We’re writing this post off the back of ‘Pyxium: A Guide’, the overview to our platform. If you haven’t checked that out yet, you can find it here.
In this post we want to go into a bit more detail about why we exist, how we currently perceive the online learning space, and what our founding principles are.
1. Why online learning?
The power of education
You don’t have to look far to see how important education is for all members of society. There’s plenty of research showing the positive effects of education for individuals, communities and society as a whole. These benefits are not only economic – greater education is often associated with greater health and wellbeing, greater tolerance of others, higher engagement in political issues, greater social trust… the list goes on.
We agree. We believe in the power of education. We believe that with the right guidance, direction, and quality resources, education can work to empower each and everyone of us to become the best person we can be.
The online learning movement
Education is currently undergoing a massive transformation. Online learning is booming – even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was predicted that the Online Education Market would be worth $350 billion by 2025.
This isn’t particularly surprising either. Humans have a natural tendency to learn, and as the world becomes more digital and technology focused, learning and education will become more digital too.
Online learning resources are going to massively change how learning is done around the world. But, still currently in their infancy, there are a lot of problems to hash out.
We want to be part of the solution. We want to reduce the pitfalls of a lot of online learning resources that currently exist, and provide an online learning platform that genuinely helps people learn, grow and develop.
In a world of continuing digital change, we feel such platforms are crucial.
2. The current state of online education
There are absolutely tons of online learning resources out there. From MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) providers to specialist learning platforms to YouTube, there are a wealth of sources from which to learn.
This isn’t always a good thing. Over the course of exploring a wide range of these sites, we again and again come across problems with how content is taught.
Quality control
There are a lot of genuinely good learning resources online. However, these resources are often highly formalised, or focused on topic-specific or qualification-specific areas, from professional certifications to school-level exams.
If you want to take up a new skill that doesn’t necessarily fit into these categories, things become a little bit trickier.
Many platforms lack sophisticated quality control methods to ensure all courses on their platform are high quality. Some platforms even promote that anyone can be an instructor – regardless of whether they know the best way to teach their topic area, and regardless of the content they submit to teach. You can read more about what makes a good online course here. But it shouldn’t be your job to filter out the good courses from bad – it is up to the platform to ensure all the content they are curating is high quality.
Guidance
Many online platforms require you to pick and choose your own courses to take, with little guidance on what would be appropriate. For instance, a quick search on Udemy for ‘Nutrition’ will point you to a mammoth amount of potential courses to take.
For experts, this works well – if you know about the subject area already, you can understand your learning journey, and which specific course is appropriate for you right now.
Research suggests otherwise for anyone else. A lack of knowledge within a topic area means a lack of knowledge of what the key lessons to learn are. If you’re not sure exactly what the key lessons are, then you can’t be sure you’re choosing the right courses from the beginning.
The focus on ‘user-led’ learning sounds great, but can often lead to a misplaced confidence in one’s subject area expertise. What’s more important is learning the right thing, at the right time, and understanding the learning journey you are going on. For that, we all need a bit of guidance.
Learning is not a passive pursuit that can be spoon-fed to you. It is active and requires you to piece together all aspects of your learning journey.
Focus on Learning
Too many online courses are modelled around the wrong priorities. Many platforms focus on generating revenue from streams that are not directly related to learning.
Some platforms require you to pay for access to a course – but then do nothing to support you in completing it. Other platforms require you to pay for membership, and don’t support you to enrol in courses. Still other platforms require you to pay for certificates and acknowledgements of reaching the end of their content, but are not designed to help you effectively work through their content.
This results in a value system distanced from learning itself. It results in online courses that lack the necessary structures and principles to promote effective learning.
3. Our principles
At Pyxium, it’s our aim to address these recurring problems. Through a carefully managed and research-backed platform, we hope to redefine what it means to learn online, and put the focus back on learning.
Our platform is built on 5 main principles:
Value
When you learn on Pyxium, you create a virtual currency called ‘pyxies’. You can then use these pyxies to buy things in our marketplace, like any other currency!
Pyxies can only be created when you answer questions right in our courses. By answering questions right, you are showing that you have understood and learned the content being taught.
This understanding, and this learning, is where the value is created, and this value is represented by pyxies.
Accessibility
You should be able to learn what you want to learn regardless of level of knowledge, budget and time available, or tech savviness.
We’ve created a platform that is simple in its design, clear in its objectives and wide ranging in its content.
We also have carefully curated guided learning paths, meaning even if you have no knowledge of the subject area you want to study, you’ll be learning the stuff you should learn in the order you should learn it.
Flexibility
Any time you complete some content, your progress is automatically saved. We also split our courses up into short, manageable chunks of bitesize but necessary information.This means you can learn even if you only have 5 minutes spare.
Our platform is designed to be usable on both mobile and desktop, meaning you can learn wherever you are, whenever you can.
Growth
When we learn, we grow as people. We’ve designed our platform to teach topics focusing on personal growth, within the categories of Health & Wellbeing, Social Issues and Personal Development. When you use our platform, you can be sure that the lessons you are learning are in topics that are focused on your growth as a person.
Learning
We hold our instructors to high standards. Any instructor on our platform needs to have expertise in their subject area. We also require them to create courses in line with our course templates – and these templates are based on the latest research in cognitive psychology on how people learn.
We are strict on our quality control. We only publish courses we believe are high quality educational resources. When you learn on Pyxium, you can be confident in your potential to genuinely learn from the time you invest.
Sound good? We’re currently in development, and are looking for both users to try out our platform, and instructors to help us create content for our courses.
If you are either of the above and haven’t yet registered to test our platform, you can do so here.
Here’s to your personal growth!
