The Nooma Doctrine

The Rails Doctrine

Here are the five pillars of The Nooma Doctrine:

  1. Teacher autonomy
  2. Online teachers are software developers
  3. Leverage the Internet
  4. Content is not enough
  5. Let my soul live

Teacher Autonomy

We take teacher autonomy very seriously. We want to empower teachers build their own brand.

From our decision to have our teachers directly connect their Stripe accounts to provding teachers full control over their resources, we constantly think how we can bring more power to the teachers.

Online teachers are software developers

Online teachers have to organize and maintain many video, image, and text files just like software developers. Teachers deserve an optimal workflow just like our developers so that they can keep iterating on their creations.

Learning content, just like software, has to be kept up to date. We believe that the subscription model will be a powerful motivator for teachers and students to constantly become a better version of themselves.

Leverage the Internet

The Internet is a beautiful place and is still in its infancy. We believe that in the future there will be extremely powerful browser based tools that will rival native apps. Actually, it turns out there are pretty powerful apps on the Internt already.

Nooma embraces embedding tools from the Internet. For example Google Hangouts on Air can be used to livestream a group hangout while Twitch can be used to livestream a large show. Or we can use Plunker or JSFiddle to enhance our programming lessons. We believe the Internet will continue to provide amazing tools that we can just embed into the Nooma platform.

We want to revolutionize online education and we believe that can only happen by intimately embracing the Web. We love it, we love gifs, Shiba Inus, and all of the quirkiness of the best invention in history.

Content is not enough

Can you believe you can get a world class education online for free? When we realized this we were absolutely mindblown. Something that really confused us why aren't more people learning? We learned that content is not enough.

Content is a requirement for a learning platform but community is a necessity for lifelong learning. We don't imagine Nooma to be just some course builder we want our teachers to build communities.

Let my soul live

There are so many of us with jobs that do not make us feel alive. Every day we don't do something we were destined to do, our soul dies a little. To remind ourselves to do what makes our souls feel alive, we chose the name Nooma which means soul in Greek.

We want everyone to feel the liberation and the joy that comes from doing something that they love. We want our teachers to absolutely love what they do so that they may teach the students how to love.

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