Eating your own Dogfood

5 lessons learnt about building an online climate school.

Today I received the certificate for successfully completing the Terra.do climate change bootcamp. While I definitely wanted to get a holistic perspective on the entire climate change landscape and find a like-minded community, this was also the only way for me to actually be a user of the product I am building and in the process gain extremely valuable insights.

But before we get to that..

Some Context

Terra.do selects passionate individuals from across the world for a 12-week journey through various aspects of the climate challenge. This is accompanied by guest interactions, engaging assignments, group zoom calls and 1:1 mentorship. Ideally this requires climate experts (we have one of the best), amazing facilitators (again, the very best!) and an amazing pool of guests and mentors (again, pretty well endowed there). But we need to make it happen online, for people across all time zones, enable them to get the most value for every hour they spend with Terra, and scale this entire experience to 100k people in a period of five years: that’s my job!

So with that out of the way, let’s dig into the learnings!

Information Needs to be Organized!

The first thing that hits you in the face is how much is going on with this bootcamp. In order to create an experience that does justice to its promise, we have really gone out of our way to pack in so much into this program. This is a good thing, period.

But it very quickly becomes overwhelming and before you know it you have absolutely no clue of what is going on. With so much happening on slack, emails, zoom calls, Terra website and multiple 1:1s, fellows are lost even before reaching the mid-way. Being extremely flexible means you do not have repeatability, and that adds to the chaos (school timetables are so underrated in creating micro-habits that keep us organized)

A physical setting tends to eliminate a lot of these problems since you “touch-base” with your fellows much more frequently (remember how valuable your bench-partner was in school?).

Being online amplifies these challenges.

Serendipity + Community = Value (sh*tloads of value)

We have done an okayish job of bringing together amazing people across geographies and skill sets but united in their intent towards solving climate change. Beyond that, we haven’t done much, if anything at all.

Yet, despite our primitive product suite right now and rudimentary efforts, the community has flourished in beautiful and unanticipated ways. Fellows have been able to support each other with employment, knowledge, connections and form a tribe where they feel at home. From discussing and debating over de-growth and alternate economics to organizing around women in climate and even starting off a mini-school in Terra, our community is really doing some fantastic work!

And the best part? All this was serendipitous. Just imagine the potential with a catalyst in place!

Content is the Winner!

So what’s special about that? We are after all a “school” with “experts” who will be giving a lot of “gyaan” (=knowledge/content). How is that a learning for me?

As it turns out, there is another aspect to it. I am talking about the content created by fellows while at Terra. Something very special happens here as you see your own perspectives change and mould over a period of 12 weeks. Even in my own case, the content I have created during this boot camp is a condensed journey in self discovery, vis-a-vis a climate lens. To me, this is by far the biggest selling point of the “Terra experience”: the kind of change you are able to create in only 3 months!

Just that right now we hardly ever talk about this aspect of the course: it's like KFC not talking about their wings. Maybe we should start talking about the wings a little more?

Scaling Challenges

So we have an in-house content platform which serves the core “classes” (really proud of this one, you should check it out). However, everything outside of it is very people dependent and not codified at all. Metrics like engagement, quality of group interactions and success for a diverse set of fellows and their very diverse objectives matter. 

This means that scaling becomes a nightmare and conventional MOOC playbooks go out of the window. Instead of investing in repeatable nearly identical user experiences, you need to focus much more on enabling the middle-layer of instructors and community managers. I could see things starting to break and become extremely uneven at a 3x scale; preventing that from happening at 100x is a non-trivial hard problem (and therefore fun!)

Is it a MOOC? Why not a MOOC?

Which brings me to the final learning bit: the idea of this alternative approach towards MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). When we started off we did not know how wise this approach would be, but having experienced it first hand leaves no doubt in my mind about the potential of holistic learning experiences.

And if you think hard about it, that is a very logical progression to this place. A technology disrupts a physical system, and then gets personalized. Think of DVDs (physical), free online content (generic) and Netflix (personalized). Think Playboy (physical), Pornhub (generic) and then OnlyFans (personalized).

This is the similar progression when it comes to education. There are schools, there are MOOCs and then there is something in between which brings the best of both worlds.

Something like the Terra experience. After all, I’ve seen tears in the graduation calls. When did that ever happen in a MOOC?

What else? And What Next?

Why, I just laid out our roadmap! Now all we need now is to execute it, and do a damn good job at that!

After all, our lives depend on it :)

PS. I will definitely be writing more on the journey that lies ahead