Meet Pathwright 2. Now teaching online can finally be about people.
We’re excited to announce a brand new version of Pathwright aptly named “Pathwright 2.”
Since we launched in 2012, we’ve partnered with hundreds of thoughtful, creative educators who teach hundreds of thousands of people. They’ve created learning paths for university students, home cooks, new team members, aspiring hypnotists — you name it.
Our core philosophy that educators make paths hasn’t changed, so Pathwright 2 feels comfortingly familiar. But in the past few years our ambition for education grew, we learned more about how great educators teach, and technology changed a lot.
Pathwright 2 is our first bold step towards making an education tool that’s personal, beautiful, and useful for any topic and teaching style. Here are just a few new things you’ll find in Pathwright 2:
Make it personal, even at scale.
Teaching is an empathetic, generous act of helping other humans grow. It’s deeply personal. Most education software these days focuses on passive content, passive income, or merely managing the files and data around a live classroom. Ironically, the learners and teachers themselves are an after thought.
Education is all about people. So with Pathwright 2, our primary goal was to put people first on every screen. You can literally see where everyone is in their learning path:
Community discussion in Pathwright is designed specifically for learning and available on any learning step. As a teacher, you can collect projects and share personal feedback to guide your learners.
If you think keeping a personal touch is important in teaching, give Pathwright 2 a try.
Create a beautiful sense of place.
If you’ve ever walked onto beautiful college grounds like those at Magdalen College Oxford or into the Rose Main Reading Room in the the NYC library, you’ve felt the impact that beautiful architecture and art has on learning. Don’t you feel inspired to know more and do more just by walking in? It’s as if being surrounded by order and beauty challenges what we expect of ourselves. That’s good, right?
Unfortunately most all online education software relegates art and design to a custom logo and colors within a generic, boring interface. Our goal with Pathwright 2 was to create a uniquely beautiful learning experience that also gives a unique sense of place and wonder to every learning experience. A logo and a color swatch aren’t nearly enough.
Teach with a web app, not a web site.
We accidentally started the new version by building a native iOS app version a little over a year ago. As we experimented with an app-focused design, really cool things starting falling into place. Learning and teaching is an active process (like an app) not just a passive experience of consumption (like a website or shopping catalog). It’s hard to describe, but to us Pathwright 2 feels more like an app than a website or shopping experience. It doesn’t even matter whether you’re on a desktop, tablet, or phone. Try it out for yourself and I think you’ll see what we mean.
Additionally, you can run every part of Pathwright 2 on your phone — not just the learning experience. Post lessons, respond to questions, change settings, anything.
Teach with insight.
Ever since we launched Pathwright we’ve had a nagging feeling that something was missing between the course creating/editing experience and the learning experience. In hindsight, it’s obvious. We were missing a way of experiencing a course that’s focused on just one thing: teaching!
Once a course is built, a teacher cares most about seeing where everyone is, how they’re doing, what needs attention, and generally helping guide folks along. So Pathwright 2 includes a brand new Teach view of the path that does just that. To us, it just makes sense.
Get frequent updates.
If you’ve been on the original version of Pathwright for a while, you know that we haven’t launched anything major for you in the past year (we’re sorry!). That’s because we’ve been focused on Pathwright 2 which is built in a way that we can push out enhancements and upgrades weekly, not monthly. Stay tuned — there’s a whole lot more coming.
It’s still all about making paths.
We’re excited about all the new features (and especially some that are coming). But the core of what Pathwright does remains the same: we help educators make paths for humans and guide them along those paths. With the explosion of click-bait content, social-media distraction, and echo-chamber anxiety the internet has become a difficult place to learn. But we’re optimistic that technology is part of the solution, not just part of the problem. And we’re convinced that people need learning paths more than ever.
If you’re someone who likes the idea of harnessing the chaos of the internet into a simple, focused path and personally guiding your learners to a better place, we hope you’ll give Pathwright 2 a try. It’s entirely free to try out for as long as you’d like.
Take a unique, interactive tour (bonus points for finding the easter eggs!) or dive right in and get started by creating your own Pathwright account today.
