Meta for more than courses - Hyperlink's new Meta Course

We’ve been running the Meta Course for over a year, and until now we’ve focused primarily on helping people develop courses.

A few months in, we added clubs on Hyperlink, but creating them has been a more casual DIY process. We’ve also written about ideas for further shapes and forms of learning, and want to do more to help bring them to life.

There’s a tremendous possibility space for what internet learning can look like. We’ve seen all kinds of interesting formats — workshops, research collectives, communities, peer groups — and we know there’s so much yet to explore.

One of our favorite parts of building Hyperlink is working with so many creative people who are doing fascinating work and research, and excited to share that with others.

We want Hyperlink to be a laboratory for innovative learning structures and alternative pedagogies; a space to play and build and try and fail and iterate together.

The past few months we’ve paused the Meta Course and focused on building Hyperspace, but we’ve recently redesigned the program and brought it in Hyperspace, and we’re running a new cohort starting August 24th.

We find that many meta-oriented programs on teaching online have a fairly narrow ‘ideal participant’ archetype. Something like ‘domain expert with large audience looking to build a course business’. That’s great, but we find that framing limiting.

We’re interested not only in creating courses, but cultivating a space for play and experimentation.

Designing new learning experiences is a challenging process, but one we find super rewarding. It can be scary and uncomfortable to try anything new, all the more so when it involves shaping an intimate and transformative experience for a bunch of people who don’t yet know each other.

We’ve worked with experienced teachers and complete novices. With people who want to teach a lot and people just trying it out for fun. With people who are more interested in leading peer groups than inhabiting the ‘teacher’ role at all.

We also know many great organizations working adjacent to Hyperlink, who share our ethos. We want to think about ways we can support this wider network of alternative / independent learning communities, and we’d love to explore this in the Meta Course as well.

We truly believe we need more and better ways to learn together. There’s near-infinite learning material out there in the world, but there’s also an acute lack of imagination in our collective institutions when it comes to actually directing people to engage and explore and create.

So, are you up for joining the new Meta Course?

The next cohort starts Tuesday, August 24th.

This time, we’re trying a slightly accelerated timeline: three weeks, six sessions. Attend at least one of the two feedback sessions each week, and we’ll schedule additional workshops as needed.

Come to start working on a new idea. Come to iterate on a course you’ve already started. Come to jam on ideas for learning clubs. Come to design new meta-structures and organizational forms for learning. Come to play.

View details on the Hyperspace page (click the Cohort 11 page too) and enroll here (invite required).

If you’re thinking about a course or club, submit ideas at the forms linked here and we’ll get back to you.

If you’re thinking about something else, hit reply and tell us a bit what you have in mind.

Finally, we’re in a bit of a quiet summer season, as far as learning happening on Hyperlink, but we do have two courses with new cohorts this month: Colin’s Language Construction Workshop and Adolfo’s Antifragile Writing.

Both these courses were recently redesigned and we’re excited to see how they go. Consider joining!

—The Hyperlink Team