Education, the LMS Ecosystem and WooCommerce

Jonathan: This is your co-host Jonathan Wold. And I’m joined here today with Anna Maria Radu. How are you, Anna?

Anna: Hello. Good morning. Good morning from the beautiful Coeur d’Alene. How are you?

Jonathan: I’m doing very well. And today we have a special guest with us as is always, they’re always special guests on Do the Woo, but today we have Ronnie. Ronnie. Welcome.

Ronnie: Thank you very much for having me.

Jonathan: And where in the world are you joining us today from Ron?

Ronnie: I am from home in Austin, Texas.

Anna: Beautiful.

Jonathan: For those of you listening, who don’t have the privilege of seeing the video, you have a fantastic piano behind you. And how long have you been playing piano, Ronnie?

Ronnie: I think I started taking lessons when I was probably 10 or so, but I don’t play as much as I would like, mostly around the holidays or something.

Jonathan: I’ve enjoyed finding that there’s quite a few musical, folks with musical backgrounds in the WordPress space broadly. It’s like we’re talking to someone and they happen to either have an instrument behind them or they’ve… There’s a few folks I know who have music online, you can listen to. And I’m like, man, this is awesome. Music is fantastic.

Anna: Jonathan is a musician himself. He might tell you about his talents. Multiple, plural, go ahead, Jonathan.

Jonathan: I enjoy music thoroughly and sometimes I should probably be more humble about my abilities than I actually am, but I enjoy it. I carry a harmonica around and I’m known to bust it out unexpectedly and at least to my own personal enjoyment. So I enjoy it a lot.

Ronnie: Very nice.

Jonathan: So Ronnie, we’re going to talk about the education, the LMS space today. Let’s start out with your background though. Tell us about your background. You didn’t start out doing stuff on the web, is that right?

Getting into the web

Ronnie: No. My first career out of university, what I went to school to be, was to be a math teacher. So I was a math teacher for six years, algebra through calculus, though I really did. While I was in college, I got really lucky with an internship all four years of the university program at an accessibility institute at the University of Texas. And my job there in part was to look at university websites on campus and run them through some automated accessibility scanners and write up some feedback and send them off to people around campus to make improvements.

Anna: How long ago was this?

Ronnie: I started in the fall of 2000. So 22 years ago.

Jonathan: This was the early days of accessibility.

Anna: My math doesn’t add up on this. I’m not sure. How did you do that? No, no.

Ronnie: We all get to 40 someday and I’m right there. But my experience there, it introduced me really to the web, the director of the Institute was really instrumental in writing the web accessibility guidelines that we still use today. And so just exposed me to that community, to being around the web. They were really big and I think it was movable type, trying to get accessibility into that, exposed me to open source and that sort of thing.

Jonathan: And what was the original interest in math? What led you to say, “Oh, I want to be a math teacher?”

Ronnie: That’s a good question. Just in school, it was always my favorite class, always seemed to do well and I had some really good teachers. If you ask any educator about how they, or why they got into education, I think the most common is a good teacher.

Anna: Yes. Yes.

Ronnie: So I definitely can relate to that. I was able to take a few computer science courses and math is pretty related. Some overlap there and just building stuff even before university on the web exposure there.

Jonathan: Was the web accessibility work then? Was that a bit of your foray into the web or did you have interest prior to that? Was there any context before you started focusing on the accessibility piece?

Ronnie: Even in high school, I think we had a dial-up internet account that came with some public webspace. And so I realized you could somehow FTPN and add a file to the web and access it. Playing with that when I was a kid, but it didn’t build anything useful or interesting. I graduated, I got my first teaching job, but the whole time I was teaching, I knew I wanted to be in education, but I just started building things. I was building websites to help build community around math teachers, I tried to search engine for lesson plans for math teachers. I was just exploring entrepreneurial things. And that led me into WordPress for sure. Because then anytime I wanted to build something to like, “Oh, I could use this plugin or I could use this service.”

When WordPress came into play

Jonathan: When did WordPress first come on the radar? You mentioned movable type, which was a contemporary in the early days. When did WordPress first become a thing to you?

Ronnie: It must have been 2006, when I think I built my first couple of WordPress sites. And really I just played with different technologies. Then I got on a mailing list for a company called WPMU DEV, which really focused on multisite. And a lot of the things I was building was what was called WordPress MU or multi-user then and became a paying member there.

And for a couple years, was building some things, nothing too successful, mostly just to scratch my own niches, about six years into teaching, my wife got accepted to grad school in Spain and I needed a job while she was in grad school and really started like, “Okay, I got to find a career out of this.” And WPMU DEV, which I was a member of, sent out an email that they were looking for some people and I applied and eventually got hired and then stayed there for almost 12 years.

Staying in the education space

Jonathan: I’m curious about the inflection point. You had the opportunity with moving where you’re like, okay, this is an opportunity for a career change, but you had some building interest and accessibility up to that point. You’d done some of the web things, it sounds like you pursued some entrepreneurial interests. Did you see this as still within the education space when you went MU DEV?

Ronnie: It was, because they had Edublogs, a platform. And that’s what I went to go work on Edublogs. In fact, Edublogs launched, I believe a few weeks before wordpress.com itself.

And still a large, if not, one of the largest few WordPress multisites in existence. I definitely had my hands there in building tools for teachers and for students and eventually into universities that we were working with. It was a combination. It flowed back and forth between Edublogs and our education services to WPMU DEV, it varied over the years, but I always had that education focus.

Jonathan: So it had the education focus. And it sounds like you made a natural segue into more of a technology focus within education and then the scale that comes with it, the broader impact that you can have in the space.

Ronnie: Quite honestly, it was like, we’re moving. I knew we were going to spend a year or two in Spain. And I thought I would come back. I went to grad school to be a school principal. And I thought I would come back and find an administrator job, but then no, I loved what I was doing too much. And the flexibility and freedom that came and being in the classroom and working with schools and teachers directly, but this is much better for me.

Anna: I get that you still do part of that. I saw that you attend those meetups, the worker accessibility meetup, other types of events where you teach in one way or another. You still educate people on WordPress matters.

Ronnie: I hope so, that’s a goal. It’s a big part of what I want to do because it’s important and it’s fun, more importantly than anything for me personally, it’s just something I enjoy.

A birds view of 12 years at one company

Jonathan: So 12 years is a long time at a company. You started out focused on Edublogs and some of the plugins. What did the arc of that time look like? What did you do over that period of time?

Ronnie: When I started there, we were maybe six, seven people, all freelancers, most of us had other gigs. I had other gigs for the first several years. I was teaching online at university and kept another freelancing a little group. But then as we became more established, we kept growing and it became a full time, proper role, and we grew into a legitimate business. There’s about 200 people, I think when I left. You get to see a shift. It seems like every time a company doubles in size, it’s a massive shift in just the culture and the dynamics and what it takes to be. So from seven to 20, and then again, when we hit 50 and 100, those are all pretty magical milestone moments.

Jonathan: They’re big jumps. They can be very big jumps for companies.

Ronnie: Yeah. So getting to live through all that and be part of that was a lot of fun.

Jonathan: Touching on commerce for a moment. Now you work on Sensei, you’re focused on that. So we’ll talk more about that in a bit, but when did Sensei first come onto the scene for you?

Ronnie: Really early on. Sensei is around… I should know this, but I think it’s about a little over 11 years old.

Jonathan: Yeah. It was an early product.

Ronnie: Yeah, and there were a couple of competitors out at the same time actually at WPMU DEV, we had a competitor for a while that I worked on some.

Jonathan: What was it called?

Ronnie: CoursePress.

Jonathan: Yes. CoursePress.

Ronnie: There’s so many presses and courses and campuses that it’s confusing and it’s still available on GitHub by the way. But I don’t think it’s seen much love in a long time. Definitely, we saw that we implemented or through Edublogs and that snowballed into a brand called CampusPress that I was managing. We had customers using different LMS plugins that we were hosting and supporting.

An overview of LMS (learning management system)

Jonathan: And for those who don’t know, let’s take a moment just to define something. So LMS, learning management system. Can you just give us a little bit of maybe some background on the space from your point of view as an educator, like when… Whatever you think is relevant, but presuming that folks don’t have as much education context, what are maybe some basic terms or some context that you think would be helpful for them?

Ronnie: Excellent. Thank you for that. LMS is learning management system and there’s so many different types of LMSs out there now. And so many sizes and scopes, and there’s an LMS for every niche and genre that you can think of. But historically you had some big giants in the field. You have Moodle, which has been around for a really long time and is an open source project. You could say along with WordPress, Moodle is to the LMS space, what WordPress is to CMS. Especially in the open source CMS world and Moodle still has a large thriving community, best I can tell.

Jonathan: And is it fair to say in terms of definition that’s the LMSs are used by educators to manage the student experience and vice versa students to track and manage, it’s a technology basis for where the learning components are brought together.

Ronnie: And historically it was for large organizations. You had universities or enterprise corporations or whatever with their LMS, but over the years we’ve seen through the creator economy and the expert industry. Individuals creating courses, knowledge that they’ll sell or give away as part of your coaching services or consulting services or it’s a marketing lead generation. There’s so many different uses and use cases that you see with courses. That’s really where you started seeing things like Sensei and all these LMS plugins that popped up being a way to… Well, you already have a WordPress site and that’s where your marketing site is, or maybe your membership site, it’s natural to put your online courses on the site. So you use an LMS plugin for that.

Jonathan: Excellent. Now just to cap off at least for the moment, the personal side of this, so give or take 12 years at Incsub focused on like the broad array of the education space. What was your focus when you wrapped up your time there? Like, what were you working on?

Robert: We had moved into hosting and I was spending so much time on hosting like enterprise. We were almost like a WordPress VIP for the education space, for universities and school districts and marketing level websites. And we had consumer managed hosting through WPMU DEV as well that I worked a lot on. I was getting out of the education world basically. I felt like I was being pulled more into the hosting world, which I also find very interesting and it was a lot of fun, but I could just feel myself being removed further and further from the education space.

Jonathan: You have this deep root in education, Sensei comes along as an opportunity and you’ve been doing that about six months now?

Ronnie: Yeah. I started November of last year.

Jonathan: Excellent. And for those, most folks on this podcast would know, but for those who don’t, can you just tell us a little bit what Sensei is and what you’re focused on?

Sensei the WooCommerce LMS

Ronnie: Yeah, so Sensei, it’s originally a Woo project, a Woo product from Woo themes before Woo was part of Automattic and was a plugin that I think was sold along with a theme, because Woo themes was making lots of themes for selling courses and then was acquired by Automattic when Woo moved over, and it went through periods of more focus and less focus within Automattic. I think anybody could see that if you were paying attention that sometimes updates would be a little bit less frequent or maybe not as big, but, well, when I came in and right before I came in, six months ago, it’s become a really big renewed focus within the company. We have tripled the team size, focusing on it at more than tripled and multiple dedicated engineering teams and marketing and all sorts of things to put around it and just see what we can build and make it the most useful product as possible to those that are creating and selling courses.

Anna: So how would you describe your role in this project?

Ronnie: I am just the general lead of Sensei project. So, covers everything from the product and the development side and our business strategy, marketing, pricing, all that sort of good stuff.

Thanks to our Pod Friends PeachPay and Nexcess

Jonathan: You’ve got this deep context and you know the space well. It’s always interesting for me, I like it when folks come from outside the ecosystem in because they get to bring a lot of their insights and perspective. You have the advantage of both bringing an outside perspective as an educator, and also having deep, long term context for the space. There’s a lot of things that you’ve seen. That at least from my point of view gives you a lot of shortcuts to things that when you’re in a position like this, at very least there’s a lot of mistakes that you can avoid that people who don’t have context for the space can tend to make if they’re coming entirely in cold.

Sensei is growing, what excites Ronnie about it and the space

And you also have this background as an educator, presumably much broader perspective, for instance, it’s not just the technology, it’s also thinking about the education experience and drawing from your background as a teacher and what you’ve learned and what you’ve seen other teachers do. That puts you in a really good position. My question is, as you look at the future, Sensei is growing, the team is growing. What are you excited about? There’s lots of things to do in your position to build a business. You have the broader Automattic ecosystem, you have all the things happening in this space. What are some of the things that you’re personally excited about with this opportunity?

Ronnie: The projects that we’re working on, that I’m most excited about that I just find myself spending as much time and as possible is making that learner experience like the end user, the ultimate end user of the course, just as polished and as educational and as engaging as possible. For example, I see a lot of courses, I’ve participated in a lot of online courses or see customers and the course just walls of texts, lengthy lessons, lots of text, maybe alternatively long videos which are nice. But my goal is that we build a product that makes it really easy for course creators, they can’t help, but build more engaging courses. And by engaging like interactive, people don’t need to see walls and walls of text.

We need to break it up with making them, click the mouse, something, or give some feedback or choose your own adventure or stuff that we’re working on. There’s lots of things that we can do there, it’s twofold. We’re focusing on that end user, but the only way to get there is to have the course creator be able to do that easily and in a way that they can find and… It takes a lot of time to build a course thoughtfully.

Jonathan: I’d say a lot of folks, if you don’t have some context or background, adult education, I don’t want to say it’s harder than you think, but that’s part of it because when I began to make foray into that, and I started to be curious and learn, it’s like, okay, there’s a lot of different learning styles, I might be able to create a course for my type of person. Most people don’t consciously do that. They intend to like, “Oh, it’s for everyone in my particular niche.” But they don’t give thought to the fact that some people like to read, some people like to see something. So in my experience limited as it is so far, because I love the education space. There’s a lot to know and understand if for no other reason than the fact that people learn very differently.

When you’re going to create a course as a creator, you have an idea. Most people don’t say though, “I’m going to create it for this specific type of learner and be good.” They’ll be broader, but tend to miss that focus. And it sounds like what I’m hearing you say is, you both have that context and awareness. And as you look at how to empower creators, you’re thinking about things like that, how do you help optimize for the fact that there are different learners and that experience of the learner is going to be very different perhaps or should be than like what the creator might be obvious to the creator of the course?

Ronnie: And something I can elaborate there, as a tip that I’m learning more about and trying to read some of the latest research and things. We spent a lot of time when I was going through school to learn how to be a teacher. We talked about what you mentioned learning styles and that people learn differently. And so we try to think about that, like let’s put in a bunch of different ways of showing the same material, but taking it further. You really have to tie that to the content being taught. And it makes sense once you think about it, but the content, some things just lean or just make more sense to be taught with a video than others. Some things make more sense to have some image that’s interactive than other concepts-

Jonathan: Yeah. That makes sense.

Ronnie: Or being heard. And so in the education space and as students, we were always taught like, Nope. I’m an auditory learner. I just learned by hearing. So then as a student, we start thinking, “I have to hear everything or I’m not going to learn it.” That’s a fallacy actually that you can… Depending on the content and the concepts, certain teaching methods instead of learning styles take precedence. And so if I can help build into the product, all those different methods or ways of making it easy to have more interaction or whatever it may be, then I’m hoping that we have better result.

Learn.WordPress on Sensei

Jonathan: I’m hearing this than positioning for the creators being a guide to them of saying, Hey, whatever the experience looks like, it’s this intent of, “What are you trying to create? Let’s help guide you in how to do that.” This type of content, you might try these types of things and I’m pardon my memory on this. So learn.wordpress.org. Is that using Sensei?

Ronnie: It is. Yeah. The free version of Sensei.

Jonathan: It’s been very interesting to watch the shift. I love to learn initiative. I feel like it’s still early and it’s full potential. I’ve created a course on a workshop and it’s been fun to watch that grow because I still feel like it’s quite understated and still early, but the education is a really important part, at least in my mind of carrying out the WordPress’s mission. And so I’m curious, any thoughts or does the learn WordPress, is it on your radar? How do you think about what’s happening over there?

Ronnie: I’ve been able to meet with some of the team that’s working on the platform inside itself and on the content. And I lurk in the training channel in Slack, in the make Slack and try to comment when I can, or contributor days coming up at WordCamp Europe. And I hope to spend the whole time with the training team. So that anything that can be built in and released back to the public. Definitely that’s a big part of our mission.

Building his own course

Anna: I have a tricky one, Ronnie. Do you have your own course on Sensei?

Ronnie: I don’t have anything public yet, that I’ve made.

Anna: We should.

Ronnie: Yes. When I was going through the process at Automattic, for everyone goes through a trial project and they didn’t tell me that my trial project needed to be a course, but I decided to create a course as my product. And that was super informational to me. I just was able to learn a lot through that process and working on a public demo course and things. And I’m trying to do that myself just because every time I do that, I’m like, “Oh, we need to change this, just a little bit here or move that just a little bit there. I’m a big believer in dog fooding and using it yourself, so hopefully I can get to point where I can do a course of some sort too more publicly. We have other internal courses.

Jonathan: Of course.

Ronnie: Like all of our internal training for employee onboarding is all on Sensei. And so that team’s very valuable, getting feedback from how people are using it directly.

Jonathan: I love that idea of having a good demo course because a good demo is easier said than done, but when you can do that right, then it does a lot to anchor, you’re like, “Ah, it sets a bar.” It can set a bar for like, “Oh, wow, this is an interesting way to approach this particular subject.”

Ronnie: But I break my own advice, I want it to be perfect and polished. Then I refuse to hit publish when I should just publish and iterate.

Anna: Just publish it, just do it.

Jonathan: It’s easier said than none though, because we put these pressures on ourselves. But it’s like, “Oh, I work at Sensei now and I do this and so it’s got to be good, it’s got to represent.” But yes, you’re also modeling, whatever you choose to do, what message do you want to put out there to other creators? So good luck at that.

Anna: It will happen. I’m sure it will have something to do with math or music. I hope it’s something that we’re not really expecting. That’s my hope. I will be keeping an eye on that.

Ronnie: No pressure, no pressure.

Jonathan: It’s actually a good point because if you do a course on how to create courses it’s not bad. That’s the plan. That’s totally fine.

Ronnie: It’s not the plan.

Jonathan: Okay.

Democratizing education with WordPress

Anna: On a more serious note though, I saw that you gave a talk, a few years ago on democratizing education with WordPress and this is one of Jonathan’s most favorite topics of all time. If he would do social drinking, he would probably have that on his go to list, but he doesn’t do that. So I would be really curious to hear your point of view on that topic.

Ronnie: I could get really philosophical and weird corporate thoughts here. And a lot of it is, maybe a little bit different, like when I was a public school teacher and I’m a big believer in public education which is going through some very serious movements and changes in the US right now. Also our university system and higher education, I think globally is going through some pretty significant changes and one common thread I think I see including all the way up to individual course creators and the knowledge economy. Historically those that own the content had all the power and had all the money. Now, content is pretty much free. Content is expensive to create, but once it’s created, it’s out there.

Jonathan: Distribution costs are so low and effectively zero at that.

Ronnie: And so when I think about democratizing education, I think about how do we help have the best content and those best learning experiences bubble to the top and be found. I don’t have serious long term detailed plan. There’s no PowerPoint presentation I can pull out to share with where we could go, but if Sensei can play a role or Automattic can play a role in that content discovery and maybe open versus starting to be with images and open source and creative commons, videos and audio and images, something there would be very powerful.

Jonathan: Is the mission more learner focused or creative focused or is it evenly split? How do you think about that?

Ronnie: It’s evenly split. And it’s hard because I would also try to preach, having one focus.

Jonathan: It’s hard, because with democratizing publishing, for instance, we’re not democratizing reading. I’d argue that, I think the mission and WordPress, the way that I would frame it, like in my current thinking is it’s WordPress at its core is more about empowering creativity on the web, and publishing is perfectly fine as a concept.

Picking the creator or learning side

But at this point, people are creating the entire things that at least in my thinking can go beyond the act of publishing, yet it is very creator centric and yes, we obviously care about the end user and sometimes the lack of focus can lead to some of the things like accessibility gaps. It’s like we’re overly focused on the individual creators, but it’s attention because, I’ll ask if you had to pick which side would you pick the creator or the learner?

Ronnie: I think I would choose learner. But then I would build things for the creator that help the learner. So it bubbles up to the creator and I would say it even bubbles up further than that, I think a big part of, from the business model and business side of Sensei, like agencies, freelancers, those helping those creators choose the tools or implement the tools that’s more our customer, but they’re not our user. If we don’t have a great learning experience, then none of it matters.

Jonathan: I bet that you can manage that tension though, because in the case of WordPress, already has the creator focus. If you lean on, because you’re part of the WordPress ecosystem, it’s almost like you could afford to be all in on the learner side of things in the context of being in the WordPress ecosystem. Because I agree, if you don’t do that, you’re going to be like a lot of other plugins and players in the space who do tend to be overly creator focused. And we end up having the end users themselves.

Jonathan: I would argue that WordPress, it had a significant edge early on. And it’s interesting too, because who is the user? Because early on there’s a lot of people who are creating the blogs, it was less, you could put whatever theme you want. It’s going to be interesting because there are two different audiences. And at least from my point of view, I’m really happy to hear the learner emphasis because it’s where I think a lot of creators need help, is for someone to say, “Hey, we’ve been thinking about this for you. We’re going to guide you through that process. You focus on creating, we’re going to help this learner side of it.”

Anna: And also the learners can become creators themselves. I think that’s a beautiful effect that this can have.

Ronnie: That’s a very nice point.

The education space and where WooCommerce comes in

Jonathan: Let’s talk about the WooCommerce connection. When you think about the education space, where does WooCommerce come into the equation for you? How do you think about what’s happening in e-commerce broadly and then WooCommerce specifically?

Ronnie: It’s that knowledge industry maybe membership sites is a big example where lots of either membership sites have courses or courses have membership components and community components or something like that. So that whole idea of courses right now and how it works with Sensei and how it works with WooCommerce. Course is a product and you sell the product and then you get access to the course. It’s almost like any other product.

And then the beautiful thing is that all the other things that come with that every add-on is basically compatible. Every extension is basically compatible. And so that’s a big benefit of something like being a part of the WooCommerce. Ecosystem at the same time, I think WooCommerce is working on in general and Sensei is working on in general, there are areas for improvement to streamline things or make it a little simpler to implement.

Jonathan: No, I don’t believe it.

Ronnie: Yeah. A little simpler to integrate with the payment gateway or whatever, because, of all the areas that I’ve been in the WordPress community for 12 plus years, WooCommerce is probably the thing I use the least in my… I had less experience with anything. And then when you get hired at Automattic, if you’ve heard, you start to do a support rotation. And I got to put on Woo support doing live chat support for Woo. I’m sorry to those few people that got stuck with me, but I had really good mentors and people looking over my shoulder telling me exactly what to say, but it is with great power and great flexibility comes some complexity.

Jonathan: How much of your focus in the space has touched the business aspect? You’ve been in this for a long time with Incsub, and my guess is that the business aspect for creators has always been pretty prevalent or prominent. Has that been the case?

Ronnie: Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think we want to empower people to be able to not spend forever figuring out exactly what extensions they need or what settings they need or how to configure which payment gateway or whatever it is. And we want to still give them those options because there’s a lot of usefulness in those options if you’re, if you know what you’re doing, but a movement to just making things a little simpler is going to make us all happy.

Jonathan: And I think in this current technology climate, I love seeing the proprietary platforms innovate and create these better streamlined experiences at the end of the day. We talk about this a lot, this difference between ownership and renting. I think WordPress enjoyed some early user experience advantages over other options. Today, overall as an ecosystem we’re behind on user experience and what it means to like empower a creator. And I don’t think other than it’s hard work, there is not a good reason we should be behind.

Ronnie: The main reason I think if we are behind is what I’m experiencing with Sensei too. It is an 11 year old product. And we have people using it for 10 plus years and they are using a setting that relies on a function that like-

Jonathan: You can’t just make changes to it. It’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. An advantage of a rich history and context, a disadvantage in that out of respect and good business practice, you can’t just make sudden moves. This is part of why people have confidence in the ecosystem, there’s longevity to it. It’s not just going to make a change to this or to that. But it can make innovation and building that momentum a lot more challenging.

Ronnie: A hundred percent.

In the LMS space, the opportunity for WooCommerce builders

Jonathan: I’m curious. With WooCommerce, and I think to me, it seems fairly obvious, the connection is focused on that side of like, all right, if a creator’s going to create and they have any business intentions, they’re probably going to want to commercialize. And that’s where that connection just comes in really nicely. And because they play well together, it gives you this strong foundation to be able to build on.

For the builders listening, where are the opportunities that you’re currently seeing in the LMS space? The folks listening are building plugins, they have service businesses focused on WooCommerce, from your point of view with the context that you have, what’s the future look like? Where should people be focusing?

Ronnie: We are focusing on a couple of things, and I think the more people helping and adding to that, the better. And so those are blocks in general of like interactive blocks is what we’re calling them. And there are lots of growing number of premium block providers out there and free block providers out there. But you can do some really creative things.

We have flashcard block and image hotspot block, and some of these blocks exist elsewhere, but trying to do it in a way that then ties into the LMS and integrates where you can require that they’re complete or interacted with before marking a lesson complete, you can give feedback or show and hide content based on how those are interacted. I think integrations there with the content and just exploring unique ways of getting the end user to be a participant in the course.

I’m very interested in what’s going on with WordPress core, with comments block and discussion blocks and being able to put those anywhere. And every time I play with it, it changes a little bit. We’re not quite to the point where we feel like we can build on top of it. But I want to, and I think we’ll be there very soon.

I think others as well like changing from how it is today in a blog post with comments at the end, let’s put discussions in line, let’s rank comments up, or the things that you’re familiar with, or you like to do in something like Slack or on social media, build that into the content somehow. I think there’s a lot of room for innovation there. And I think that could be really interesting.

Jonathan: For folks who are listening and they’re like, “Okay, sweet. I want to go build some blocks in the education space.” What guidance would you have to offer them? What mistakes should they avoid? How should they think about it?

Ronnie: Just download existing blocks and see how they work and try to build off of them. That’s the beautiful thing about the open source community. We can all learn from each other. I’ve been playing and trying to find things that I like in learning platforms and outside of learning platforms on social media or messaging apps, there’s all sorts of journaling apps and all of these different tools. And I try to make notes of the interactions I like or the things that I thought brought added value.

Jonathan: Is that the heart of it for you? Is it really the content interaction is where the opportunity is? It’s like a creator’s created some type of content and what you want is to just provide ways for the learner to interact with the content. Is that how you’d kind of sum it up?

Ronnie: That’s my goal at the moment for the foreseeable future and the reason for that is because if it’s not interactive, then just publish it as a blog post.

Jonathan: That’s a good distinction. And if you take that focus, you can go very wide with that because you can then begin to think, “Okay, what are all the possible inputs that a creator could have?” Because, that’s one side of the equation. That can then lead you into things like VR and augmented reality. And just like, “Okay, what are the range of inputs?” Let’s anticipate because offer creators more ways of inputting. And then for the learner, more ways of interacting with it, which can be across devices. It can be different. If you think about it creatively, I could see the horizon opening up quite a bit with what could be done.

Ronnie: And I ultimately have a goal that these tools are used outside of courses too. The sales pages can be interactive and interesting and blog post can be interactive. All the blocks that we’re making, you can use anywhere. And that’s exciting to me, it’s just another iteration in how we interact with the web.

Jonathan: It’s interesting to see that interaction growth being driven by learning because there’s different things that we do on the web. We’ll entertain ourselves, we’ll just interact, there’s social components to it. Learning is pretty fun foundational to value that we get from the web. We use it to pick up new skills, to learn facts, whatever it might be. And interaction is deeply rooted in a human way like that’s part of the learning process, is how we interact with those things that we’re learning, how we apply them. It’s cool to see you thinking that way.

Anna: Ronnie?

Ronnie: Yes.

Anna: I just love it. How you giggle every now and then when you talk about your work, I think that’s the best, I think that’s wonderful.

Ronnie: It’s just a lot of coffee.

Anna: Oh, I wish I could say the same, but I think it comes from deeper within and I’m happy to see that.

Ronnie: Thank you.

Anna: Is there a recommended way on how people can get a hold of you?

Ronnie: Yeah. Well, senseilms.com. Nice contact from there, but also ronnieburt.com. It’s my own little WordPress site. That is great. I’m Ronnie Burt on Twitter as well.

Anna: And Instagram? I checked that already.

Ronnie: Yeah. I am there.

Anna: Lots of interactive content. You can go check it out.

Ronnie: Yes.

Jonathan: Excellent. Ronnie, thanks so much for joining us. Really enjoyed this and we’re looking forward to seeing what you and the team do with Sensei and excited to see what happens.

Ronnie: Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it.

Anna: Thank you, Ronnie.