As an e-learning consultant and a student of Zen, I spend a lot of my professional life trying to make learning more efficient and a lot of my personal life sitting with a practice that refuses to be efficient at all. These two parts of my world do not always agree with each other, and I have been thinking about that friction more than usual lately.
I am not going to tie the two together into a neat framework here. This is more an honest look at what happens when the principles I rely on at work run into what I am learning in a very different kind of education.
Why do we reach for efficiency?
In e-learning, efficiency is one of the first things we reach for. We break complex topics into modules, build microlearning, streamline content for quick consumption, and watch completion rates. There are good reasons for all of this, especially when the goal is getting information to people with limited time and bandwidth.
I believe in that work. I have built my career around making digital learning more accessible and more effective, and I have seen what an efficient, well-designed course can do for people who would otherwise have no access to the content at all. In the rural and remote settings where I do most of my work, efficiency is often the difference between something existing and nothing existing.
At the same time, my Zen practice keeps surfacing a question I cannot quite resolve: what happens to the kinds of learning that cannot be made efficient?
What does koan study actually look like?
A large part of my Zen training involves working with koans in dokusan, which are private, one-on-one interviews with a teacher. For those unfamiliar, koans are brief stories, dialogues, or questions from the Zen tradition that point toward the nature of reality beyond conceptual thinking. They are not riddles to be solved so much as lenses that change how you see.
Koan study at a Western Zen center has challenged a few assumptions I carry over from my professional life. I want to walk through them honestly rather than turn them into design principles.
What does one-on-one learning offer that scale cannot?
In traditional koan practice, a student meets privately with a teacher in short, intense meetings and presents their understanding, and the teacher responds to exactly where that student is. There is no hiding behind a written response or a carefully worded answer. The relationship deepens over months and years, and that depth is part of what makes certain breakthroughs possible rather than a side effect of them. The moments in this practice that have changed me most came out of the specific chemistry between me and my teacher, and I do not see how any other delivery method could have produced them.
That is hard to sit with professionally, since so much of what I do is about scale. I help build systems that reach hundreds of educators across a state, on the premise that good design can extend learning beyond the one-on-one encounter. It can. Even so, koan practice keeps reminding me that some kinds of understanding only show up in direct, personal contact, and no amount of clever design makes up for the absence of a real relationship.
What happens when failure is the method?
Most educational models aim for steady, measurable progress. Koan study involves returning to the same material over weeks, months, or sometimes years: a student presents their understanding, gets turned away, comes back with a fresh view after more practice, and eventually has a breakthrough that could not have been predicted or scheduled. In some ways it is the study of one insight refracted through many attempts.
In my professional world we design for progress, with learning paths, milestones, and completion. Koan practice has no completion rate. The learning happens in the returning rather than in moving forward through content, and it asks for a tolerance for sustained confusion and apparent failure that is close to the opposite of what we optimize for in e-learning.
I do not have a clean way to reconcile the two. I still believe in well-structured learning progressions, and I also know from direct experience that some of the most important shifts in my own understanding came after long stretches of feeling completely stuck.
Is it knowing about something, or realizing it?
Contemporary koan practice treats intellectual analysis as useful but not the goal. Students learn to show their understanding through presence and spontaneous response rather than explanation, to carry insights into daily life and sitting practice, and to notice the difference between knowing about something and actually realizing it. Some of that kind of knowledge has to be lived into, and it does not travel well as content.
That distinction bothers me a bit in my design work. Most of what I build is informational by necessity, in that I am helping people pick up knowledge and skills they can use in their roles. That work is valuable, and I do not want to shrink it. Koan practice has made me more aware, though, of the moments when I am designing for information transfer and quietly hoping it produces transformation. Those are different things, and I should be honest about which one I am actually doing.
Where does community come in?
One thing that surprised me about koan work is how much the private practice depends on a wider community. The breakthroughs happen in dokusan, but they are held up by group sitting, shared meals, and the simple presence of other people doing the same difficult work. The learning moments are private, and they still rely on everyone around them.
This one carries over more easily to my professional world. I have watched online courses come alive when learners feel connected to others doing similar work, even in a self-paced course. Community sets up the conditions for learning to happen, and on that point both traditions seem to agree.
Where does that leave me?
Koan practice has taught me that some of the most valuable learning, the kind that changes how you see and respond to the world, cannot be packaged into modules or delivered as content. It shows up through sustained engagement, personal relationship, and a willingness to not know.
That does not make e-learning inadequate, but it does mean I need to be more honest about what it can and cannot do. Some learning goals benefit a great deal from efficient digital delivery, and others need something slower, more relational, and harder to measure. The challenge I keep coming back to is telling which is which and designing for it, rather than defaulting to the approach I know best.
I do not have that figured out yet. What I have is the tension itself, and a growing suspicion that sitting with it honestly is more useful than resolving it too early.
If any of this lines up with your own experience, whether you come at it from a contemplative practice, a design background, or somewhere else entirely, I would like to hear from you. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com.
