant difference.

If you’d like to try any of the above, consider starting with just one meet-up among your learners. Then build to a month or month-and-a-half long community as you find what works.

Even applying one or two principles from above in your already content-focused learning experience could make a significant difference.

If you do try out one of the ideas above, let us know. We’d love to learn with you and from you.

Three Ways to Design Your Online Courses for Community Learning

Our five-step recipe for designing learning experiences that help learners build the right habits, overcome boredom, and do these things in relationship with others.

Design the Perfect Learning Experience in 5 Steps

It can seem as if education is about information alone, since that's the part you can really see.

But it's often much more about building the right habits, overcoming the boredom that stands between us and what we'd like to learn, and doing these things in relationship with others. We don't just need books. We need patterns, frameworks, and people to journey with.

What we need is design. Specifically, Learning Experience (LX) Design. (More on why we need LX.) Today, I'm sharing our five-step recipe for designing the perfect learning experience. We'll use a recent project as a case study.

Last year, Pathwright's LX Team designed courses for Synergy Performance Psychology. Synergy helps teams—in athletics and business—work and grow together in healthy ways. We took their excellent content, and turned it into a transformational journey in the form of an online course.

We had to know who they were teaching. Through our Learner Profile and Blueprinting process, we narrowed the course to focus on businesspeople, not athletes. We also identified that these learners would need to apply what they learned almost immediately. We can't share Synergy's Blueprints, but if you'd like to learn more about this process you can view our templates here: Blueprint template and Learner Profiles template. Or get a simplified view through our How to Design a Path course.

After we identified who Synergy would be teaching, we designed a lesson that fit their learning context. We assessed their material to find out what could be discussed, what information could be turned into something actionable, and where we could get the learners involved with the information.

How could we get learners answering discussion questions or engaging in personal reflection? Synergy's course would be taught by various managers in different business scenarios, so it was important that those managers could work on actionable projects with their subordinates.

Through the process of making an actionable path, we usually uncover content gaps: Questions must be written, projects must be created, and material must change formats.

In Synergy's case, the introduction to their written research needed to be in video format to combat the impersonal feel so common in business training. Learners needed to see the experts who were addressing them so they could feel more invested in the material. We also wrote discussion and reflection questions that meet learners at their current competency level.

Your online course must stay focused and specific to the topic at hand. This happens only if the visuals and content of an online course feel consistent and coherent. For Synergy's course, this meant adding brand-appropriate visuals that could inspire and engage their specific learners.

Ultimately, we created an online learning environment that precisely modeled Synergy's values. Each step pulled the learner deeper into their world.

Our LX Design Team walked with Synergy through each of these steps. Their teaching took on a new, engaging format as a result of our work together. Though they taught the same information, now their learners could act on it and build a community around it. LX Design pays off big when learners come together around empowering, energizing teaching.

Want to team up? Learn more about Pathwright's LX Design services here. 

You can also send questions, comments, or topic suggestions our way on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email lydia@pathwright.com. We'd love to hear from you!

Learning has always had the same enemy: distraction. And teachers have always had the same task: to fight distraction with good design. That's more true in the brave new world of the internet...

Why Would a Software Company Design Courses?

Pathwright is not a software company. We're an education company. That might seem like an odd statement; we're known for a software product, after all. But if the internet crashed tomorrow, I like to think that Pathwright would still exist. We would still spend our days dreaming up and designing tools to give teachers superpowers.

Learning—whether offline or online—has always had the same enemy: distraction. And teachers have always had the same task: to fight distraction with good design. That's more true in the brave new world of the internet than ever (who hasn't gone down a wikipedia rabbit trail or found themselves on Netflix instead of MasterClass?).

Learning has always had the same enemy: distraction.

With many former and current educators on our team, our goal is to rethink education in an online context. That's why building a software product isn't all we do. For the past seven years, we've been honing our skills as course designers. We've helped educators turn bundles of writing, videos, questions, and projects into engaging, transformative learning experiences. We call this work Learning Experience (LX) Design.

Because Learning Experience (LX) Design is a relatively new term, I thought I'd take you through each step of our design process, highlighting a few partners we've worked with over the past few years along the way.

Our LX team starts every design project by getting to know learners. We define their aspirations, challenges, and situation, so we can tailor a learning experience to them.

When Princeton Theological Seminary approached us about reimagining their Certificate in Theology & Ministry, we took a day and a half to discover exactly who Princeton was trying to teach. That allowed us to dream up the most effective way to reach them.

Through an exercise that we call "Learner Profiles," we catalogued the particular challenges that faced Princeton's distance learning students. Then, we used what we call a Blueprint to map a plan for a more modular program design.

This planning process led us to design (more about this in the next section) a new kind of online course for Princeton. Instead of listening to hour-long lectures, learners dipped in and out of lecture segments, active readings, and discussions with classmates.

This "lean-forward" approach kept remote learners always on the edge of their seats. We discovered this because we started with a plan.

When we have a plan in place, we test it with prototypes. Our team uses a partner's existing content to build a prototype that we test with real teachers and learners.

Synergy Performance Psychology has spent years leading the way in sports and organizational psychology. Recently, they approached our LX team about taking their organizational leadership training to new heights. Our team designed an interactive learning path out of their static research documents.

. . . technology plus information doesn't necessarily equal learning.

Through our design prototype, we discovered that we could increase engagement through a personal introduction from the researchers themselves. So we wrote and supervised short video introductions for each lesson in Synergy's course.

The result was high-quality research in an engaging, actionable, personal learning path.

Synergy will soon launch their training to over 3,000 learners.

It's probably no surprise that our team can build paths in Pathwright really, really quickly. Once, when a partner was in a pinch and needed changes made quickly to a course over the weekend, we even built and edited over 100 learning steps on an iPhone . . . on an airplane . . . with airplane wifi. We're not messing around.

Here's another example—one of our favorite partnerships. For the past two years, our LX team has worked closely with Reach Out & Read Carolinas to build courses together.

We act as their Path Building team. To ensure every course reaches learners in tip-top shape, Reach Out & Read Carolinas sends their paths to our team. We quickly load their PDF based research into Pathwright, converting it into interactive Blocks along the way and adding discussion questions to better engage their community.

Reach Out & Read has more time to stay focused on being experts in child literacy because we can quickly build engaging, interactive paths for them.

We design courses because technology plus information doesn't necessarily equal learning. In fact, that combo often equals distraction. In each of the cases above, our LX team's mission was to eliminate distraction so learners could be immersed in the learning experience. After all, that's when transformative learning takes place.

The more complex and abundant your learning material is, the more it requires design. And the more distractions at your learners' fingertips—from Facebook to french bulldogs playing with balloons—the more they'll benefit from a planned, designed, and beautifully executed learning experience.

To get a demo and quote from our LX team, visit us here.

Jerry Seinfeld wants to know if you’ll watch his show. Well, that was a big question when developing his internet show "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

How Long Should Your Online Lesson Be? Seinfeld Might Know

Jerry Seinfeld wants to know if you’ll watch his show. Well, that was a big question when developing his internet show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. He asked YouTube, Facebook, and others who know our watching habits well.

Seinfeld: I'd like to make this show. Each episode will be about 20 minutes.

YouTube: That'll never work. People will never watch past 5 minutes on the internet.

Seinfeld: Well, I'm going to make this show, and it's going to be about 20 minutes long. We'll see.

I wasn't in the room, but that's basically how Seinfeld says it went.

When the show aired, the creators of Comedians in Cars found that almost every viewer watched each entire episode. They hung around for an average of 19 minutes.

Does this mean that YouTube was wrong about people's attention spans? Not at all. YouTube collects millions of data points about our viewing habits every day. They know how long we pay attention.

It does mean, however, that YouTube doesn't know how you'll watch this particular show. YouTube can give a well-informed suggestion when it comes to the length of your internet show. But you might just surprise them.

A lot of people ask, "How long should my online lesson be?" My usual answer is: “About 20 to 30 minutes.” 

But here’s my real answer: I don't know, and we might be asking the wrong question. 

I wish there were a magic number of minutes that hit that sweet spot between getting a learner's full attention and tiring them out just enough to sleep well at night. But, alas, I haven't found that number.

Seinfeld's experimental show teaches us a question to ask instead of “how long should an online lesson be?” 

What kind of lesson do learners need and want?

Seinfeld knows his audience. He knows there are people out there who'd love to watch their two favorite comedians chat. As a teacher, you know your learners best. You know how to get in your learner’s shoes and retrace their path. If you do that, you'll know where and how to lead them. Maybe practicing physicians learn best through bite-sized lessons taken between seeing patients. Maybe those learning to cook will be happy with an hour long lesson as long as you chop up the cooking demonstration into shorter videos. Get to know your audience (your learners), and you’ll know what they need in a lesson.

Despite its variety of guests, Seinfeld's show has a lot of predictability. You know you'll find comedians, cars, and coffee. That framework makes the variety of guests sparkle even more. The comedians, cars, and coffee become the cozy living room where you can have a surprising conversation. So try designing a pattern for your learners to follow each day or week. Then, let the information sparkle on its own. 

"People are less likely to fall asleep when you move," Seinfeld says about his show. The same is true of courses. Give your learners movement, and they'll stick with you. Sure, they could learn a lot from an essay that takes an hour to read, but they aren't as likely to stick around for that (especially if they’re reading online). Instead, pace your lessons by changing up activities: something to read, something to write about, something to watch. (You can also add pacing with point values.)

YouTube could’ve been right, by the way. There’s a chance Seinfeld’s internet show could’ve failed. But part of the point here is that Seinfeld tried this new kind of show for a new kind of audience. 

So go make a new kind of learning experience your learner hasn’t seen before, one that matches their needs and is paced just for their skill level. But if it doesn’t work, don’t sweat it. Keep asking the right questions and iterating on your design. Engagement is the key, and, with time and attention, you can find it.

Pathwright supports learner engagement in several ways. Check out how to evaluate course performance, so you can iterate on your design with expert know-how. 

I love exploring historic universities. While living in London last year, I had the chance to explore some of Oxford’s colleges and numerous universities in Scotland.

Walking into each felt like an invitation to learn. And that feeling is no accident. Educators have known for a long time that creating a beautiful place to learn helps students learn better. Beauty motivates us to learn before we even realize it.

Universities, for all their other faults, have taken advantage of this principle for centuries. In contrast, most LMS software is generic at best. Often, it’s ugly and distracting. LMSs tend to feel more like a functional tool than an immersive environment.

At Pathwright, we believe that a beautiful place to learn is even more important in the virtual world.

Here are four ways we believe beauty empowers learning:

Before your students click play on video lessons or read discussion questions, your brand attracts or repels them. Just like an Ivy League school’s crest speaks to a school’s reputation for learning, your branding can increase your legitimacy as an educator.

This reputation can’t be faked. Good branding grows from the inside out. Your brand should be a natural outpouring of your educational goals. What educator doesn’t believe strongly in their goals? Let your brand promote what you believe at your core. If it does, it won’t fail to draw in the right learners.

Just as your educational philosophy deserves to be visualized well, so does your content.

Think back to when you bought textbooks in college. Virtually no one enjoys buying textbooks, because textbooks rarely reflect a passion to learn. They are often poorly bound and horribly laid out. And they’re never fun to read. Information piled on top of facts is not a good look.

Online lessons shouldn’t be that way. If your content is worth teaching, then it’s worth packaging well.

Students should be proud they’re learning with you.

Branding your school consistently and holistically will create this sense of identity. While a logo can help you accomplish this task, good branding requires more. Even simply providing a consistent color scheme will help your students invest themselves in who you are as an educator.

Good branding empowers your individual student’s identity without compromising your educational philosophy.

You can probably think of restaurants or cafés that you revisit as much for the atmosphere as you do for the food. Websites and online schools can be the same. If your online educational platform is an attractive and comfortable environment, it will be one in which your students want to learn.

Creating a sense of place and purpose is essential for online educators. Most of your students will sit at a kitchen table or in a coffee shop as you teach them. Background noise, the day’s mundane tasks, and a thousand cat videos bombard your learners and compete with you for their attention.

Through good and beautiful design, your online courses can become a portal that transports learners away from these distractors. It can push them to wantto learn and keep them coming back day after day.

At Pathwright, we believe education should be beautiful. We’ve designed every screen to be elegant and aesthetically appealing. Educators can generate a unique, atmospheric background around each course to captivate learners. With Pathwright, you can brand your online school’s experience so it feels like your unique place. Try it free today.

Like the first page of a novel, your course introduction sets the tone for everything that follows. In a course, the first few steps can give your learners a map of what they’ll learn and the energy to tackle it.

4 Ways to Engage Learners in Your Course Introduction

Like the first page of a novel, your course introduction sets the tone for everything that follows. In a course, the first few steps can give your learners a map of what they’ll learn and the energy to tackle it. Let’s take a look at four ways to introduce a course.

A personal greeting gives your course a friendly feel. This does a lot for engagement, especially when you’re teaching at a distance. Writing works ok for this, but short videos (under a minute) work best. Don’t fuss with fancy equipment. Use a smartphone, simple tripod, and easy-to-use mic. We did this for Intro to Pathwright.

Keep the script simple. Introduce yourself, tell your learners what they’ll cover and why it matters, and tell them you’ll be there for any questions along the way.

If you’re teaching more experienced learners, use the intro to get to know their skill level. For instance, if you teach a class on illustration, you could start with a simple project.

Not only will they take an active hand right away, you’ll get the chance to set more specific goals for their progress.

Discussions get learners involved with you and each other. Try the simple, effective method of asking your learners to introduce themselves or dig a little deeper. For instance, if Malcolm Gladwell were teaching on spending in education, he might ask learners something like this:

This question encourages participation out of the gate. Right at the start, learners invest with you in discovering something new. The question also stirs up some healthy controversy (and the energy that comes with it) that you can channel through the rest of your course.

This is a favorite of mine. A story engages your learners’ imagination in a powerful way. If I were teaching a course on one of my favorite poets, Osip Mandelstam, I’d open with a story about how his wife and friends saved his life’s work from destruction.

This short anecdote sets the stage for all the drama and intrigue inherent in Mandelstam’s work. Hopefully, it would inspire my learners to see how meaningful and important Mandelstam’s work really is.

The best introductions will combine a few of these tactics. Regardless of which you choose, the most essential thing is to communicate your passion for the material and to give a map for your learners to follow. This combo will set the pace for your learners and give them fuel for the journey.

Online courses should be more than just an attractive way to convey information, because learning is more than just relaying facts. It’s about relationships that build frameworks for information.

Online courses should be more than just an attractive way to convey information, because learning is more than just relaying facts. It’s about relationships that build frameworks for information. Asking useful discussion questions will help your students in three key ways:

To learn through explaining things themselves

To synthesize what they’ve learned with their experience

Below you’ll find four tips to help you write questions that accomplish these goals:

Strong open-ended questions guide our thoughts without expecting specific answers. Asking an open-ended question is like fencing in a pasture—a farmer wants his cattle to have plenty of grass on which to feed, but he doesn’t want any of them going too far off on their own. The right discussion question will push students in a helpful direction without giving them too much room to follow unhelpful tangents. Let’s imagine what open-ended questions about this blog post would sound like:

What’s one thing that you found really helpful from our discussion about open-ended questions? (Too broad.)

How do you think your specific subject material will shape how you write open-ended questions? (Helps students apply information to their own context)

What are some important things to remember when you’re writing open-ended questions? (Expects regurgitation of what’s been discussed, doesn’t push students for original thoughts)

How can open-ended questions in early lessons prepare your students for what you want to teach them later in the course? (Pushes students to consider specific benefits we didn’t discuss)

Even if you write the perfect open-ended question (broad enough to be challenging without being so broad it’s unhelpful), expect to see a wide array of answers. Students will combine what you’ve taught them with their own experience to bring something original into the conversation. That’s discussion’s superpower—each student becomes a teacher, and each benefits from the experience of others.

The community aspect of discussion groups will also provide more (and better) feedback. Feedback from peers not only helps a student benefit from someone else’s ideas, but it applies positive pressure to the learning process. No one wants to come to a discussion empty-handed, knowing that their fellow classmates will be watching, so they’ll put more time into answering a question well.

As you write discussion questions, consider asking yourself: “Does this question help students to add their own experience to this discussion?” Try following that up with: “Does this question motivate students to give a thoughtful response?”

Offering more than one question to answer — providing some that are very accessible, others that are more challenging — will draw in more students to participate. Many of your students won’t be used to online discussion. And others will squirm at the thought of having to share in front of their classmates. For these students, easily accessible questions will become a training ground for healthy discussion. These easier questions will familiarize students with what it’s like to discuss and get feedback. Again, let’s imagine an accessible question we might ask if we were teaching this blog post:

How have discussion questions helped you learn in the past? (Simply focuses on the student’s personal experience while drawing out information about the subject.)

4. Offer Incentive (Grade the Discussion)

It’d be difficult to grade every discussion post (much less the feedback on those posts). And, if you’re asking the right kind of discussion questions, there shouldn’t be a “right answer” to grade. But offering points for participation will usually draw in the stragglers.

Participation points may seem a little too pragmatic at first. After all, we want students to want to discuss, right? But no one learns to swim without getting in the water, and some of us need a little push off the edge of the swimming pool. Giving out points will get them involved, and once the student is in the discussion, they just might find that it’s really helpful. 

(Read more on grades at their worst (and best) and how points create dynamic courses.)

Helpful discussion questions take time to write. The process isn’t easy, though it gets easier with practice. But when you’ve mastered it, your online course will feel more like a class and not just a textbook. Students will begin to engage with what you teach and with their classmates. You’ll build a community of learners prepared to apply what they know.

How to Design for Community Through Online Cohorts

Design the Perfect Learning Experience in 5 Steps

Why Would a Software Company Design Courses?

How Long Should Your Online Lesson Be? Seinfeld Might Know

Education Should Be Beautiful

4 Ways to Engage Learners in Your Course Introduction

How to Write Discussion Questions

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LX Design

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