Dispelling a few myths about moving online and sharing a toolkit and outline for making the change. 

For teachers, conference preparers, and onsite trainers, moving in-person events online has come as an unanticipated challenge. We can't promise to make this task easy, but we'd like to help—first by dispelling a few myths about moving online and secondly by providing a simple toolkit and outline for making the change. 

"There's a silver-bullet tech solution out there, and I just need to find it."

Reframe: While we wish this were true, to move online, you'll likely need a combo of tools. None of them will duplicate your in-person experience on its own. More on those tools in a minute.

"If I don't have a live lecture, I won't create community, and no one will learn."

Reframe: Live lectures alone—especially over something like Zoom—can create a false sense of community. While they're probably the closest thing we have to teaching live, other tools can be a big help. (Read more on teaching through connections and community.)

"It's on me to duplicate the entire in-class experience."

Reframe: No way! To move online well, we've got to shift our thinking toward designing something different, not replicating something that exists.

"Online learning is going to be inevitably socially inferior."

Reframe: While being in-person can be special, online learning affords us incredible possibilities. From being able to jump into a chat conversation at any time to blending the benefits of multiple media formats—we can build real community online.

Reframe: Pathwright is ready to discount our platform for you or even hop on a call to plan and outline your course with you for free. Together, we've got this. (Wondering why a software would company help you design a course? Read why here.)

An exceptional online teaching toolkit will have three or four parts:

A mindset shift. First, give yourself permission to think about the experience you're creating in a different way. Take the pressure off any one format (for instance, a live-stream or video call), and consider how to break up the experience into discrete parts. With each part of the experience identified, you can design your way to something new.

Zoom (or your video software of choice). Of course, you'll likely need videos calls at some point. We really like Zoom because it allows you to break up into small groups during larger live events. Small group discussions will do more to build community than video lecturing alone.

Pathwright. In this toolkit, Pathwright acts as a bit of glue to hold things together or tracks to move them along. With Pathwright, you'll have a place to introduce your session or lesson, schedule when people should arrive (automatic reminders built into Pathwright help out a lot here), and follow-up for projects and discussion afterwards.

Recorded video (optional, but nice). If you want to take things to the next level, instead of just offering a live Zoom lecture, record a bit of your lecture in a super simple smartphone video. If all the informational parts of your lecture can become short readings or videos, you'll have more time for focused discussion online.


You likely don't need this encouragement, but now is a great time to keep things really simple. The outline below has proven to be effective for us and our partners time and time again.

Create a simple introduction, ideally with a short, pre-recorded welcome video and an opening reflection question or discussion. Then, share the details your class will need for the live video call. Maybe include a brief summary of what you'll cover. You can also use this step to upload a recording of your session after the fact.

Finally, include any homework, review, or discussion in the last step. Give your class or conference attendees a chance to discuss or download any important information.

Things can certainly get more inventive than this. We'd love to talk with you about creating something even more custom for your event. But if you're looking for an easy way to make a creative environment, community to cure isolation, and pacing, this is a first step.

Don't forget, we're here to talk for free — schedule a conversation or reach out as you need us.

Christian shares how you can use the Cohorts feature to offer your courses in multiple ways simultaneously and take the impact of your courses further.

Four Ways to Offer Courses That Quadruple Their Impact

At Pathwright, we hope technology empowers teachers and experts alike. (I've written about the importance of these complementary relationships before here.)

I want to share a feature that empowers this duo of skills: Cohorts. A Cohort is a set of learners who move through a version of your course together. Cohorts give you the ability to offer your course in multiple ways simultaneously.

Create a self-paced Cohort at a lower price point. The Cohort might involve less moderation (or no moderation), but learners understand they get the value of working at their own pace.

Offer a guided, schedule-based Cohort with personal feedback from a teacher. Teachers might give feedback on course work and meet with learners over video chat or in person.

Offer premium levels of a course with additional bonus content or more individualized instruction.

Offer private Cohorts for another teacher or organization to teach to their own learners.

Multiple course offerings means even more ways to help learners. The beauty is that you can offer any combination of these groups at any time. Set custom prices for each or offer them for free — it’s up to you.

If you’re already using Pathwright and would like a little more guidance on offering Cohorts, check out this article from our Guidance Team.

Thousands of people use Pathwright every day to design and teach dynamic courses. You can try out Pathwright for free. You’ve got nothing to lose!

Experts are expected to be teachers (and vice versa). If we confuse these two equally important skills, we dramatically devalue what makes them particularly helpful.

Writer Joy Beth Smith tweeted about the demands of publishing her first book. As if publishing wasn’t challenging enough, she also must promote her book — a job requiring skills very different from writing. What should she charge for speaking engagements? How can she compress 60,000 finely-tuned words into a half hour speech?

Education as a field might suffer a similar confusion. Experts are expected to be teachers (and vice versa). If we confuse these two equally important skills, we dramatically devalue what makes them particularly helpful.

Put simply: Experts advance a discipline; teachers advance learners.

An expert focuses on mastering a discipline in order to advance it. By contrast, a teacher transfers disciplines to others. Teachers operate within their specific community of learners to help those learners attain mastery. Hopefully, their learners become experts.

Why do we confuse these roles? What's lost in the process?

Not too long ago, lecture circuits were like Netflix. Vast information bound up in books didn’t move easily. Unless you were wealthy enough to be literate or lucky enough to live near a library, you had little means to learn. Unless an expert came to town. On this rare occasion, you’d gather in a big hall and binge on lectures for hours.

If you were really lucky, you might be able to afford university — experts talking for hours and days on end. Then, you became the expert! You could lecture, too!

Repeat this process for hundreds of years. Congrats, you created our education system.

Eventually, digital circuits got pretty great at transferring information, too. This sadly hasn’t yet changed much about how we teach. Learners still sit through long lectures to get information or wade through millions of pages of Google search results that never seem to stick.

Somehow, we still require teachers to play experts, conveying the minutia of their fields in a few interminable minutes (regardless of the strain this puts on learners and teachers alike).

Earlier, I said teacher and expert are different roles. If we emphasize their superpowers, they start to work together.

Export their answers for other experts and teachers

Understand the lexicon and essential questions of their discipline

Engage their specific community of learners

Adapt essential resources for their communities

Invite learners along a path to new levels in their discipline

What strikes me is that these roles don’t compete — they complement. Scramble them together and you have long, dull lectures. But treat them as white and yolk in the same egg, and I think we’ll forge an alliance that finds answers and explains them for communities who need them.

The rare few will master both roles. But we might more often need to say, “Those are totally different skill sets!” If we create easy channels for experts to share their expertise and effective tools for teachers to bring that expertise to their communities, we’ll be in better shape. Teachers, experts, and learners alike will certainly be happier.

At Pathwright, we aim to equip both experts and teachers. That’s why we’ve made tools for both. Experts can now offer their curriculum for teachers in communities around the world. Teachers get power-packed courses complete with teaching tools that make helping their learners even easier. Here’s a short article from our guidance team on offering your course to multiple Groups. If you’d like to find out more about Pathwright, check out Intro to Pathwright.

How much of their limited attention can teachers give to learners? For a long time, we’ve operated as if only two choices exist. But I think there’s an Option Three.

Learner Attention vs Scale at Odds Then, Not Now

This post is an expansion of my own notes from working on our new About page. You can check that out for a quicker overview and cooler pictures.

Let’s say you have one bottle of Dasani. Just one. But on the table in front of you sit two dozen potted tomato plants, just beginning to bear fruit. What do you do?

Do you divide the water fairly between all twenty-four, even though each would get less than an ounce? Maybe give the water to just a few, so they actually grow? Drink the water yourself and learn to like tiny, green tomatoes?

Today we're looking at a problem parallel to this tomato teaser. How much of their limited attention can any teacher give their learners? For a long time, we’ve operated as if only two choices exist. Option One—limit learners to increase per capita attention—or Option Two—scale over everything. But I think there’s an Option Three.

For Option One, we flip to the front of the history book. Back in Aristotle’s time, the mid-300s BC, teachers work with very few learners. Aristotle teaches only a few aristocratic pupils at a time. Later, Jesus educates at a teacher-disciple ratio of 1:12 (excluding his TED Talk-like addresses). Da Vinci manages an even lower ratio—more like 1:7.

Let's start graphing. I know, I know, I'm excited too! But settle down, please.

We draw one axis for how many learners each educator teaches at once—"# PPL." Now we draw another for how much attention each teacher could afford per learner—"ATTENTION." Our apprenticeship examples in purple fall on the far right. Low number of people, high amount of attention.

Okay, we flip forward in history. Now we're in the 1700s and 1800s. This era marks the rise of what’s sometimes misleadingly called industrialized education. The teacher-learner ratio changes; we find Option Two.

In Europe and North America, smart folks like Horace Mann wonder how to make educated citizens out of their diverse, far-flung populations. They begin developing a concept we'll later call the "common school"—the seeds of our modern public education system. As education goes national, they discover a new appetite for scale. I’d like to think those early meetings must have sounded like start-up pitches—“But how will it scale?”

Education leaps from a few learners at a time to dozens at once.

We flip further to the back of the history book. Starting in the 1920s, radio helps audiences experience arts, education and entertainment as it happens. Everyone watches the 1969 Apollo 11 mission on TV. Fred Rogers uses his show to reach 1.8 million homes at its peak in 1986. Geography and history game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” sells more than 4 million copies by 1995. The learner masses grow to almost inconceivable scale.

Let's revisit our attention-to-people graph and add Option Two. A few blue dots for public school in the middle, a few at the far left for mass media.

When we draw a curve to connect all of our points so far, we get this:

It looks like Option One and Two combined to create a system that biases toward giant settings. Most learners represented on our graph would be in the head, with very few filling out the long tail. We can tell that teachers figured out how to give a few drops of attention to a lot of learners at once. Learners, on the other hand, don't receive much personal attention unless they're long-tail outliers. This system bias results in extreme efficiency but risks efficacy in the process.

Earlier, I dangled the possibility of Option Three. What would a third way look like?

At Pathwright, we've spent the last decade working to balance the curve with thoughtful, creative educators and organizations. We gave customer Krista King the features to personally tailor thousands of her individual learners’ paths just for them. Fellows programs like the C.S. Lewis Institute used Pathwright to scale their high-attention mentorship. They scaled to many new cities while helping supervisors give the timely attention their fellows need to explore through independent study.

Option Three uses a modern learning platform like Pathwright to share engaging learning with a personal touch. If we draw the curve our customers created, we get something very different:

This curve accounts for a few turnkey courses on the left tail. But it scales both attention and learner headcount nicely, for the first time. To compare, here’s the curve Option One-Two created, overlaid with our Option Three curve.

It seems to me that education has wound through the phases of a start-up over the last few millennia. It incubated in tribes and apprenticeship settings. It launched a compelling MVP in the 1700s and 1800s as education went to market at scale. But now it’s upgrade time.

I think education deserves to get out of beta, don’t you?

Both schools and organizations work better with clear paths and close connections. At Pathwright, we’ve seen giant institutions use well-designed paths with effective teachers to bring their scale down to each learner. So I'm certainly not suggesting closing schools. We’ve also seen two-person operations scale out to serve thousands. So apprenticeship isn't dead either.

We think you should be able to scale your attention with your learners—our amazing educators provide the proof. We’re not here to change the world (you’re doing that already). We’re working to give you the creative tools you need to keep doing it without having to choose between attention and scale ever again.

Give every plant the water it needs to grow.

Again, this post draws from my own notes as I worked on our new About page. All of these ideas wouldn't fit on that page. If you have a sec, check out our About page for a more fast-moving, visual overview of what we're here to do.

Coffee Walks is a new and ongoing interview show from the Pathwright team. Mark Johnson discusses the importance of side projects in his own life and the Pathwright team.

Coffee Walks is a new and ongoing interview show from the Pathwright team. We'll talk about technology and teaching through stories that connect them. In this episode, Mark Johnson discusses the importance of side projects in his own life and the Pathwright team. 

Host: Christian Shockley
Guest: Mark Johnson

More from Mark:

"How I Launched Six Side Projects in 2017" 

Have an idea for an interview topic? Send questions, comments, or topic suggestions our way on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email christian@pathwright.com. We'd love to hear from you!

coffee_walks_1-_mark_johnson_on_side_projects.mp3

You can probably design your way to any outcome. But let’s compare coffee and little kids to see.

Why I Believe in Design and Design Believes in Me

The 3 Phases of Design Every Project Encounters

Today it’ll be 85º. When I got to work this morning, I put fresh, hot coffee in a mason jar with a lid and put it in the fridge. Through the magic of good planning, after lunch, it’s a wake-making iced refreshment waiting for me. I’m certain of the outcome, barring power cuts or someone leaving the fridge door open. I’ve designed this care for myself.

Earlier this morning, I made breakfast for both my kids. I do this almost every morning. Sometimes they eat, sometimes they super don’t. They’re two and four years old—food moodiness is par for the pre-K course. I hope that, whether they eat or not, they learn how to care for themselves with a healthy breakfast. And that I love them. I’ve targeted these outcomes, though I’ll try many other tactics to solve for them, too.

So, two cases of design. Two cases of self-care.

If you're solving things with design, you could divide your approaches into short-, mid-, and long-term design. Putting coffee in the fridge? Short-term design. Breakfast with love? Long-term design.

But I think you’ll be walking into the mouth of madness if you try to plan mid-term design. Why? Let me explain with another example.

Let’s say you’re going for a walk. Short-term design is you deciding how to take the next hundred steps. Quick pace? Slowly, so you don’t arrive sweaty? Which path works most efficiently for you?

Long-term design is what point on the horizon you’re aiming for, be it self-care or the building across campus.

Mid-term design happens after your first hundred steps, but before you’ve reached your horizon point. Running late, better pick up the pace. Are you tiring too quickly? Does your friend Sarita want to join you? You pick a direction that intersects with her while still moving toward your destination.

You design the short-term; you design the long-term. But the mid-term designs you. When you arrive in the mid-term zone, suddenly you possess performance data on the first hundred steps, new stakeholder input from Sarita, budget feedback from your tired legs, etc.

Now that your walk is telling you some information, you’re prepared to do another round of short-term design in response. You might walk quickly, but take the stairs to Sarita instead of the long way around. You still have the time (and the legs) to reach your destination. All’s well, though you might try new approaches after reaching your friend.

This is why we at Pathwright work in six-week project cycles. We’ve written about that before. Among other things, focusing on short-term and long-term design at work keeps us from neurotically obsessing over things like quarterly profits or overcommitting at the expense of adaptability.

We know our long-term mission. We design our slate of new projects. We wait for mid-term design to kick in in-between.

Great designers of all kinds welcome mid-term feedback. Mid-term exams? Tweaking the curriculum for next semester? Having the team try a different kind of book for the next company book club? Reframing launch instructions for the next conference? All cases of allowing in mid-term design to collaborate with you.

You could call my fridge coffee trick a “life hack”. I’d just call it good design—figuring out what you’ll want and how to get it before you have to have it.

In four hours, I’ll need cold coffee (long-term). So right now, this hot coffee needs a cold fridge (short-term). If it’s still hot in an hour, I’ll move it to the freezer to cool faster (mid-term). I can’t know what the coffee will need in an hour. I could go crazy theorizing or overcomplicate things (or both, yikes).

The coffee will tell me. Design happens between my needing coffee and what the coffee needs from me.

Please, set yourself a moonshot long-term design goal. And take the next hundred well-designed steps to get there. But don’t obsess over what might happen after that. Embrace the mid-term design coming to you. It’ll tell you what to do.

The first person to ever complete a Pathwright course was a retired gentleman in his 70s. He’d never even used a computer before. His granddaughter set him up with a laptop, internet connection, and a barely-working Pathwright account.

The first person to ever complete a Pathwright course was a retired gentleman in his 70s. He’d never even used a computer before. His granddaughter set him up with a laptop, internet connection, and a barely-working Pathwright account that he used to blaze through the course faster than all the other beta testers.

That was in 2011 when Pathwright was just two twins (Mark & me) hacking together in our spare bedroom and spare time. Our first goal was to design a course experience so simple anyone could do it. And this fine gentleman validated that we were on the right track. That felt great.

Back then, we wanted nothing more than to make a simple, beautiful product that teachers and learners alike would love. We spent the next five years bootstrapping Pathwright from a side project into a team of people serving thousands of educators.

But, after launching Pathwright 2 in 2016, I slumped into dissatisfaction with our product. It’s not that it wasn’t working. In fact, people loved the changes we’d made. But I’d begun to fall into the Silicon Valley trap of thinking that somehow our little software app needed to “change the world.”

Now we’ve never fit the mold of a Silicon Valley startup. We turned down venture capital in favor of bootstrapping and have always been profitable because we’ve had to be. We've always run Pathwright more like an ordinary business. That isn’t to say we’re not ambitious, but we're not motivated by truckloads of money or fame. We're more interested in making a dent in the world for good while we can.

Despite this, I’d drifted towards the stereotypical Silicon Valley siren call that our product might just change the entire world. But the reality is that most businesses — and especially software businesses — aren’t going to change the world. And that’s ok. Software is merely a tool, after all.

We’re not hoodie-wearing heroes, we’re the craftspeople and tool makers. Our role in the story is more like Ollivander, Harry Potter’s wand maker, Batman’s assistant, Alfred, and Don Quixote’s horse.

Let’s get over ourselves. Sure, viewing our trade as techsmiths isn’t as glamorous but it is fulfilling and noble.

Once we stopped navel-gazing at our product and put ourselves in our proper place, we had the clarity to formulate our true purpose. Here’s what we came up with:

Our mission is to multiply the impact teachers make on the world.

This simple mission frees us from struggling to play the hero and focuses us only on helping the people who truly make a difference in the world: Teachers.

If you’ve got something to teach, then you’re the hero of our story. And if our Pathwright can cut down your busywork so you have more time to teach and give you tools that help you teach more personally and reach more people, then we’re multiplying the impact you already have. And that’s what changes the world.

If you'd like to design a course, we invite you to try out Pathwright for free.

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!

We couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill we had no way of switching off or even slowing down. Recovering a more natural rhythm of work and rest humans are wired for, here are five benefits of working in 6-week cycles that we can't do without.

During the summer after I graduated from college a sinking feeling began to creep up on me. While I'd readily said "goodbye" to school for good, now I was looking at a seemingly-endless expanse of time ahead of me with no new semesters, long breaks, advancements or graduations to look forward to... just work and whatever I made of it. I like work and making my own path through it, but something about this horizon of unstructured sameness unsettled me enough that I got very close to signing up for more school.

Over the following decade, I got used to the never-ending stretch of time, and we began to build Pathwright as a never-ending series of projects. (Software is never "done".) We'd start and finish projects and then pick up the next. We hit (and missed) plenty of launch dates in no particular rhythm. We tried out many project management tools and methods from kanban boards to project management software to sticky notes and saw marginal improvements.

In other words, we worked pretty much the same way as every other company. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill that we couldn't switch off or slow down. As the product and team grew and projects stacked up, we ran into frequent periods of intense work and subsequent burnout. After a particularly rough stretch of time leading up to launching Pathwright 2, we knew we had to get off the treadmill. That's when we stumbled across this article about how Basecamp works in six week cycles. We've learned a lot from Basecamp over the years and had nothing to lose by giving this method a try in the new year of 2017.

Most new ideas we try on for size work to a degree, and we adapt them a bit for marginal overall improvement. But this idea was not like that: It worked immediately. It worked amazingly. And it's still working.

Now, it's hard for us to imagine not working in six-week cycles that we refer to as "Trails." In addition to recovering the more natural rhythm of work and rest we humans are wired for, here are five benefits we can't do without:

1. Time-boxing projects into six-weeks helps us plan smaller & smarter.

It's notoriously impossible to predict accurate timelines or costs for software projects (and that's true of any multifaceted, creative project). Humans are simply no good at predicting the future. Once we finally accepted our finite planning powers, we gained a tremendous amount of mental clarity and focus from simply limiting our time horizon for projects to "what can we realistically accomplish in just six weeks?"

As for how many projects we plan during one trail, we followed Basecamp's lead and commit to:

⛰ Expeditions: A few bigger projects that will take four to six weeks.

🏞 Hikes: Seven to ten smaller projects that take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

After the first few trails of taking on quite a bit too much, we added a "Notch Day" smack in the middle of the six weeks that acts as a checkpoint to review project progress, share feedback, and help each other edit down projects to even smaller sizes when we can.

2. We get to hit the reset button every six weeks.

While we try to keep projects within the six weeks, we don't stress out if we don't quite make it. Instead, we hit the "reset" button during the two weeks in-between trails.

We call these two in-between weeks 🏕 "Camp weeks" which are a break from focused projects to focus instead on review, exploration, and planning at a slower pace.

Any projects not finished in the previous trail are reframed and reshaped as a new project for the next trail or put on a waiting list for a future trail.

3. There's time to look back, think, and plan.

Our 🏕Camp Weeks in-between each Trail are a welcome respite. We take a slower pace, re-orient ourselves towards our goals and mission, and begin to map out the next six-weeks of work.

Camp weeks not only provide us with a nice break, but also help us zoom out from periods of detailed focus to reflect on our mission, strategy, and goals. This big picture review every six weeks helps us avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing the urgent over long term impact.

4. We have a rhyme and reason for saying "later."

Before we worked in trails, it was more difficult to tell team members and partners with a great idea or pressing need that we'd have to get to it "later." While later is necessary 93% of the time, it could come across as subjective and arbitrary when our only framework for planning was whatever we decided was next in line. Additionally, we spent a lot of time and energy attempting to synthesize all this new feedback with current plans as it came in (which was all the time).

Now that we work in Trails, we can simply share that we'll consider the idea during an upcoming Camp Week and get back with them — and then forget about it until then. While we still have to say "later" to most requests, at least there's a rhyme and reason behind it and our team and customers have all generally found knowing the rhythm of our work reassuring.

5. We get to share more of what we've accomplished.

🏕 Camp Weeks carve out enough time to share what we accomplished in the previous trail with our team and customers every seven weeks. We call this 👩🏼‍🏫 "Show & Tell" and it's become a something we look forward to. It's a bit like a mini-graduation we get to experience together six times a year. We're twelve trails in now, and I'm still amazed by how much our team accomplishes in just six weeks.

If you feel like you're running on a treadmill, experiencing bouts of "sprints" and burnout,  then  it's time for you to try something new as well. We unequivocally recommend giving some form of this work & rest rhythm a try and would love to hear how it works for you.

Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email lydia@pathwright.com with thoughts, questions, or topic suggestions.

I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’s weird for me to say that, when you use Pathwright, you probably won’t have to pay someone like me.

5 Design Settings That Transform Your School in Seconds

What If You Didn't Have to Pay a Designer?

In my heart (and based on two degrees), I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’s weird for me to say that, when you use Pathwright, you probably won’t have to pay someone like me.

For years, I’ve worked with our team to make Pathwright pretty from your first login. But you may not know that you can take your school to the next level totally on your own.

Truly intuitive? So beautiful it blows your hair back? Tweak five simple settings to throw just the right mood in seconds.

When you create online courses with Pathwright, each course is automatically given one of 72 different colorful course covers. These course covers act like book or album covers. They give learners and staff alike a visual cue by which to remember the topic or content.

That’s a great start. But when you’re ready to really make courses your own, adding custom covers makes a big impact on how learners perceive them. You may have brand assets already at your fingertips, or you may want to turn to resources like Flickr Commons or Unsplash for great, free images.

We wrote detailed guidelines for adding custom covers here. Here’s the 5 second version:

You’ve got two great options. First, reusing your course cover with blur turned on makes the most sense for course backgrounds. Most course designers do this. But second, if you turn blur off, you’ll see a nice banner appear across the top of the path where the general info is.

Going the banner route takes a bit more planning not to render the course title unreadable. In most cases, you likely won’t encounter that problem. But think of it as more of a pro move.

To me, the best course backgrounds share three qualities:

Use mostly midtones, not bright highlights or deep shadows that create too much contrast

Don’t contain an overwhelming amount of detail

On the left, we've used an image with one main color. On the right, we've gone with an image that really runs the gamut.

On the left, the image is way too extreme in highlights and shadows. On the right, we've maintained reasonable contrast.

Here’s how to add a course background like that:

Your account icon is what most of your people will think of as the school itself. It’s like a social media avatar mixed with an app icon.

Often, using your logo makes the most sense here. If you don’t have a logo or don’t want to use it, anything memorable will do. Keep in mind that this will be seen during login and in discussions, so it’ll be small but important.

If you’re not sure what to do for an account icon, a memorable solid color or shape (or both!) works nicely. Here’s how to add an account icon:

Account backgrounds show at login for everyone. But if you're staff, you'll also see these special backgrounds on your dashboard. In both places, they fill the entire background, making this a simple way to set the right branded tone.

The most effective account backgrounds are a lot like course backgrounds—mostly midtones, limited detail. But in contrast to course backgrounds, choosing an image with a single dominant color can be an effective unifier.

Here’s how to add an account background:

This is one of those “cherry atop the sundae” settings. Whatever color you choose for your account’s primary color will instantly be applied to almost every link and button. It’s a quick way to really make Pathwright your own.

Brands typically have a main color. Usually, that’s the right color to use for this setting. But watch out: Black, red, and very light colors don’t work best.

Black doesn’t read as a clickable link very well.

Red makes every clickable option look dangerous.

Very light colors won’t even show up on lower-end screens or may look strange on mobile devices.

In these cases, reach for your brand’s secondary color. Using this as an opportunity to carve out a sub-brand for your Pathwright account can be an interesting direction, too.

That’s it! These five simple settings turn Pathwright into your own custom-branded app. We’re always working on more ways to make our platform the perfect canvas for your team, so let us know what we’re missing! Tweet at us or send us messages through Support with any ideas.

If you're keen to explore more, check out our Support article on everything you can brand with your Pathwright account.

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."

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