Why we’re rebuilding our learning architecture

During their internships, our students adopt key self-development practices:

  • Pomodoro — to focus and invest time deliberately

  • Fleeting notes — including regular inbox review

  • Zettelkasten / exocortex / personal knowledge base / public journal / thinking-through-writing

These aren’t just productivity hacks — they’re core to how we teach.

We don’t educate for the sake of education. We educate to change the world.


The problem: everything lives inside the LMS

We integrated these tools directly into our LMS. While students are inside the platform — everything works.

But the moment they step into the real world — reading documentation, working with external systems, facing actual challenges —

the tools disappear.

  • The Pomodoro timer only works inside course content

  • Fleeting notes can’t be captured while reading standards or books

  • Zettelkasten isn’t available outside our closed system

This creates a contradiction:

we install practices, but make them impossible to continue.

So students are forced to find and adapt external tools — which raises the obvious question:

Why spend time learning our tools at all, if they won’t last beyond the course?


The architectural shift

This realization made us rethink everything.

  • We’re dropping all in-house tools that have solid alternatives on the market

  • We’re focusing on seamless integration with existing, open, and well-supported ecosystems

  • We only write our own code when the product is truly unique


What replaces our internal tools

Instead of LMS modules, we now use:

  • hypothes.is for fleeting notes

  • solidtime for time tracking and Pomodoro

  • Discourse as a hybrid public-private Zettelkasten


What’s next

Our engineering focus now is integration — connecting these tools into a unified experience.

So that when a student builds a practice, they can carry it with them — from learning to life.

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