3 ways to grow your learners & your course at the same time

How to Grow Your Online Course with Word of Mouth

When we learn something new, our first instinct is to share it. After all, learning is about connections to ourselves and others. But most online courses are locked behind a paywall or login, making it difficult to share. Locked-down learning is not only less fun, but less likely to stick. And, it blocks the most potent marketing tool in a course designer's toolkit: word-of-mouth.

Word-of-mouth is a marketing term for when people buy a product because someone they trust shared it with them — in a conversation, on social media, or in a presentation.

You can foster growth for your learners and for your online courses by creatively encouraging them to share what they learn — a win-win scenario!

A positive learning experience is the foundation of word-of-mouth promotion. Once you have that, your learners will want to share their experience in your course, and you can help them do so with timely prompts:

Learners earn small and large accomplishments throughout an effective learning experience — building their first website, making a quilt, cracking a tough math formula, articulating a thought, etc. Identify those uniquely positive moments and:

Prompt them to share accomplishments outside your course — on Facebook, Twitter, or with friends. You get the benefit of their audience.

Share great examples of work on your social media or website so others can see your learners' progress.

Give special recognition when your learners succeed in a big way. For example, post a brief bio of your graduates on your website or recommend them on LinkedIn.

We all love to see (and re-share) posts that showcase something we've accomplished!

Asking people directly to share your course can feel awkward, but there are natural ways to do so that appreciative learners will be happy to help you with:

Prompt new learners to invite friends or colleagues to join them in the course.

Ask for reviews and post interesting ones on social media or your website.

Share your goals and ask your community to help you reach them. For example, you could share how many learners you hope to have in the community by the end of the year (and why), or you could share how many courses you need to sell to begin developing your next course. This is a time-tested approach favored by nonprofits, but anyone can do it! It works best if a for-profit company focuses on what they'll be able to offer next when the goal is reached.

An additional incentive or two puts some icing on the cake for people who want to share your course:

Create a referral program where anyone who shares your course with someone who joins both get cash, a gift card, or a free course.

The best way to really learn something is to teach it. Give everyone who completes your courses the option to create their own group to re-take it with friends, families, or coworkers at a discounted rate.

Issue a certificate, badge, or award at the end of the course that includes coupons for discounted access for anyone they'd like to give a unique gift to.

How Pathwright helps people share your course

Pathwright's Share feature is a one-stop shop for sharing paths quickly and beautifully. Use your device's native sharing options (e.g., Airdrop, text message, etc.) in real-time, or use a QR code for convenient sharing at live events and in promotional materials.

Here's a quick overview of Share from Christian: 


Prompt your learning community to share your paths with their peers. The Share feature generates an attractive visual card that shows your course cover. Anyone who shares it will see an aesthetically appealing representation of your course anywhere you encourage and/or incentivize word-of-mouth sharing on social media or through native share (e.g., Airdrop, text message, etc.).

In-Person Teaching, Events, and Conferences

The Share QR code is great for in-person teaching, events, and conferences. Now, instead of asking everyone to type in your website URL and click 2-3 times to get into a course, you can put the course's QR code up on your presentation slides (Pathwright, Keynote, PowerPoint, etc.) for the audience to scan with their smartphones. The QR code comes in handy in a printed syllabus for a class or at an event registration table or kiosk.

It's raining QR codes! They're everywhere, and with good reason. Whether print, live, or digital, a QR code is a very low-threshold way to quickly turn curiosity into a learner in just one step. Whether you promote your courses through ads, coffee shop bulletins, live events, or guerrilla marketing tactics, a QR code could come in handy.

Don't let a paywall or login block the most powerful form of marketing for course designers! Learn three tips for how to grow your learners and your online course with word-of-mouth promotion.

After hosting the University of Rhode Island's Summer Institute in Digital Literacy in-person for eight years, Renee moved the program online with Pathwright in 2020. She discovered a few unexpected positive side effects . . .

A Fresh Outlook on Teaching Media (and Hosting Conferences)

Professor Renee Hobbs has dedicated more than thirty years to media literacy education through teaching, researching, writing books, and creating supportive communities for educators.

One of those communities is the Media Education Lab, which equips educators—K-12 teachers, college faculty, school administrators, librarians, and more—to teach students how to access, critically evaluate, and create media on their own. Many countries, including the US, need this skill to bridge political and cultural polarization gaps.

Renee's work felt even more meaningful in 2020 as she saw an "increased awareness about how our online community is inevitably tied to a political project . . . through education we want to create a more just and a more secure and a more fair society. Media literacy has a lot to say about using current events, using popular culture, using what's going on in the world as a tool to promote learning and dialogue and collaboration and problem-solving."

Participant diversity increased because hotel and travel expenses were no longer barriers. Four teachers from a Navajo reservation and educators from Brazil, Romania, and other underserved communities joined online. Renee reflected, "Our online community grew more diverse and deeply collaborative and intensified our feelings of connection across time and space."

Moving the Summer Institute online created a natural and low-barrier way to build technology skills for older participants, like Jane. Before the Summer Institute, Jane didn't know what a web browser was. But Renee created a staffed Zoom room called "The Lounge" that was available for support all day every day of that week to make sure anyone could get help when they needed it. Not many used it, but Jane did. She asked for help fourteen times in six days. She finished the program and signed up for the more advanced follow-up program for summer 2021.

Renee said, "[Jane] obviously increased her confidence and her perception that she could be a learner online, and the fact that she signed up again to get a deeper dive... it just means the world to me. It means that everybody can benefit from the robust journey that online learning affords, and I don't want to leave anybody behind on this journey."

Media Education Lab saw a spike in overall participation in their events throughout the year, some of which may have been correlated with the successful online Summer Institute. In 2020 alone, 10,248 people joined their Zoom meetings.

"My thinking about online learning has changed. In a way, I felt very prepared for the pivot because I was already teaching online. But I realized that we had to help our educators — the people we serve — think deeper about realtime and anytime learning (synchronous vs asynchronous) . . . Teachers always guide and connect and help students create, but the form that the guiding, the connecting, and the creating takes might be different now in online learning," said Renee. "Christian Shockley [Head of Ed Labs at Pathwright] was really a big influence in our thinking about the affordances of anytime learning and how to make anytime learning just as curiosity inducing, just as engaging... And for most of the people we worked with that was the big 'ah-ha!'"

Hey there! It's Christian from Ed Labs here jumping in. I hope you enjoyed this article on one of my very favorite Ed Lab Partners, Renee Hobbs. To round things out, I'd like to share a few tips to help you run your own conference online using Pathwright.

First off, get yourself in the mindset. Whether it's a simple or complex conference, the Path is going to act as a basecamp for your attendees. It'll be the place they join and come back to for those right-on-time nudges to the right events. So that means...

You should rely a lot on scheduled, custom reminders. Think of it as uploading your hosting personality even before the conference begins. Want to know another cool thing about using a robust schedule? Your conference attendees can export it to their personal calendar.

Now to the structure of your conference. If your presenters don't have a lot of extra material to share pre or post session, your path design can stay relatively simple (think a step or lesson for each session). But if you have lots of speakers and you want your attendees to have fun, interactive lessons before or after a session (which I highly recommend!), you'll want to use Collections. With Collections, you can give each speaker their own path to customize, then bundle them all together for your conference attendees.

Alrighty, I'll leave my tips there for now. If you'd like to meet with me to design your own conference on Pathwright, feel free to schedule an Ed Lab session. Remember, Ed Labs is focused on educational design (not typical support questions). For those kinds of more technically focused questions, the talented Pathwright guidance team is available at hello@pathwright.com.

In 2021, Renee published a new book on propaganda, Mind Over Media, and an online companion course that models the learning activities in her book. Renee hopes this course will help educators engage with students in analyzing current events, propaganda, and disinformation. Learn more about Renee Hobbs, her 2021 book, and her good work at the Media Education Lab.

Join the online education conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. We'd love to hear from you! To share feedback or a topic suggestion for the Pathwright blog, please email me at lydia@pathwright.com.

Mr. Roger's suggestion to "look for the helpers" is heartening for all of us right now. As fear spreads, so do acts of generosity and courage —  we simply have to look for them.

Because Teachers Are the Helpers We Need Right Now

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'” ― Fred Rogers

Instead of self-distancing, we see heroic healthcare workers self-risking their wellbeing for the wellness of others. Behind the scenes, we see millions of us who aren't at immediate risk make extraordinary changes for the benefit of our communities.

It's helpful that we're all in this together, but it can be hard to learn and grow when our future is uncertain.

And that's where teachers come in. Amid the chaos, teachers are just the helpers we need to make new paths and guide us towards growth.

Our mission is "to multiply the impact teachers make on the world." We've never had a chance to put our mission into practice quite like this, and we're up for the challenge. If you’re an educator looking to make a difference in this trying time, we’re here to help you. 

In our Distance Educator Resource Dashboard, you'll find quick links to articles and guides that will help you move from in-person to online quickly and creatively. We'll be updating the dashboard with new links, guides, and upcoming live teaching sessions, so be sure to check back.

Two highlights:

Free live help & support: We've opened our calendars for free, live conversations with Michelle and Christian, two of our expert Guides. They'll be able to help you navigate any challenge you're up against, whether that's moving recently in-person classes or events online or expanding to help more isolated people with only the internet for company. Here's where you can schedule a conversation.

No fees for COVID-19 training & discounts for educators in need: We're offering free use of Pathwright to anyone offering COVID-19 response training and to individual teachers who need to move their classes online for the first time. We’ll also provide discounted plans and course design guidance for educators offering free or discounted courses or who must quickly move online without the financial resources. See our Distance Educator Scholarship for more information.

If there's any other way we can help, please let us know.

Finally, I'll leave you with another one of my favorite quotes, this one from T.H. White, that is especially apt today:

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.”  

“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.  

“There is only one thing for it then — to learn.  

“Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  

“That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.  

“Learning is the only thing for you.  

“Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”   

- TH White, The Once and Future King

We're thankful for the generous work teachers do to help us learn in times like these. It's the only thing for it.

We're excited to officially announce the biggest new feature we've built to date: Blocks. Blocks gives you the power to design effective, engaging learning content like never before.

A New Way to Create Content With Pathwright

Over the past year, we designed Blocks "secretly" with our partner educators. As we iterated, developed, and tested with world-class teachers and instructional designers, Blocks became a completely new way to design creative, beautiful, and interactive learning content. And Blocks aren't just new to Pathwright, they're new to education platforms in general. You won't find an instructional content authoring tool like Blocks built into any other education platform.

Blocks is well-tested and ready for you to use today. We hope you'll enjoy using it as much as we have. If you'd like to know a little more before you explore, read on.

Blocks is designed for active learning (not passive consumption)

As we all know, learning is an active, not passive, process. But most web content builders are designed to create content for passive consumption: blog posts, news articles, videos, audio podcasts, ebooks, etc . . .

You can post all kinds of passive content from this ubiquitous web editor.

These passive content builders are easy to use, familiar, and pervasive. Naturally, education platforms adopted them and tacked on quizzes, projects, or discussions to occasionally interrupt the passive stuff. This approach served us well early on, but we began to question its effectiveness. Perhaps learner engagement drops off in online courses because of the dull, blog post-like format rather than the content itself.  What if this "tacked-on" approach was a "hack" built on top of a passive content model? And what if that model is fundamentally built on a wrong premise about learning?

We began designing Blocks for the learner first with the goal of engaging their brains long enough for them to grasp a concept without putting them in screensaver mode. And so far, it's working. Here are some of the ways you can use Blocks to transform passive consumption into active learning:

Instead of a bulleted list to explain a set of facts, use flashcards that picture concepts and engage a learner's memory when they discover new information (above).

Drop a reflection question below a short video or article to help make it stick and encourage application.

Instead of a video demo, quickly create an image with touch-points your learner can use to explore a scene.

We've worked hard to make each of our 30 starter blocks look great out of the box on any device. Even more complex interactions like annotated images or flashcards provide a natural, app-like experience on smart phones and tablets:

With the lego-like Blocks content designer, you can be more creative than ever as you segment your content, show more than tell, and pace the flow of learning.

Blocks provides the best of both worlds: An instructional design tool & education platform all in one.

Currently, designing pro-level instructional content and making it available within an online course requires two big steps of mashing together:

Content created within an expensive, highly-technical instructional design tool like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline and exporting it.

Embedding the export into a "player" within an expensive, highly-technical Learning Management System (LMS).

Hacking these two complex systems together carries more than 2x the expensive and technical hassle, while usually resulting in a disappointingly disjointed, limited, and opaque learning and teaching experience.

But now with Blocks, you can have your cake and eat it too:

Anyone can author instructional content right within the easy-to-use Pathwright platform without having to import, embed, or link to content from elsewhere.

All the content you build is fully integrated with Pathwright's built-in teaching tools, so you'll be able to use stats, grade work, share feedback, and have discussions right alongside and within your interactive content.

While there are still more advanced interactions that specialized instructional design tools offer, Blocks has all the basic tools you'll need to design instructionally-sound and unique content—and we're just getting started. We'll add new blocks and enhancements frequently.

(And as an aside, Blocks enables us to create entirely custom learning interactions for you. So if you have an idea for a block you'd like to build with us, let us know.)

Blocks multiplies your content team's productivity

As you think about using Blocks for your learning content, you may feel a little like a few of our partners did as we began to roll  this feature out  internally: "Well, this is cool, but wow—we've got a lot of work to do to upgrade all this content."

We think you'll discover along with them that upgrading to Blocks is a surprisingly quick—and fun!—experience:

With only a few clicks, Blocks creates great-looking content. You can copy+paste blocks (or whole steps with multiple blocks) to re-use templates across your courses.

Now all of the images and files you use across all of your content are stored in the new Media Manager—that means brand-appropriate visuals are only a search and tap away.

Oh, and Blocks includes one of our most requested content features: Autosave. Your content saves automatically as you edit so you won't lose your work.

Additionally, our own Learning Experience (LX) Design Team is available on a project-basis to help you economically and professionally transform any content you have (whether it's on Pathwright already or not) into the new Blocks format.

You can start using Blocks within your Pathwright account  today. If you don't have a Pathwright account, you can create one to try out for free and start using Blocks in minutes.

When I tell people about Pathwright, I often hear a version of “man, my university’s software sucks, we should use yours.”

Hating your LMS (Learning Management System) is not an uncommon sentiment. Google “[LMS name] sucks” for pretty much any mainstream LMS, and you’ll find outpourings of ire from students and teachers listing all the ways they’ve been screwed by these poorly designed platforms.

While I wish we could help students dealing with crappy LMSs, the problems with the Higher Ed-LMS market run deeper than poor software design.

Below are a few reason why bad LMSs end up at even the most prestigious institutions.

Most mainstream LMSs were designed with little thought given to the students’ experience. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out (although it may take one to use the software). This seems like a bizarre choice from the outside since 80–90% of the users of an LMS are students, but it is intentional. Student experience isn’t a top priority to the big LMS vendors because the students are not the ones paying for the LMS!

LMSs are designed for the misinformed 💰people

Imagine a committee (when have committees ever made bad decisions?) composed of administrators, IT people, and the token student and/or teacher. For these committees, due diligence in LMS selection starts with a giant features list (one often found through a Google search or provided by fancy consultants). This list determines the “best” match for them.

I use quotes around “best” because the people helping them make this decision are often aggressive sales staff from LMS companies. As you might imagine, on the LMS side, this leads to an arms race of features— one that plays off the good intentions and fears of the committee.

The committee, with feature-FOMO, throws money at the problem. It’s the LMS that can check all the boxes on the list and that makes the most steakholders (this is a better way to spell it—you know it is)happy that takes the prize.

This leads to LMS software that is a rat’s nest of features that only “power users” can understand. Those features require conferences and time-sucking, on-site training for the primary users (students and teachers) to get any work done. The original committee might even regret their decision, but now they’re trapped by the contract—often a contract that lasts as long as 5 years (light-years in internet time). In the end, this is a losing game for everyone.

So how should universities pick an LMS? Start with the needs of your students and teachers. They are the primary users of the software and unless their needs are being met, you are making an expensive mistake. Below are a few tips for picking an LMS that will serve your school well:

Don’t fall into the money trap. Money won’t necessarily buy you the best software (repeat that 100 times). Also, signing a contract for any longer than one year makes no sense in the modern software world. Don’t do it!

Write a list of features you actually need by talking to the people who’ll actually use the software. You don’t need a pre-made check-sheet or consultant for this. Every university’s needs are different. This will take time and research (but you’re good at research!). The energy will be worth the mistakes it saves you from.

Remember, technology is just a tool. Software alone won’t turn bad teachers into good ones. And teachers are the key. Find software that helps them do their job better and then gets out of their way. They’re the ones helping students learn. And isn’t that why we’re all doing this anyway?

Thousands of teachers use Pathwright every day to design and teach courses to their team, class, or anyone in the world. If you’d like to design a course, we invite you to try out Pathwright for free. You’ve got nothing to lose!

At Pathwright, we're passionate about partnering with creative educators. Now, for a limited time, we're introducing Season Passes — a way for organizations to get behind-the-scenes access to our Pathwright Labs and collaborate with experts in creating the future of teaching and learning.

Get inside access and 1:1 collaboration with Pathwright Labs.

From day one, Pathwright has partnered with like-minded, invested educators instead of outside investors. We’ve helped grow our partners from zero to tens of thousands of learners and millions of steps completed as they’ve helped us grow Pathwright’s feature set for everyone.

A Season Pass is a new product that expands our partner model. It grants behind-the-scenes access to the experts and experiments in the Pathwright Labs. As a Season Pass holder, you can collaborate directly with our team to help shape what’s coming next for your organization alongside what’s coming next at Pathwright. While each consultation applies to your education program strategy, path design, and new technology, many topics we cover apply more broadly to your entire education strategy and tech stack. For instance, we’re helping current Season Pass holders think about how the latest developments in AI impact not only the paths they make with Pathwright but their entire education ecosystem.

The one-on-one consultations mean we must keep the number of Lab collaborators small. But we’ve opened up a few additional Season Passes for the spring and summer of 2023.

Season Pass holders get a minimum of 6 months of access to the following:

Exclusive Lab updates on new product ideas we’re exploring for upcoming Seasons with the opportunity to collaborate on how plans take shape.

Lab Conversations with experts at Pathwright to explore how your organization’s vision and plans could integrate with Pathwright’s current and future abilities. For example, pass holders get access to:

ProductLabs: Explore creative ways to strategically maximize your use of Pathwright’s features in your software ecosystem and explore upcoming ideas we’re working on in the Labs. ProductLabs also include the opportunity to introduce your teachers, mentors, and learners to our ProductLab team to share feedback that informs the design of upcoming features.

EdLabs: Explore creative ways to design and offer courses with Christian + the option to host an “EdLabs Live” — a one-hour teaching session for your designers, teachers, or learners where we’ll “co-teach” a helpful, timely topic together contextualized to your particular needs.

Training Labs: Help team members and departments get quickly up-to-speed on how to use Pathwright at a pro level in a personal training session.

CommLabs: Get a fresh set of eyes on what you’re already up to as you connect with your community — whether you’re exploring ideas for growing your audience, encouraging more learning, or just reviewing an email or promotion page.

DevLabs: Get secure access to our GraphQL API sandbox, plus personalized guidance from our developers on best integrating with SSO and other software platforms.

As a Season Pass holder, you’ll also get priority technical support from Pathwright Guides.

Due to the collaborative nature of Season Passes, we, unfortunately, can’t provide them for everyone. Season Passes are a good fit for organizations that can afford an additional $14K–$28K/year commitment and are aligned with our vision for improving teaching and learning.

(We’ve reserved space for up to five Season Passes in 2023, with two reserved.)

Get exclusive access to the Pathwright Labs with a Season Pass. Collaborate with experts and help shape what’s coming next in teaching and learning. Find out what a Season Pass offers and how to apply.

AI has the potential to revolutionize the education space, but there are still important questions to answer around the validity of its facts, alignment with existing content, and ability to be a reliable assistant for educational tasks. Pathwright Labs is exploring these questions and developing ideas to ensure AI is a helpful tool alongside learners and teachers.

While AI can already answer questions and generate content that looks plausibly human, it often “hallucinates” and makes up facts and data that look correct but are invalid.

That’s a problem, especially in education!

Before indiscriminately applying AI everywhere in education technology, there are crucial questions to answer that warrant thoughtful and humane consideration. In the Pathwright Labs, we’re exploring:

How do we prevent AI from making up facts and data (hallucinating)?

Can we prevent AI from going off-topic or regurgitating pre-existing biases from its training data?

Can we align AI with our educator’s existing content (books, videos, etc.)?

Can AI transform existing documents and content into actionable paths, recommendations, and FAQs?

Can we make AI cite its sources when giving answers or suggestions?

Can we use AI as a reliable tutor or Teacher’s Assistant for everyday educational tasks?

How can we make AI a helpful tool alongside learners and teachers without replacing the human elements that make education an enriching experience?

We’re working on ideas and experiments that address these questions alongside educators we respect and trust in our Labs. If you’re interested in these questions, please join us for our OpenLab event for discussion and an early preview of how we can move forward in this brave new world.

PS, If you’re a Season Pass holder, you can schedule a personal ProductLab to get an inside look at what we’re working on and discuss how we can help you align and use AI to further your business and educational goals.

Get an inside look at how AI can be used in education and find out if you can trust AI in education. Join us for an OpenLab Event on AI & Education and get an inside look at what Pathwright is working on with AI. RSVP now and join the discussion!

How to Grow Your Online Course with Word of Mouth

A Fresh Outlook on Teaching Media (and Hosting Conferences)

Distance Learning Support

Announcing Blocks

Why Is Your School’s LMS So Bad?

Introducing Season Passes

Can we trust AI for education?

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