Learning Experience Design in Depth: Design the Journey, Not Just the Course
Signature Course No. 472 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Learning Experience Design in Depth: Design the Journey, Not Just the Course course, in the People, Culture & Engagement category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
A course is an event; a journey is what happens across days and weeks. Before the first session and after the last one, in several formats, at work and away from it — that is where performance actually changes, or quietly does not. This course teaches the discipline at that level, on one running company: Navessa Home Services, a fictional regional firm whose field technicians, dispatchers, supervisors, and customer care advisors supply the worked cases across both modules.
It starts with diagnosis. Every journey in this course begins with a refusal: the refusal to design anything until you can say, in plain sentences, what performance is wrong, for whom, at what cost, and why you believe learning will change it. You will sort causes across the four families — knowledge and skill; environment; process and incentives; selection and capacity — claim only the share learning can treat, and hand the rest to their owners in writing.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Diagnose and Architect the Journey — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Journey Blueprint, Front Half; then, Module 2 — Assess, Include, Sustain, and Prove — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Launch-Ready Journey.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — the front half of a journey blueprint for Navessa's ninety-day apprentice journey: a cause-separated diagnosis, an evidenced learner picture, a destination stated as performed capability, a dependency-ordered architecture, formats assigned by job, a practice ladder, and a closed feedback system; and a complete, launch-ready journey plan for Navessa's twenty-eight customer care advisors — its assessment, accessibility and inclusion provisions, the social layer, entry and sustainment, and the evaluation plan — each capstone also performed on your own ground, on a live program of your own.
The honesty standard is part of the course. Good design raises the odds that people learn and transfer what they learn; it does not guarantee outcomes, because workplaces, managers, incentives, and workload all push on the same performance the design is trying to change. Where a claim could be read as a promise, this course teaches the bounded version — judgment includes knowing what design cannot do.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Learning Experience Design in Depth: Design the Journey, Not Just the Course is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning delivers.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the refusal. Take the most recent learning request you received and state the performance gap underneath it as observable behavior — who does what, how often, at what cost; sort its causes across the four families and name the evidence, not the opinion, that tells you which family is largest; and say which part of that gap your organization once tried to fix with learning even though its cause sat in another family, and what happened. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Journey Blueprint, Front Half for Module 1 and The Launch-Ready Journey for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Diagnose before you design — in that order, every time. Every skill in this course is the same discipline wearing the concept's clothes: establish the cause before building the cure, state the destination as work performed rather than content covered, and let evidence — not testimony, not habit, not the loudest opinion — make the design decisions.
Module 1 builds the journey's front half. Performance diagnosis and the four families of cause; the evidenced learner picture; the destination stated as a performed capability; sequencing across time — dependency order, spacing, and the shape of weeks; each format chosen by the job it does; transfer designed from the first sketch; the practice ladder climbed to full difficulty; feedback loops that close; and motivation and belonging designed without gimmicks.
Module 2 proves it and protects it. Assessment that measures the capability itself, at full difficulty; accessibility and inclusion held as first-sketch constraints; the social and manager layer that decides whether new behavior survives a normal working week; the engineered entry; sustainment through the middle; honest evaluation of whether performance changed; iteration from evidence; and the full design review that judges the journey whole.
And it holds its boundary throughout. The foundations — design models, measurable objectives, and single-course structure — are incoming knowledge here, taught in the predecessor course, Signature Course No. 236, Instructional Design: Build Courses That People Learn From. This course is the level above the single course: the journey itself, designed whole.
What you will learn
- Diagnose whether a performance problem is a learning problem at all — and name the non-learning causes a design cannot fix
- Build a learner picture from evidence that changes real design decisions, and state the destination as a performed capability
- Architect a sequence across days, weeks, and formats — ordered by dependency, spaced for memory, each format matched to its job
- Design for transfer from the first sketch: a practice ladder that climbs to full difficulty, and feedback loops that close
- Assess the capability itself, and hold accessibility and inclusion as first-sketch constraints across every format
- Design the manager and peer layer, engineer the entry, and sustain the journey through its middle
- Evaluate whether performance changed — and say how sure you are — then iterate from evidence and run the full design review
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Learning Experience Design in Depth: Design the Journey, Not Just the Course, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Journey Blueprint, Front Half and The Launch-Ready Journey
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people who design how others learn
Practicing learning designers — who already build competent courses and want the depth rung: journey architecture, practice and feedback systems, and evaluation that withstands a skeptical stakeholder; and learning and development leads in companies who commission, buy, or approve learning and need to tell a journey from a catalogue, and a design claim from a design.
University and college program designers — who build multi-week professional and continuing-education programs and need the same architecture at academic scale.
Subject experts pressed into design — engineers, clinicians, operations leads — who know the work deeply and are now responsible for how other people learn it. This course assumes you already hold the foundations: you can work a design model, write a measurable objective, and structure a single course. What you need to bring is one real program — built, building, or owed — that you are willing to redesign honestly as you go.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Diagnose the Performance Problem
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Learning Experience Design in Depth: Design the Journey, Not Just the Course is Signature Course No. 472. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.