Offcourse

Offcourse was founded by Jan Hein Hoogstad and an international team with diverse educational backgrounds. The platform emerged from a conviction that traditional institutional education was limiting human potential and that knowledge sharing should be decentralized. Built during a period when online learning was still treated as a compromise rather than a distinct medium, Offcourse represented an early attempt to create infrastructure for what the founder calls "crowdlearning"—a community-driven approach where individuals collectively curate and share knowledge.

Traditional educational institutions create barriers to learning by gatekeeping knowledge and limiting access to diverse perspectives. Learners had no easy way to aggregate quality learning resources scattered across the internet—blogs, tutorials, videos, podcasts—into coherent, shareable courses. The challenge was not just technical but philosophical: how do you create learning infrastructure that works outside institutional walls and genuinely empowers people to learn from and with each other?

Offcourse built an open source platform that inverted the traditional education model. Rather than institutions determining curriculum, the platform enabled any user to become a curator and instructor. Users could gather the best sources from across the internet and organize them into structured courses. The platform facilitated asynchronous, distributed learning where knowledge flowed horizontally between peers rather than vertically from authority figures. By treating online learning as its own distinct medium—not a degraded version of classroom instruction—Offcourse leveraged digital affordances like real-time feedback, interactive tools, and thematic organization to create engagement. The open source approach meant the platform itself could evolve through community contribution, embodying the same principles of collaborative knowledge-building it enabled for learners.

Offcourse demonstrated that crowdlearning was viable and that communities could self-organize around shared learning goals. The platform proved that knowledge sharing promotes growth for everyone involved. More importantly, the project validated a foundational insight: online education should be designed from first principles as a superior alternative, not as a compromise. This learning directly influenced subsequent work in ecosystem architecture and knowledge infrastructure. Offcourse established patterns for distributed communities, asynchronous collaboration, and shared knowledge spaces that would become central to later projects like Rizom. The platform showed that when you remove institutional gatekeeping and give people tools to curate and share, learning becomes an act of collective meaning-making rather than content consumption.