Every week for four weeks, a course meets. A course is a group of people learning together, sort of like a book group.

You can host each of the four classes of the course in your office, your home or a coffee shop. The ideal size is 6 to 15 people, but you might want to invite a few extra folks as insurance.

Consider not just your co-workers, but fellow freelancers, friends, people who do work you admire. While it's fine to ask strangers to attend, my sense is that's not going to be effective, at least at first, when the program doesn't have a track record yet.

We call the person who organizes the classes within a course (that's you) an organizer. No credentials required, other than a generous desire to lead and share.

Every four weeks there will be a new course. Obviously, a group can continue meeting from course to course, or you can pick and choose. I think it would extraordinary if the 11,000 people already subscribed to this each hosted ten people for a dozen courses over a year. That would be a powerful step in raising the conversation and output of more than a hundred thousand people…

The first course is going to be based on selections from my work for a few reasons. First, I figure most of you know my work and want to be more engaged with it, and second, I can tweak the course more in search of a paradigm that works. We call the subject of the course a scholar, mostly because we couldn't think of something catchier and more accurate. More scholars will be announced soon.

Before each course is launched, we'll post two different PDF documents here. One is for the students in your class, and the other, similar but with some added material, is for you, the organizer.

This list, then, becomes the central clearinghouse for which courses are up next and sharing what we learn from you. The college, though, is completely distributed, it lives and breathes because of what you do with it.

Your job, then, is to:

1. Invite the right people to your course.
2. Find someone else to bring snacks.
3. Make sure all the students get the PDF, in advance, by email. One PDF covers all four classes in the course.
4. Lead the class. This doesn't mean you need to teach it. The best classes are going to be peer-driven events, in which the organizer works to push people forward and to give people a chance to be heard. You're not an expert on anything except your own experience with the work, and that's just fine.

The first course begins in October, and we've reserved Tuesdays as our default day (because syncronizing people across social media can't hurt). #KryptonTuesday is the idea, but you can run it on any day you choose–you're the organizer. Some are choosing to do it during the workday, some in the evening. October 1st is the target launch, and you might consider inviting people to reserve the date.

One and only one boundary: don't run a class online. It won't work and it denatures what we're trying to build. In person is magical.

Students should expect to spend about an hour a week preparing for class (all the material is linked to within the PDF) and perhaps 90 minutes working together in their weekly session with you.

It's all free, it's all open, and I'm hoping that this format will copied and morphed and used by others going forward. We've got nine of the courses outlined, and will release one a month, though it's entirely possible that Krypton (and others) may put a choice of courses online. Of course, once a course is live you can run your classes whenever you like… no need to be in sync if you choose not to.

In my next post, I'll go over some of our thinking about scholars, and then I'll be posting the first curriculum, because you don't need to trust me that's it's worth doing before you invite people to join you.