For most of the history of EdTech, we have confused the instrument with the music.
The course, that glorified PowerPoint we have all come to know as online learning, has sometimes been the half-broken banjo we were forced to play because it was all the technology could manage.
At its best, it has been a grand piano.
But it was always just an instrument.
The Note
Think about a musical note.
G# tells us something very specific: which note.
In learning, the equivalent is the subject.
G# is Anti-Bribery.
Or workplace safety. Fractions. Conflict resolution. Identifying a northern cardinal. Configuring a network.
The subject tells us what we are dealing with, just as G# tells the musician which note we are dealing with.
But neither tells us enough about the experience.
A musical note has an envelope: attack, decay, sustain and release.
The envelope describes the shape of the sound through time. G# can arrive sharply or gradually. It can disappear almost immediately or sustain. It can end abruptly or fade away.
Now we have something closer to an instruction:
Play G# like this.
And notice what we still haven't necessarily specified.
The instrument.
A piano might satisfy the envelope. A violin might. A human voice might. A synthesizer might.
But some instruments won't.
A guitar and a piano can play exactly the same G#. The pitch is identical, the experience isn't. Strike a piano key and the note attacks and decays according to the physical nature of a hammer, string and soundboard. Pluck a guitar string and it follows a different shape. Bow the same note on a violin and you can sustain it in ways neither instrument can.
The envelope is the shape of the sound.
That is why specifying G# isn't enough. And it is why instruments aren't interchangeable simply because they can produce the same note.
If the score demands an envelope an instrument cannot produce, it is the wrong instrument for that passage.
But if an instrument can produce G# while maintaining the required envelope, it is welcome.
A skill works the same way.
Subject + Experience Envelope.
Anti-Bribery is our G#.
The envelope tells us what needs to happen with Anti-Bribery. Perhaps the learner must understand the rules, recognize bribery when they encounter it, distinguish a legitimate gift from an improper inducement, and make the right decision when presented with an ambiguous situation.
A video lecture followed by an assessment is an instrument we might use to produce that experience.
It might be exactly the right instrument.
Or it might be our half-broken banjo.
Shiny Toys
For years, I have accused EdTech of having a fascination with shiny toys.
Every new technology arrives and we immediately start looking for subjects to teach with it.
We build a simulation because we can build a simulation.
We add video because we can add video.
Now we are adding AI because we can add AI.
That's backwards.
Don't choose the instrument and then look for something to play. Start with the score.
If the Experience Envelope calls for something a simple video and assessment can deliver beautifully, use them.
If it requires the learner to make decisions under changing conditions, perhaps a simulation is the right instrument.
If it requires practice with immediate, individualized feedback, perhaps AI belongs there.
And if the shiny new technology adds nothing the envelope requires, don't use it.
The question isn't whether an instrument can play Anti-Bribery. Lots of instruments can play G#.
The question is whether this instrument can play Anti-Bribery with the envelope the competency demands.
The Human Ear
There is another party to this contract.
The listener.
It isn't enough for an instrument to be physically capable of producing G#. It has to produce an experience a human being can actually receive.
Volume matters. Duration matters. Context matters. What came before matters. Fatigue matters. And, yes, enjoyment matters.
Even the choice of instrument matters.
Bagpipes?
Learning has an ear too.
An experience can contain all the right information, address exactly the right subject and demand exactly the right cognitive work, yet still be a terrible learning experience.
Boring matters. Confusing matters. Exhausting matters. Delight matters. Curiosity matters.
That doesn't mean every learning experience must be entertaining. Sometimes the score calls for tension, repetition, difficulty or sustained concentration.
Music isn't always pleasant either.
But difficulty should be there because the score demands it, not because we chose the wrong instrument.
The Audience
And then there is the reason we are doing any of this.
The audience.
I can build you a perfect system for tracking every song a musician knows. I can tell you which scores they have completed, which notes they played, how long they practiced and whether they passed an assessment proving they can recognize every chord.
But if nobody wants to listen, what have we accomplished?
Learning has an audience too.
We don't teach Anti-Bribery because we want people to complete Anti-Bribery training.
We teach it because we want people to behave differently when they encounter bribery.
That is the outcome.
The Experience Envelope is useful only insofar as it helps us create that outcome.
Attention matters. Engagement matters. Enjoyment can matter. Practice matters. Difficulty can matter. Context matters.
They matter because they affect whether the experience changes anything.
This is where much of EdTech has lost the plot. We became extraordinarily good at proving that the learning happened according to our own definition of learning.
The learner enrolled.
The content launched.
The video played.
The assessment was passed.
The course was completed.
The certificate was issued.
Every note accounted for.
But did anybody hear the music?
Did behaviour change?
Did performance improve?
Can the learner do something today that they couldn't do yesterday?
Because if the experience fulfilled every requirement of our system but failed to produce the outcome we built it for, the contract wasn't fulfilled.
We were measuring the wrong contract.
Rehearsal
And this means the score itself isn't sacred.
The outcome is.
The notes and chords have to be chosen. Each has to be matched to the right Experience Envelope. The right instruments have to be selected to produce it.
And then we have to listen.
A band working on new material doesn't write the score, perform it once and declare the job finished.
They rehearse.
They listen.
They play it for an audience.
They notice where attention disappears, where something lands unexpectedly well, where the arrangement gets in the way and where the song suddenly comes alive.
Then they take that performance back into the next rehearsal.
Learning should work the same way.
Did the experience hold attention? Did the learner understand it? Could they apply it later? Most importantly, did the behaviour or performance we set out to change actually change?
If not, perhaps we chose the wrong instrument.
Perhaps the envelope was wrong.
Perhaps we played the wrong notes.
Perhaps the progression itself was wrong.
The competency map and its Experience Envelopes shouldn't be a specification we publish and walk away from.
They are a score we continuously validate against the performance.
Every learner gives us another performance to listen to.
Every outcome gives us another opportunity to improve the arrangement.
And then we play it again.
The Half-Broken Banjo
The problem is that, for most of EdTech's history, we haven't had very many instruments.
Sometimes you know exactly what you want to express, but the instrument simply can't play it.
So you do your best.
We wanted practice, feedback, exploration, conversation, experimentation and adaptation.
What we could reliably deliver at scale was text, pictures, video, multiple-choice questions and Next buttons.
So we played the song on the half-broken banjo.
And we got surprisingly good at it.
Eventually the banjo became a grand piano. Modern courseware can be extraordinarily sophisticated. Simulations, branching experiences, beautiful interactive media and sophisticated assessment are all possible.
But the fundamental assumption survived:
We build the learning experience first, put the learner inside it, and call that the course.
There is another way.
When the Instrument Can't Play the Score
Recorded music has dealt with this problem for generations.
Vinyl has physical limits. There are things an engineer would like a recording to do that the medium cannot faithfully reproduce. Bass, dynamics, stereo information, playing time and physical groove geometry can all force compromises.
So engineers negotiate.
The objective isn't to reproduce every aspect of the original signal regardless of the medium. It is to preserve the experience that matters within the capabilities of that medium.
Sometimes the technology simply cannot maintain the requested envelope.
That doesn't mean anything goes.
It means there has to be a negotiation between the contract and whoever holds the authority to interpret that contract.
Learning should work the same way.
If a competency requires someone to demonstrate a behaviour and the available technology cannot observe that behaviour directly, we shouldn't quietly substitute a video and declare the competency complete.
We ask:
What experience can we provide, or what evidence can we collect, that preserves what matters about the contract?
For years, that negotiation was constrained by scarcity.
Then AI arrived.
And AI brought the whole band.
The Cacophony
This should be wonderful.
It may initially be awful.
We are rapidly approaching a world in which almost anyone can generate a lecture, video, simulation, assessment, conversation, explanation, exercise or interactive experience almost instantly.
The scarcity problem is disappearing.
In its place comes a very different problem:
cacophony.
A thousand instruments, all perfectly capable of making sound, don't make an orchestra.
Someone has to stand up, tap the baton and point everyone toward the score.
That score is the competency framework.
A competency framework shouldn't be a catalogue of courses.
It should be a progression of experience contracts.
The notes and chords identify what needs to be learned.
Their Experience Envelopes describe what needs to happen around them.
The instruments are selected because they can produce those experiences.
And the performance is judged by what happens to the audience.
Now AI has a very different role.
It doesn't get to decide what learning means.
The score already told it.
Pet Sounds
And this is where things get fun.
In 1966, Brian Wilson made Pet Sounds without much concern for what was supposed to count as a rock instrument.
There were strings and horns, bicycle bells and whistles, unconventional percussion and strange combinations of instruments and sounds from outside the traditional rock band.
There are even barking dogs and a passing train.
The studio itself became an instrument.
The interesting question was no longer:
What instruments are we allowed to use?
It was:
What sound does this moment need?
That is what understanding the Experience Envelope allows us to do with learning.
The course isn't dead.
Sometimes the course is exactly the right instrument.
Sometimes it's a grand piano.
But now we can make Pet Sounds.
Thinking Cap Everywhere
And this is where the last mile begins.
The foundations come first: the competency framework, the notes and chords, the Experience Envelopes, the instruments capable of producing them, and the evidence that tells us whether the audience heard what mattered.
Only then can we think clearly about the last mile.
That changes what an LMS needs to be.
At Thinking Cap, we're increasingly interested in learning experiences that don't look much like courses at all.
Read something.
Watch something.
Find something.
Annotate a video.
Have a conversation.
Use an AI.
Enter a simulation.
Solve an actual problem.
Perform something in the physical world.
Work with another human being.
Make something.
Teach something.
Produce evidence that you can actually do the thing.
The important part isn't getting all of those experiences into Thinking Cap.
Quite the opposite.
Thinking Cap doesn't need to play all the instruments.
Thinking Cap is listening.
The competency framework provides the score.
The Experience Envelopes tell us how the notes need to be played.
The learner, the workplace, the web, other people, software, AI and the physical world provide the instruments.
Thinking Cap listens to what happened.
It listens to the experience. It listens to the evidence. And, most importantly, it listens for the outcome.
Then the next performance can be better than the last.
That is what we mean by Thinking Cap Everywhere.
Not putting an LMS everywhere.
Not turning the entire internet into a course.
Not dragging every learning experience back inside our walls.
Just listening.
Because once you know the score, understand the envelope and listen to the audience, learning can happen almost anywhere.
And anything capable of playing the note is welcome.