Thinking Good

Lessons & musings from a career in creating online programs

Why Your Online Learning Program Isn't Working (and it’s probably not the platform)

24 March 2026

I promise to not make “education: you’re doing it wrong” a regular vibe, but the ideas here seem like a worthy primer.

When an online learning program underperforms, the first instinct is usually to blame the platform. The interface is clunky. The reporting is limited. Learners can’t figure out how to log in. It doesn’t have that one feature the salesperson promised.

Sometimes these things are true. But more often, the problems were baked in before anyone picked a platform. Here are three mistakes that show up regularly in online learning programs, and what to do instead.

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Everyone Knows NPS Doesn’t Measure Learning

17 March 2026

If you’ve ever evaluated an online learning program, there’s a good chance you’ve used Net Promoter Score (NPS). You’ve probably also wondered whether it’s actually telling you anything.

You’re right to wonder. NPS isn’t just an imperfect tool for measuring learning. It’s measuring the wrong thing entirely.

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Painkiller or Vitamin?

10 March 2026

A quick way to pressure-test a learning program: is it a painkiller or a vitamin? Painkillers solve problems people feel right now. Vitamins are things people think would probably be good for them. The difference matters more than you might think. In this post, I tell the story of how a program I helped advise went from “nice to have” to urgently neededand what that reveals about designing learning that people actually engage with.

Read the full article on Substack >