Articles /
#Learning Experience Design
How to Design for Community Through Online Cohorts
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.
Four Ways to Offer Courses That Quadruple Their Impact
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.
Should Teachers Be Experts?
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.
Learner Attention vs Scale at Odds Then, Not Now
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.
Design the Perfect Learning Experience in 5 Steps
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.
Blocks, Not Pages, Are the Future Of the Web
The web is in an awkward phase right now. We’re transitioning from an era where a website was simply a collection of linked pages to one where even using the term “page” to describe a particular screen is a giant oversimplification.
Why Would a Software Company Design Courses?
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...
Announcing Blocks
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.
How Point Values Create Dynamic Courses
The story of the three-point shot and what it has to teach us about why point values matter in an online course.
LMS Forums Are Broken
The moment a lecture turns to asking questions, exploring answers, critiquing, expanding, etc. is usually when the most engaged learning happens.
Teach Through Connections and Communities, Not Content
To do a little myth-busting, a course isn’t simply collected information. Teaching is the shape that information takes and the relationship that’s built around it.
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.”
Why Teachers Should Give Questions, Not Answers
On a given Saturday, with time on my side and a bit of boldness, YouTube will teach me almost any skill. I need to change the oil in my car? 3,660,000 videos are ready at hand to show me how.
Why We Design for the Learner First
The primary users of Pathwright are the hundreds of thousands of students completing learning steps every day. None of these users pay us.
The Scary High Cost of “Free” Courses
Free courses are an easy way to attract new sign-ups and help people who don’t have the budget to learn what we teach. Win-win, right? Well, not exactly.
Education Should Be Beautiful
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.
The Echolocation of Design
There’s a commonality for designers, whether a product designer or a teacher designing a course. It’s this: Sometimes, even though you know what you want to accomplish, you don’t know how to get there.
Measuring for Genius or Growth
Last year, after working in the “real world” for three years, I decided to move to England in order to study for a Master’s degree.
Everything Is a Teaching Thing
The first days of class are what I remember best from my time teaching. Covering syllabi, mispronouncing names on the roll, trying to wrap up early to build goodwill with my students.
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.
The Shape of Learning
Before you read this, pause and take a look at everything you’ve learned in the past month. …and done? Of course not.
Designing on Purpose
Naturally, we get asked why courses in Pathwright don’t include a sidebar. Fair question. I’ll share two reasons why I think it’s time for course designers to break up with their sidebars.
Why Is Your School’s LMS So Bad?
When I tell people about Pathwright, I often hear a version of “man, my university’s software sucks, we should use yours.”
Content Marketing Is Not Teaching
The idea of “teaching” an online course has been largely distorted to mean packaging up a bunch of videos and documents and then focusing all energy towards selling it
How to Write Discussion Questions
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.
4 Things David Foster Wallace Taught Me About Teaching
Every so often a person is gifted with both wonderful skill and the skill to teach. David Foster Wallace was such a person.
