In a culture that only sees one kind of time, it feels like swimming upstream to carve out space outside the bounds of our calendar or to-do list. But making space for creative, opportunistic shifts yields better results and helps us feel more creatively inspired in our work.

A different way of thinking about future plans.

Why we threw out our roadmap and started a Lab

After 20+ years of designing software, I’ve been asked this question countless times.

Until fairly recently I answered positively and ambitiously: “We can probably work that in.” Or, “We hope to start this fall.”

But the more specific and enthusiastic the answer, the more proportionally stressful and misaligned the delivery, it seems. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar in your career. Even if you don’t have a formal roadmap, no doubt you have plans and others who want to know when they’re coming — be they your boss, customers, or a teacher. And the biggest problem with plans is that they never play nicely with our calendars.

We can only share future plans in terms of years, quarters, or months, so naturally we create proportionally specific obligations. Even soft roadmap commitments create small amounts of debt for our future selves and often, our team too.

Do you feel some trepidation around those future plans no one’s been able to get to yet? Held back from acting on an unexpectedly opportune moment? That’s the subconscious weight of debt accrued.

Alternatively, we might be entirely non-committal about future possibilities. While this avoids debt it's frustrating to hear (and certainly isn't inspiring). Yet time is all we have to slot future plans into. So what’s the solution?

A few years ago, one of our partners introduced me to an intriguing idea. Ancient Greeks had two words for time but we only have one — and that additional word makes a world of difference.

Chronos time (“chronological”) refers to sequential time slotted into predictable categories (months, deadlines, phases). It sounds familiar because it’s the only kind of time we modern folks know. And it’s the root of our troubles with roadmaps and plans. Chronos is useful for goals, execution, sequencing, quantifying,  planning, budgeting, incremental improvements, and scaling.

Kairos time is “when the time is right” — it's opportunistic, unplanned, and unpredictable. We lack a modern word for it, but we can feel it when we enter Kairos time. It happens when we lose all track of time exploring ideas only to “wake up” with an insight that colors all we planned before (if we let it). Kairos is when we get an instinctive sense that it's time to move forward or sense that things aren’t quite ready yet, regardless of what our to-do list or calendar has to say about it. Kairos is useful for discovering transformative potential and is all the things Chronos is not: unmeasurable, unpredictable, unplannable, transformative, and subjective.

In a culture that only sees one kind of time, it feels like swimming upstream to carve out space outside the bounds of our calendar or to-do list. But making space for creative, opportunistic shifts not only results in better long-term results, it helps us feel more creatively inspired in our work. (And uninspired people don’t create inspiring products.)

The first step to making space for Kairos time is to name it something other than a project, to.-do list, or any other Chronos tool. Our team named our space "The Labs". It totally replaced our "Roadmap."

The Pathwright Labs aren't a physical location, but a mental space we enter to explore and experiment with new ideas debt free. We keep our Labs unique by using a different set of collaboration principles and tools than we do for most other work. Here are five of them:

Focus on ideas, not tasks: The Labs are where we explore any idea or rabbit trail that’s possible to discuss or sketch. Anyone in a Lab not only has permission to freely explore but is expected to. "Task", "plan" and "date" are four-letter words in this kind of conversation.

Tools: We use Discord to talk (audio-only to stay focused on ideas) + a screen share of a collaborative whiteboard where we visually map out ideas. (FigJam and Whimsical are both handy collaborative whiteboards for remote teams.) For personal exploration, we use idea-connecting note-taking tools like Roam Research, Notion, Craft, pencils and notebooks.

Invite experts: There's nothing that kills a creative exploration faster than someone who has no expertise to contribute. A Lab is not a classroom. But informed diverse perspectives are critically valuable. The experts on our team invite in Lab partners and customers with different perspectives, goals, or expertise to explore together.

Tools: we use Calendly, Typeform, and emails to invite customers and partners to mutually beneficial Lab conversations. For best results, keep the group size small.

Prioritize Containment: Avoid "lab leaks" where half-baked idea spread into actual plans and project work. If a Lab idea is any good, it can be highly disruptive to what's already in focus and must be introduced carefully. It’s essential to keep clear borders between ideas in development and an idea that will be an Official Project™️. (Speaking from personal experience, the most common way lab leaks occur is when someone in leadership gets energized by an idea and forces it into the team awareness and focus too early.)

Tools: We keep our Project Management (in Basecamp) separate from our Lab work. When we're ready to move an idea out of the Lab, we have a quick but formal "Peer Review" that at least two people sign-off on before we commit to it as a project.

Fund experiments: The most innovative ideas can only be teased out with design, prototyping, and testing with actual humans. If a Lab idea seems especially promising — but is uncharted territory — we sometimes fund experiment with our own time and/or hiring in additional specialists. Experiments are "off the books" projects apart from our weekly project work that flesh out an idea before we eventually integrate it into our core products.

Tools: We invest cash reserves to fund Lab experiments and sometimes team up with like-minded partners (in fact, Pathwright began a co-funded Lab Project with our first customer.)

Work in seasons: "How much time should we be dedicating to Labs vs. Projects?" is a common question with perhaps the most frustrating of answers: "It depends." But as a rule of thumb, I'd suggest thinking of 20% as the max energy expenditure — more than that generates too many ideas actually work out. But some seasons — like the Covid19 pandemic in 2020 and AI leaps in late 2022 — are disruptive enough that spending more time in the Labs may make sense. Other seasons are more suited for making ideas real with action. But of course, both should always be happening and with a greater weight given to making things happen. (Chronos — a Greek god — is the only one to have survived to modern day for a reason.)

Tools: Only you can decide the right allocation for project or Lab work or direct your team if you're in a position of influence. Pay attention to your intuition about what’s right for the season.

What "roadmap debt" do you currently have? What could you cancel or at least renegotiate?

Do you have separate tools/spaces for "Lab" work, apart from your calendar, todo list, and project systems?

Do you have a clear border between ideas or experiments you're exploring and work that's committed to? What's the process for moving from one side to the other?

How can we help? If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. You can email me at paul@pathwright.com Also, if your a customer or potential customer with a compelling lab idea for education and/or ed tech, we'd love to explore it the Labs.

Reduce the stress and misaligned expectations of roadmap debt and replace it with a "Lab" designed for opportunistic creative exploration.

Why rebrand after a decade? I'll answer that in a moment. But first, let me rewind.

Why rebrand after a decade? I’ll answer that in a moment. But first, let me rewind.

I’ve worked on every version of Pathwright’s brand for the last 11 years. Even back when we were called Coursebook! In retrospect, updating our name to Pathwright in ’12 was the most clarifying brand change we’ve ever made.

But lately, I haven’t felt the clarity. So I’ve been drawing new logos for Pathwright for a couple years. But none of them stuck. We knew it was time to refresh, but I didn’t have the guiding star that tells you where and where not to go with. A brand needs a big idea.

I started chasing the next big idea in earnest late last year. ’21 was a special year. I got to see so many thoughtful and creative customers use Pathwright in delightful, wholly unexpected ways. They’d moved beyond our brand’s academic adventure tone to innovate within academia and far outside it. So I made it my goal for our brand to follow them. I think none of my previous sketches stuck because they were all about us—a mistake.

I adjusted to follow the universal thing we and every one of our customers have in common: Paths. Paths are the core of Pathwright. Making a path with Pathwright should turn a task, program, or topic into something as simple to use as a road in front of you. But, of course, the thrills don’t come just from making a path. Like a road, paths are meant to be travelled!

But what about the folks behind the paths? I set out to follow our customers. After all, they’re who we made up the word “pathwright” for. That silent “w” makes all the difference, as do the makers behind every path.

Then a funny thing happened on the page as I sketched. If I rounded the silent “w” in “Pathwright”, it looked an awful lot like a winding path.

With simple lines and half circles, I had a logo, one that let me emphasize what Pathwright is for and who it’s for at the same time.

People who make paths made them long before they picked up Pathwright. They’re the “who” at the center of Pathwright, not us. We think they deserve the best possible tools, which is what we hope we’re making with every update. Great tools don’t replace craftspeople; they multiply every ounce of their effort.

A logo needs a word and a color. After tossing out dozens of fonts that didn’t fit, I drew the word myself. I can’t even tell you how many different r’s and p’s I drew. Dozens, definitely. Making the type myself was the only way to match the angle and tone of the logo. After spending weeks on it, I can say: Don’t go this route unless you have to. But in this case, it seemed like the only way.

Then I added red. That’s a big change after eleven years of gold. Why red? A few reasons.

Red, black, and white remind me of Swiss Modern, the style of choice for saying more with less. Pathwright exists on the increasingly crowded, complex internet. We’re saying “simplify” about more and more challenges these days.

Red also makes me think of high performance, like a race car. If you’re looking for the best designed, most powerful tools for making paths, you’re looking for Pathwright.

Red could be a spark of understanding that grows into a flame when you have someone to show you the path. Red signals heat.

For us? Red helps us, a group who puts a lot more time into our work than into talking about it, use our outside voices. Important things are good to be loud about. Red is undeniably the best color for speaking up.

So why rebrand after a decade? Because we understand things better than we used to. And we see where you want to go—where you’re already going!—more clearly.

And we know the most important thing we can do is make a Pathwright that goes with you.

I've talked about my work a lot in this article. But nothing to come out of a team is a solo effort. Big thanks to Mark and Paul Johnson for helping me shape these ideas, and to Lindsay Ramler and her team who took my Figma files and made a real website out of them. In the end, it took our whole team.

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!

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.

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.

The moment a lecture turns to asking questions, exploring answers, critiquing, expanding, etc. is usually when the most engaged learning happens.

As social beings, we learn best in communities. The moment a lecture turns to asking questions, exploring answers, critiquing, expanding, etc. is usually when the most engaged learning happens. In fact, the best teachers use discussion to teach far more than they lecture.

I think education technology’s role now is to enable this type of rich discussion to happen anywhere and to make it frictionless. (This mirrors what the best tech does; it acts as a superpower or painkiller.)

Unfortunately most LMSs add friction to online discussion. Here’s the typical pattern in an LMS:

Student reviews the content of the assignment (a question, lecture, reading, etc.).

She clicks a link that takes them away from the content to a separate forum or discussion board.

Finally, she discusses what they just reviewed in that separate, new place.

Now how would that look in real life? Something like this . . .

“So do you think spreading the jelly to the edge really saved her life?”

“Stop! If you want to discuss this question, you’ll need to go into the discussion room across the hall.”

Everyone shuffles into the discussion room across the hall…

That’s absurd, right? It would completely break the flow of thought from content to discussion-based application. So why do we think that’s okay in an online environment?

At Pathwright, we don’t think that’s okay. That’s why we designed discussions to work in context, along with everything a student is learning.

This is about more than where discussion happens.

As I mentioned in my last rant about sidebars, interface design for online education is in its infancy. But one thing UI designers on education platforms can do better is to keep discussion at hand and in context.

At Pathwright, we don’t get everything right either. But we start by taking a design approach that begins with how great education happens in real life instead of taking the easier route of cobbling together existing design patterns like tacking on an online forum.

If you’d like to try out the difference for yourself, you can start creating an online course for free right now.

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.

Teach Through Connections and Communities, Not Content

An effective course depends on good course design. Or, 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.

To understand this more fully, let’s think of a specific example — architecture.

When you think of any kind of building — your office or home, St. Paul’s Cathedral or the Chrysler building — I doubt that the building material comes to mind first. Instead, you think of the building as the space it creates for you to work, live, stress, hope, and love. You think about the particular kinds of connections that are made in that space and the feeling the building gives you. A building’s material matters, no doubt. But it’s only one aspect of what makes it special or essential.

A course is the same. Just as particular buildings are designed to foster certain activities and connections — between people and around information — so are courses.

That’s the long route to a simple idea: Teaching is more about connections and communities than content.

I like to think about the particular challenge this creates for those of us who design courses that are partly or entirely online. At times, creating meaningful communities in an online course feels a bit like being an architect tasked with building a tall, thin tower in a windstorm.

We’ve written before about how technology helps to solve this problem — whether that means minimizing distractions or creating more places for conversation. But I’d like to suggest a simple solution to help us as curriculum designers to create more space for connections and communities.

If it’s true that teaching is more about connections and communities than it is about content, we should constantly press our content to be more useful by asking, “How can I make this course about my learner’s real life?”

I love watching masterful teachers do this. For my college literature teacher, this meant pushing her students to empathize with John Milton’s blindness, so we could better understand his poetic genius. But I’ve seen solutions in the form of creative and clever projects as well.

One of my colleagues at Pathwright who teaches software design transforms his class projects by making them as much like real life as possible. He could simply tell students, “Design this app.” Instead, he creates elaborate scenarios in which fake clients email students requesting them to bid for a specific project.

Sure, the students know the emails aren’t real. Even so, his projects are infused with a lot more real-life energy than typical bulleted instructions for college assignments.

Answering the question “how can I make this course about my learner’s real life?” might not result in any revelatory new teaching methods. It doesn’t have to. Our aim is simply to help students connect what they’re learning to the people around them and with their everyday lives. If we can do that, we’ll have created a space in which true learning happens.

This kind of course design requires buckets of empathy and planning. If you want to see the tools we use for this kind of work, check out our course on planning effective learning experiences.

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 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. I want to write a stand-up comedy routine? I probably shouldn't, but 15,500 videos explain the process.

And it's the same with Siri and Google and Quora and . . . is AskJeeves still a thing?

They'll give me an answer, but they'll never give me a question to ask.

The point, I think, highlights two remarkable realities:

Answering questions has never been easier. This is the definition of "a given," so I won't say any more about it.

Questions have never been more valuable.The Internet Age's great pioneers (and now overlords???—looking at you Google) staked their claim around questions. Panning for these little nuggets we tossed their way, they found them to be bonafide gold. Let that sink in: companies exist because we ask questions.

What does this mean for teaching? I think it means that we often don't need teachers to be the at-hand experts ready to answer our questions. That doesn't mean we don't need teachers who are also experts (Who made all those YouTube videos after all?).

It does mean that a teacher's job on the ground often looks different than we imagine. If 15,500 people are ready to answer my questions about stand-up comedy, what do teachers do?

There are a lot of important answers to that question. Teachers contextualize expertise. They identify specific hurdles learners face and customize their journeys around and over those hurdles. Teachers sometimes simply encourage at just the right moment. But here's an answer I think gets overlooked:

Teachers, unlike YouTube, give us questions to ask.

When we don't know what we don't know, teachers can tell us. By giving us questions to ask, teachers show us what's just beyond our peripheral vision.

You may have had an experience like this. Maybe you sat down with a mentor and lamented over two career choices that were seemingly at odds. "Which one should I pick?!" you asked. Maybe your mentor returned with a question: "What if instead you asked, ‘How can I combine these two passions?’"

A whole new direction opens up to you in an instant. 

In other words, even at a time when questions are answered so easily, we often need help asking the right questions.

What might it look like if, as teachers (whether in a classroom or out), we focused more on giving our learners the right questions than the right answers? What if, as learners, we paused to ask, "What should I be asking?"

Try this. Whenever you sit down to design your next course—whether it's an employee onboarding course or an intro to graphic design—don't just make a list of what your learners should know. Make a list of the questions they should ask to find those answers themselves.

In the process, you'll not only help learners find answers to their questions, you'll reveal mysteries they didn't know they were searching for. You’ll give them something worth more than gold.

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

The primary users of Pathwright are the roughly 2 million learners completing steps every day. None of these users pay us.

Instead, they pay our customers who are made up of a much smaller group of school administrators, IT directors, and content creators from educational organizations of all sizes. (In fact, we have several customers who make way more money than we do.)

From a more conventional business perspective, it would make sense for us to prioritize designing primarily for the users who pay us first and then for the learners who don’t pay us, right?

That’s exactly what many of our competitors do, and it’s working for them, at least on business side of things. However, if you’ve ever used any of the more conventional LMSs (learning management systems) or marketing-oriented course platforms you’ve probably seen how this plays out: eventually, the product becomes 90% administrative actions, content authoring, and/or marketing tools, which is what 90% of the paying customers say they want. That leaves perhaps a measly 10% of features and polish focused on the actual learner experience (LX), which in contrast is where most 90% of the usage actually exists.

We take a different approach. Whenever we develop a new feature for Pathwright, we start with the learner experience first and then work our way back from there.

By starting with the learner experience we can:

Make the teacher’s job easier. Many of the jobs teachers have to do are not related to actually teaching. Reminding students about due dates, motivating them to catch up when they’re behind, and giving them a clear next step, are all things that Pathwright handles for teachers out of the box. Once curriculum is on Pathwright, a teacher can almost put it on “auto pilot” and focus their efforts on the more valuable things like one-on-one mentorship and feedback.

Reduce the support burden. We have schools with thousands of learners that have single digit support requests for an entire year. In fact we’ve had customers cancel their support system integrations with Pathwright simply because there wasn’t enough support to worry about. The LX design we put into our product saves a whole lot of time and money for our customers.

Avoid distorting the brand of our customers. It’s bizarre to me that many prestigious institutions and brands will use learning tools that look like they were designed a decade ago. Worse than that, the poor design often creates a negative first impression and a lot of frustration that gets transferred to the institution or teacher, not the software itself. At Pathwright we believe the learner experience should be clear, modern and beautiful so that it reflects the quality of teaching and guidance that our customers offer.

While the above approach may not be the most obvious business strategy, our team has been happy to grow slowly and steadily for years by putting the learner first every time.

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

Before you read this, pause and take a look at everything you’ve learned in the past month.

👀 Take a close look at what you’ve learned…

Of course not. Unless you’re an unusually studious and visually-oriented notetaker there’s nothing for you put your eyeballs on and look at. We humans haven’t come up with a way to visually show a learning journey.

But if there were a way to look back at a learning journey, or to look forward at what we want to learn next, what shape would it be in?

This may come as a surprise, but at Pathwright, we think learning looks most like a path. As a path, learning is…

Connected: No matter how spontaneous it seems in the moment, everything we learn is connected to something we’ve previously learned — like steps in a path.

Active: Real learning happens when we reflect, apply, and act not just watch and read. Passively absorbing content without action is like sitting on a path enjoying the view and going nowhere.

Progressive: Learning doesn’t really happen in giant leaps or light bulb moments. Learning happens as we struggle step-by-step towards a destination and make discoveries along the way.

Meandering: Learning isn’t like a highway fading straight into the horizon or like a neat grid of city streets. Learning is more like a connected series of winding paths we stumble on, explore around, and even carve our own paths from.

Communal: Paths are best taken with others and learning happens best with other people.

Whenever I’m teaching, thinking of learning as a path helps me remember a few core principles:

Every new idea or concept must be connected and built on a previous one. It’s impossible to teach someone something entirely new.

Paths are best taken together. How can I encourage “togetherness” even if I’m teaching online, at a distance?

Learning is active, not passive. Watching and reading doesn’t move people forward unless it’s acted upon.

As a teacher, I’m primarily a guide that helps people choose the right path and arrive safely at their destination.

As a course designer, I’m primarily a path maker (or “pathwright”) who creates a path through the chaos of information and ideas that I and others can guide people down.

The true shape of learning is a path — not a syllabus, a classroom, or a video playlist. As teachers, our primary job is to make paths and guide people along them.

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

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. In real life, this would be like a professor selling you a textbook he wrote along with a few slideshows and then heading out the door.

Content marketers, often motivated by a mythical idea of hands-off content streams as passive revenue gold mines, have found creating online “courses” to be an easy sell. You can spot these kinds of courses by the snake-oil style sales tactics used to sell them: access windows that expire for no good reason, super long sales pages, a pyramid-scheme-like emphasis on buying into a passive-revenue lifestyle, unreasonably high price points with steep limited time discounts, etc.

A whole industry of content marketing experts and course creation platforms has emerged around this fad of using “courses” as a get rich quick scheme. While there’s nothing wrong with creating and selling useful content, calling it a “course” and calling offering it “teaching” is at best an abuse of some important words and at worst deceptive.

So what does great online teaching look like? It’s actually pretty easy to identify — being a great teacher online requires doing the same things you’ve seen your favorite teachers do in the classroom.

Build a path of small steps to reach big goals. They understand where their students’ are first and carefully guide them to achieve their goals one step at a time. Great teachers get in their student’s minds so they can make them better people not so they can get in their wallets.

Design practical projects and exercises. Watching a video isn’t enough. Until we can apply the content, we haven’t learned it. It’s one thing to watch a video demo on baking macaroons and another thing entirely to get in the kitchen and actually do it.

Communicate the cost. Effective teachers calculate what their course costs for students both in terms of time and money. This allows teachers to communicate the necessary investment upfront, which helps students buy-in with confidence knowing the challenges and rewards that lie ahead.

Give accountability and motivation. Staying motivated to learn in an online environment is tough. Great teachers help motivate their students by setting a schedule with reasonable deadlines, evaluating and scoring work, and checking in on how they are doing.

Encourage discussion and collaboration. Include opportunities to learn with and from other people through discussion, debate, and collaboration — not just from passive content.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. There’s nothing passive about real teaching. It is as much a craft and art as any other job. And doing the job well comes with immense rewards, as any teacher knows.

The good news is that the internet and technology can and should act as a multiplier to great teaching not a bastardization of it. In fact, at a time when so much great content exists, we need truly excellent teachers more than ever — this is not the time to sell out.

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