Sutra is a new approach to online learning that that lets anyone create self paced, conversational courses that generate higher engagement, completion, and peer to peer connection using AI facilitation.
Hello Product Hunters,
I am excited to introduce Sutra to you. I’m Lorenz, one of the co-founders here. Sutra is an entirely new approach to online learning.
Here’s the problem with online courses: 97% of them don’t get finished, there’s low engagement, and there’s no connection - no opportunity for participants to learn with and from each other.
When my partner and I started taking online courses together we quickly realized that if we didn’t have each other, we would never complete the courses we started.
Self paced courses are hard to complete because they’re basically like a digital book. You’re entirely on your own. There’s no opportunity to meaningfully connect with, learn from, and be supported by other participants.
Sutra’s new Conversational Courses let you create rich, AI facilitated experiences that generate higher engagement, completion, and peer to peer exchange.
And, it’s super easy to create a learning experience like this.
Our Notion like editor lets your organize your content into sections divided by discussion prompts. To unlock the next section, a participant has to respond to the prompt. Our AI engine highlights the best responses, summarizes contributions, and finds connections between what people share.
(Check out the interactive demo we posted to get the idea.)
Participants automatically get notifications that engage them in meaningful conversation.
It’s like having a professional facilitator support your course to maximize participation and completion.
Sutra is super easy to set up and every participant in your learning experience makes it better. As participants share their understanding and experience, it improves the overall body of knowledge that your course covers. Our AI powered conversational engine makes sure the participants actually complete your experience, which in the long run also helps you make more money.
This is a total game changer and we’re super excited to be launching here on Product Hunt.
Thanks for your genuine feedback and support.
With love,
Lorenz
@lorenzsell congrats on the launch Lorenz and team, I’ve been looking forward to this. It’s such a great approach to enhancing your skills. I find my self getting bored in longer online tutorials and masterclasses. I feel this will help alleviate this. Excited to check this one out!
@claytonwalker yes, totally. The norm right now is long, self paced courses with endless module that nobody ever actually complete. There is so much room for improvement. We're really excited to see what emerges here.
@claytonwalker thank you for your support and yes this entire product is born out of my own inability to stay engaged and complete a self paced course over time. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback once you give it a try.
@kate_shcherbak thanks kate. We've been prototyping this in one way or another for the last 4 years and it's always been one of our most popular and effective features. I'm also excited to see what new real world scenarios people apply this too. Would love your feedback. Do you teach any courses?
@kate_shcherbak Thank you Kate. We already have quite a few thought leaders using it to have more impact with their content. We also have many membership communities using it to go deeper into certain themes or topic areas where learning from each other is just as, if not more important, than whatever the content may be. Let us know if you have any questions.
Sutra looks so powerful—it gives a lot of flexibility to the creators to build their programs strategically—for course design itself, the operations and workflow, and the marketing and positioning. I like how the product empowers me via modular components to build my stack, the community, the funnel, and its rich source of design components to customize the content experience is a huge plus.
Great work by the team, congratulations!
@vingar thanks for your support and feedback. Yes, it's an easy tool to use to set up your program, the landing page, collect registrations and manage all communication. I would say the best part is that it actually engages the learners with each other through meaningful conversation.
@vingar Thanks for you kind words Vinish. Running a learning experience has a lot of moving parts and we've built a tool that takes care of everything in one place.
Sutra looks like a revolutionary step in online learning! Kudos to you, Lorenz, and your partner for addressing the engagement challenge head-on. The combination of self-paced learning with AI facilitation and peer interaction is genius! 🎉
I love the idea of using prompts to encourage discussion and the AI highlighting key contributions. This could really transform the way we think about course completion rates. Creating an interactive community around learning is critical, and Sutra seems like the perfect way to achieve that.
I'm definitely looking forward to trying out the interactive demo and seeing how it works in practice. Can’t wait to see how this evolves on Product Hunt! Upvoted!
@oliviajanemitchell Thanks Olivia. We put a lot of love into it. And there's so much room for improvement with current approaches to online learning. Let me know if have a chance to try it. Have you created any online courses in the past?
@oliviajanemitchell Thank you so much!!!! It's been a true labor of love creating something that I, as a career educator, feel proud of and see it impacting how learning is done. Our emphasis on the value of peer to peer learning comes through in these features and we're so excited to expand this into different learning and development sectors. Would love for you to try it and share with others.
This is an interesting approach to take with courses. Any stats on comparison to the traditional way as yet?
Congrats on the launch. Stellar use of AI!
@izakotim Most of our understanding with this approach comes from qualitative observation. We started Sutra in 2016. Since then we've design and supported hundreds of experiences and had over 50,000 people participate in group learning experiences on our platform. From what we've observed, the level of engagement and completion with this interactive approach is significantly higher.
This product is definitely needed, and I would use it myself. I have a suggestion: consider integrating quests and a question-answer feature. For example, if I create a course and a user has questions, my own AI agent could engage with them and answer their queries in my writing style. Additionally, the ability to add my existing course to the platform would be great. This would make Sutra a comprehensive solution for completing courses with friends (by sending learning challenges), offering a personalized AI assistant that addresses doubts in a natural way, and providing tailored reminders. Instead of generic prompts like "Hey, complete this lesson," it could say something like, "Let’s see how you can build an OTP system for your website." Think of it like Duolingo's notifications. Also, a weekly newsletter summarizing completed lessons with insights into the next chapter would be a valuable addition.
@ajay_kumar_yadav4 Thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback and suggestions. We've already made it possible for people to bring in their content from elsewhere to create a new experience with it on Sutra and that's working great. We do need to systematize it a bit more through AI help. There are some considerations for us in having the conversation be with AI vs other human beings. It is something our team and community have been passionately discussing and for now the conversations happen between human beings but he AI helps connect ideas and people to each other based on what they're sharing. Perhaps for quizzes and knowledge testing it can have more AI components involved. Thanks again for your thoughts here.
@ajay_kumar_yadav4 This is great feedback. As we evolve we want to develop more capability for the system to help create intelligent experiences like this. It's a bit of an art form and not necessarily a skill set that every course creator has. Crafting the right prompts and helping people create quests that are both solo and collective, is a big deal. This is definitely on our horizon. Do you have a lot of experience with online learning?
I really like Sutra's approach! Having worked as a coding teacher, and having bought myself so many courses, I know that students (and myself for short courses) are sometimes just skipping through the content and never really followed or finished them... So this sounds very cool honestly, and could really change the way people engage with online courses 🔥
@annedevj Ya, coding is a great use case. Often when I'm learning something I want to see other people's approaches and be able to go back and forth and talk about that. That's mostly missing with traditional learning approaches.
@annedevj thank you Anne, I totally get what you're sharing about your experience. We also have a lot of our creators on Sutra tell us that they came to us from other platforms because they put so much love and effort into publishing a course and then were disappointed that people weren't completing it. Sutra not only makes the learning come alive for the participants, but also for the creators who want to have impact with what they have to share with their audience. Thanks so much for your support.
@natashasell for sure, there's nothing more frustrating when you created or are teaching something, and you see your students just overlooking the content and not taking in all the knowledge you've put in 😢 so that's a real cool innovation for the field! 👏
Congrats on the launch, @lorenzsell! Sutra sounds like a revolutionary approach to online learning. The high dropout rates in existing courses are indeed a major issue, and your solution to integrate AI for enhanced engagement and peer connection is impressive. The Notion-like editor and the conversational prompts are innovative features that could really drive completion rates. I love the idea of transforming self-paced courses into dynamic experiences. Can't wait to try the interactive demo! This seems like a solid MVP for anyone looking to up their online course game. Wishing you all the best on your journey!
@ema_elisi Thanks for the kind words Ema. We're hopeful this is just the beginning of a new way of amazing peer to peer learning experiences. Really appreciate your support!
@ema_elisi Thank you so much for your support. Yes, I believe the self paced online learning space is ready for a transformation where the value of learning from other peers is included in the experience and makes it come alive for people. I can't wait for you to try it and continue talking.
Hi Product Hunt family,
I’m so excited to introduce Sutra here and to launch our new Conversational Courses features on Product Hunt.
I come from 3 generations of educators and have been working in the learning and development space as an instructional designer for 20 years. I have my degree from the Harvard Ed School and am so proud to be a co-founder of this platform.
The birth of Sutra and this new feature came from my own experience of signing up and sometimes paying big money for online courses and then never completing them. Not because the content wasn’t good, but because I felt alone and had no one to share my learnings with.
And the latest stats on self paced courses is that 97% of them never get competed, my experience included.
And yet, when we are learning with others and have a way to share ideas, application and integration of the content, it’s incredibly dynamic and makes the whole experience come alive.
We now have communities and organizations all over the world shifting how they design their online learning programs to include our methodology.
Today is our first launch here and we’re so excited for you to try it out and interact with us. Thank you so much for your support. I look forward to connecting and learning more from you!!!!
Congrats on the launch, @lorenzsell! Sutra sounds like a revolutionary way to tackle the common challenges of online learning. The AI facilitation and peer interaction features are impressive and could change the game for course completion rates. Excited to see how this evolves! 🚀
@patriciaharris Thanks Patricia. We super excited to see how this evolves too. We've been iterating on this in one way or another for the last 4 years. So it's exiting to put it out on Product Hunt. Have you ever created any online courses yourself?
@patriciaharris thank you Patricia for your support and for truly getting what we're trying to transform in online learning. I'm excited for you to try it and to continue talking.
@10xmarketer ya, totally. The vast majority of courses don't get completed. I feel like there's a huge room for improvement in this territory. We're excited to be launching something that really moves the needle.
Have you created any courses yourself?
@10xmarketer yeah, there is so much wasted content out there and creators spend so much time and energy in setting it all up and then there's no way for them to tell what kind of impact their program is actually having on someones life. For the content to be truly valuable it needs to be applicable and the best way to figure out how to integrated it into someone's world is to share that with others.
@mniroula Thanks Mohan. We're super excited to see what emerges with all the real world possibilities. I welcome your feedback. Have you ever created an online course?
@mniroula Thanks so much Mohan...yeah we first called them Interactive Journeys, but have settled on Conversational Courses, which is much more clear on what we've created. Thank you for your support!
@alexdigitalmkt We are constantly thinking about how to create more meaningful connections between the people who participate in online programs. Literally we live and breathe this.... ha ha. Thanks for your support!
@kavyaaatripathi Thank you so much for your support. For me it's the best way I learn and retain and integrate my learning, is when I do it with others.
Really excited to see Sutra hitting PH! The concept of AI-facilitated conversational courses is a total game changer for online learning. Engagement and completion rates have been such a struggle in e-learning, so this approach feels refreshing. Kudos to you, Lorenz and the team! Can't wait to explore the interactive demo!
@elke_qin Thanks Elke. I totally agree, there is so much room for improvement in online learning. We're hopeful that by bringing a conversational, peer to peer dimension, we can change the relationship that people have to online courses in a good way.
@elke_qin Thank you so much! We’re on a mission to transform the way that people learn together online 🚀 As an educator myself it was painful for me to see so much amazing content online just be wasted because people weren't getting through it. There is so much value in learning with peers and share ideas with each other as we're going through and experience....I can't wait for people to try this and shift the status quo of online learning.
Really like the concept of having an interactive course that needs efforts from the student. This should increase course completion by a lot, really interested in how this plays out.
Kudos on the launch!
@uttiya_roy1 it does take more effort from the learner, but if they are signing up to take a course, it needs to have value and impact on their life, so yes effort is needed, but the reward is so much greater when there are others you're connecting with who are going through this experience at the same time.
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