Entertainment as Education: Bradley Morris on Themeification and Creative Course Design

Bradley's journey into online courses started with a crisis. After teaching about 500 meditation workshops and retreats between 2009 and 2012, he burned out. "I got burnt out from teaching too much meditation," he explains. That exhaustion drove him to build a meditation library online, which became his gateway to digital education. Together with his team at Majik Media, he started questioning how to build "the ultimate learning experience for students." The answer came from looking at how people actually consume media online: entertaining videos, music, podcasts, and social conversations. "We wanted to redesign the online education experience," Bradley says. "One of our claims to fame is using entertainment as the vehicle to teach and transform." His three-pillar framework organizes course design around curriculum (the information), experience (how it's delivered), and community (the accountability and connection that keeps people moving).

Bradley coined the term "themeification" to describe his signature design approach: giving a course a theme that turns it into a world where the student becomes a character. In his course-building program, participants are adventurers on a journey to the top of a mountain, in an "Indiana Jones meets Saturday Night Live" style. In Green Screen Magic, students are magician's apprentices learning to perform illusions. He acknowledges this approach is not for every course but argues it applies more broadly than most people assume. Even workplace safety training could be reimagined as a spoof or parody that teaches through humor. The key is identifying the "personality" of the course. "The problem with the majority of online education content out there is that it lacks personality," he observes. For course creators who are not naturally creative, Bradley suggests finding a collaborator: a designer, artist, or actor who can bring a different perspective. He has repeatedly used profit-sharing arrangements with artists who bring creative skills in exchange for a percentage of course revenue.

Bradley candidly shares the results of a six-month experiment where he dropped all course prices to zero. The outcomes were uniformly negative: completion rates went down because people were not financially invested, community engagement actually decreased despite the community growing ten times larger because "there was less safety, less intimacy, less accountability," and his paid mastermind did not fill up as expected. "It was a massive fail," he says bluntly. The experience led him to shift from $35/month to $99/month, and then to plan a further evolution: a $5,000/year program with four coaches, quarterly coaching, bi-weekly accountability check-ins, and an application process. His reasoning is grounded in the reality of building an online business: "It's like a university degree. If you're in year one, it's going to take you two, three, four years to really see traction." He wants participants who are "in it to win it."