Welcome
The College of Exploration (TCOE) is a global learning network. Since 1991 we have designed, delivered and evaluated educational programs, workshops, courses and events for learners of all ages around the globe — with a particular emphasis on web-based learning for educators. Over 18,000 participants have joined our online campus over the years.
We are organized as a collegium, and we strive to foster relationship with and between our inner and outer worlds. Knowledge, for us, is not delivered; it is co-explored.
A frontier organisation, from the beginning
We have been at a frontier before. The pattern that guides us now is the one that has guided us since the start: respectful, challenging spaces for people to learn together.
When online learning was new
Founded in 1991 as a collegium of learners, the College of Exploration was among the very first to teach online — when most of the web was still brochures and the tools barely existed.
In spring 1998 we ran the El Niño Workshop entirely online over Caucus: scientists and educators in live working sessions on weather prediction, data visualisation, and the art and myths of storms — years before that was ordinary.
And now, learning with AI
Large language models are doing to learning what the web once did — unsettling it, expanding it, asking us to imagine it again. What does it mean to learn well when an intelligent partner is always in the conversation?
We believe AI is most powerful not as an oracle that hands down answers, but as a partner in genuine inquiry. The medium is new. The pattern — co-exploration — is not.
Come and co-explore the new learning ground
We are building a next-generation learning system on three decades of practice and the lineage of online conversation that runs from Confer in 1975 through Caucus to Confabula today — now graph-native, AI-aware, and grounded in Pask's Conversation Theory.
It is early. The territory is unmapped. That is exactly why it is worth exploring together — and why we are opening it as an invitation rather than a product.
What we co-explore
Over thirty years our co-explorations have ranged across the planet's systems and the ways we come to understand them — and now, the tools of understanding themselves.
- Ocean & Earth — ocean science and ocean literacy, earth science, the systems of a living planet, with NOAA, National Geographic, NSF and partners worldwide.
- Literacies — a quarter-century helping shape the literacy frameworks: ocean, earth, systems, climate, atmosphere, energy. See the timeline
- Systems & Cybernetics — holistic approaches to complex problems: Ashby, Pask, Beer. Explore
- AI & Learning — how we learn, think and build alongside large language models — co-explored, not outsourced.
- Evaluation & Research — three decades of evaluation leadership supporting national-level learning projects.
- Governance & Facilitation — designing and facilitating custom online and in-person processes, from strategic planning to large-scale decision making.
Fifty years of conversation at the centre
The interaction model that worked in 1975 still works today — renewed for modern, AI-aware infrastructure.