The One Thing That Makes Learning Actually Stick

Here's the problem with how we teach: We treat learning like it's a thing that happens in a classroom. You show up. You listen. You take notes. You take a test. You prove you were technically present. And then you leave and immediately forget most of what you heard.

This is particularly absurd when you're talking about things kids actually need to learn. Not facts to memorize. Not something they can Google in five seconds. But actual skills. Actual understanding. Actual ability to do something they couldn't do before.

If learning worked this way in real life, humanity would never have learned anything.

I recently talked with Christine Outram, an entrepreneur and designer who built Everyday, a learning app for high school students. Christine's background is fascinating—she started as an architect, which trained her to think at multiple scales simultaneously. She went to MIT. She invented the Copenhagen Wheel. She worked in advertising. She ran product at startups. And then she realized something: Most online learning is a grind. It's boring. It's tedious. And when something is boring and tedious, people don't use it. And when people don't use it, they don't learn.

So she asked a different question: What if we built learning apps the way we build successful consumer products? What if we made something people actually wanted to use?

That shift changes everything.

The Architecture Problem

Christine's background in architecture is weirdly relevant here. In architecture school, you learn to zoom in and zoom out. You think about the big vision—what are we actually trying to create?—and then you zoom all the way in to the details—how is this thing going to actually stand up?

Most education doesn't work like this. Most education is designed by people who are good at a subject, not people who are good at understanding how people learn.

The industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research and development. Advanced algorithms. Sophisticated technology. Ways to predict what students need to learn. And yet, the adoption rate is terrible because the products aren't actually usable. They're not engaging. They don't feel fun. They feel like punishment.

Christine realized that the problem wasn't the technology. The problem was that nobody had asked: "What would make a high school student actually want to use this?"

If you ask someone in the ed-tech industry this question, they'll talk about engagement metrics. They'll talk about behavioral science. They'll talk about retention curves. And all of that might be true. But it's technical language for a simple insight: Make it feel like Duolingo, not like homework.

Duolingo works because it's fun. It's bite-sized. You can do it in five minutes. It doesn't feel like punishment. People use it. They actually learn.

Christine asked: How do we do that for high school subjects? How do we make learning standardized test content feel the way Duolingo feels?

The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

Here's the uncomfortable truth about learning: Most kids don't actually want to fail. But the way we teach, we create an environment where failure feels catastrophic.

You're learning something new. You don't understand it. So you fail a problem. Which feels bad. Which makes you feel stupid. Which makes you want to stop using the app. Which means you don't practice. Which means you don't learn.

Compare that to a game. You're playing a video game. You die. You try again. You learn from what went wrong. You try a different approach. You die again. And you're having fun the whole time because failure doesn't feel like judgment. It feels like part of the process.

Most education apps were designed by engineers and educational psychologists. Christine designed Everyday with designers and product people who understood engagement. That's a different starting point entirely.

Instead of asking "What do students need to learn?", she asked "What would make them want to keep using this app?" And the answer wasn't fancy technology. It was simple principles: Make it fast. Make it visual. Make it satisfying. Give people quick wins. Make progress visible. Make it hard to put down.

These are the things that make apps engaging. And for some reason, the education industry thought these things didn't apply to learning.

The Psychology of Why We Forget Everything

Christine pointed out something that most education people know but won't admit: The way you learn something in a classroom is almost useless in the real world.

You memorize something for a test. You pass the test. You forget it immediately. Because you learned it in isolation, disconnected from context, for no reason other than getting a grade.

Real learning is different. Real learning is when you understand something deeply enough that you can apply it in new situations. When you see a problem and you immediately know which tool to use. When you can explain it to someone else. When you can build on it to learn something else.

Most education gets this backwards. It treats memorization as learning. It treats test scores as understanding. And then wonders why students graduate without actually knowing anything useful.

Christine approached this differently. The goal wasn't to get high test scores. The goal was to actually improve student performance. And that required understanding what actually makes people learn: context, practice, feedback, and feeling like you're making progress.

So Everyday doesn't just show you a problem and check if you got it right. It shows you the problem, helps you understand the concept, lets you practice it in different contexts, and gives you feedback that actually helps you improve.

The Simple Solution That Nobody Implements

Here's the dirty secret of ed-tech: Most of it fails because it doesn't focus on adoption. It focuses on features.

Engineers and ed-tech founders get excited about what's technically possible. "We can use machine learning to predict exactly what a student needs to learn! We can personalize the entire learning experience! We can optimize every detail!"

And then nobody uses it because it's not fun. It's not engaging. It doesn't feel like something you'd choose to do in your free time.

Christine said something that should probably be printed on the walls of every education company: "Don't fall in love with your ideas. Fall in love with the problem."

The problem isn't that we don't have advanced enough technology. The problem is that learning feels like punishment and not like growth. The problem is that students use apps they hate because their parents or teachers make them. The problem is that engagement is low because engagement doesn't matter if people don't choose to use it.

Christine obsessed over a single metric: What percentage of engaged users convert to paying users? Not "how many people signed up?" Not "what's our DAU/MAU ratio?" But "Of the people who actually used the product, what percentage decided it was valuable enough to pay for?"

This is a completely different question. This is asking: "Does our product create enough value that people willingly pay for it?"

If that number is low, no amount of other metrics matter. You don't have product-market fit. You have something people tolerate, not something people choose.

The Unlearning That Changed Everything

Christine came from architecture. And architecture trained her in a very specific way of thinking: Perfect everything before you build it.

In architecture school, you spend months on a design. You draw. You refine. You detail everything. And then it gets built exactly like you specified.

But when she moved to software, she had to unlearn this almost entirely. In software, you can't perfect everything before you build it. You build something quick and rough—a minimum viable product—and you put it in people's hands. You watch what they do with it. You learn from that. Then you change direction.

This felt terrifying at first. How can you release something that isn't perfect?

But here's what she discovered: Perfect products that nobody uses are useless. Imperfect products that people actually use, engage with, and give you feedback on are incredibly valuable. Because imperfect but used products can get better. Perfect but unused products are just dead.

So Christine completely changed how she thought about building. Instead of trying to envision the perfect app and build it, she builds something rough, gets it in front of users, watches what they do, learns from that, and iterates.

This is standard in tech now. But it's revolutionary in education.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Product Development in Education

Education has a culture problem. It has an expertise problem. It has a "we know what's best for students" problem.

Most education people were trained as teachers or academics. They know their subject matter deeply. And they assume that knowing the subject matter deeply means you know how to teach it effectively. That's almost always wrong.

Christine came in as a complete outsider to education. And that was an advantage, not a disadvantage. She didn't know what was "supposed" to work in education. So she could ask simple questions like "What would make this actually engaging?"

Most education product builders ask "What's the most pedagogically sound way to teach this?" Christine asked "What would make high school students want to use this instead of TikTok?"

These are different questions. And one of them actually works.

Why This Matters Beyond Education

If you work in any industry with outdated practices—which is most industries—you're probably making the same mistakes education makes.

You're probably over-rotating on technical features that don't matter to actual users. You're probably focusing on metrics that don't correlate with whether people actually value what you do. You're probably assuming that expertise in your subject matter means you understand how to make people want to use your thing.

The antidote is the same in every industry: Get your product in front of actual users. Watch what they do. Ask them why they do it. Believe what they tell you. Change based on what you learn.

Christine measures Everyday's success by a single number: What percentage of our engaged users convert to paying users? If that number goes down, they're building the wrong thing. If it goes up, they're building the right thing.

Everything else is secondary to that question.

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Want the Full Story?

If you want to hear Christine's full philosophy on building products people actually want to use—including her framework for unlearning perfectionism and how to think about product development in an industry that's stuck in traditional modes—listen to her full conversation on The School of Innovation podcast.

Yaniv Corem's interview with Christine Outram goes deep into how someone with a background in architecture, advertising, and design approaches the problem of education. It's forty minutes that will make you question how your own industry approaches product development.

Because here's the thing about disruption: It doesn't come from doing the same thing better. It comes from doing something completely different because you're not constrained by how things "are supposed to be done." Christine gets this. And that's why Everyday works—not because it has the most advanced technology, but because it focuses on the one thing that actually matters: making people want to use it.