If I needed inspiration for a new online educational program I’d look to video games to see what’s going on. Take Rocket League for example. This is a game tha

If I needed inspiration for a new online educational program I’d look to video games to see what’s going on. Take Rocket League for example. This is a game that’s incredibly simple to get started: you drive a car and hit a ball. But to master advanced techniques, like dribbling in the air as a literal rocket, it takes hundreds to thousands of hours of practice. To practice in a consequence-free environment there are standard and community-created training packs. To gain skills relative to your peers there’s a matching engine to create “fair online games”. To compete openly, there are ranked matches with precise criteria for getting into and falling out of a rank. Furthermore, the community is incredibly supportive of questions, show-and-tell streams, and is light-hearted enough to create their own memes. There are even tutors who will review your games play-by-play with you to fix your game sense. There’s so much good stuff here to pick apart on how to build good programs that are safe, inspiring, and lead to real skill progress for the participants. The university does a lot of it naturally but from what I’ve seen from Rocket League, you should be able to push a lot of those benefits into online formats.