For the last two years, our Pathwright blog has been hosted on Medium. Medium is beautiful and easy to use. Not to mention the huge readership and built-in marketing.

The primary users of Pathwright are the hundreds of thousands of students completing learning steps every day. None of these users pay us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

lot of people set out to start a business. The perception of flexibility, independence, respect, and potential wealth are big draws. The millennial way of expressing this is to found a “startup.”

Before you read this, pause and take a look at everything you’ve learned in the past month. …and done? Of course not.

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.

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

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

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.

Every so often a person is gifted with both wonderful skill and the skill to teach. David Foster Wallace was such a person.