I was so excited for the calendar flip to 2026. 2025 felt like a rough one for humans in general. And now it’s February, and my enthusiasm for 2026 has already taken some serious hits. Is it too early to get excited for 2027?
Probably.
But while I am, generally, unenthused about the broader state of the world, I am still excited, every day, that we get to work with educators and learners. The best kinds of people.
Working on education is almost impossibly hard – there have been billions, maybe even trillions, of words written about how education sits in the middle of your living room floor like a grumpy rhino and snorts, dismissively, when you suggest they might be more comfortable on the couch.
There’s that classic quote, unattributed, something along the lines of:
The hardest things in life are the ones worth doing
And, well, if that’s the case, making education just a teeny bit better is super, super, super worth doing :)
One reminder: Unrulr is a B Corporation, and our mission is
to encourage a diverse understanding of contributions, growth, and impact from both individuals and organizations.
Within those 85 communities, there is much, much overlap; many of the K12 organizations also run communities of practice, and non-profits work regularly with cohorts of educators. But if we had to choose a single category for each org, K12 would be > 80%.
Even K12 is an incredibly broad term. Within those K12 schools we see all kinds of programs. CTE, internships, capstones, music, art, homeschool, and J-terms are all in there. And we get to work with urban schools, rural schools, programs that focus on indigenous communities, and programs that stretch across multiple states. The variety is fascinating. And it puts us squarely in the big-bucket philosophy of education. While we firmly believe in the science behind learning, we also believe there are many, many different and effective ways to apply that science, and it’s fun to see how different approaches reflect the community where the learning is happening.
Before I ran these numbers, I’d have said we don’t really have a geographic nexus (or geographic nexuses – nexii?). But, I mean, that’s a lot of California and Hawaiʻi schools. My two favorite states (j/k, Colorado and Alaska I see you!).
Hawaiʻi makes sense. That’s where Unrulr was birthed, and where our entire team originally connected. And California is a giant state – lots and lots of schools. Idk that we have a specific nexus within California? We have some schools in the Bay Area, some in Fresno, some in LA, a couple north of LA – pretty scattered all over really.
Practically, we haven’t found geographic proximity to be a driver of adoption. We have generally followed, and will continue to follow, the network of schools doing really cool things. When we find one school, they tend to know a couple more. Sometimes those references reach across the continent. Sometimes they drop us into states we’ve never even visited. Sometimes they drop us in a different hemisphere.
International schools face some different base challenges than the US ecosystem (along with many similar ones) . Some cool spots here, and hopefully we can add more color to this map soon.
Journeys can’t exist without moments (for those unfamiliar: journeys are posts which talk about a collective group of moments). And while learning moments are constantly (hopefully!) happening throughout the school year, journeys tend to come together at natural breaks in the learning cycle: the completion of a project, the end of a semester – whenever it’s time to pause and look back.
While there are naturally far fewer journeys than moments (~ a 25:1 ratio), those 5.5k journeys actually connected over 33k moments. So almost 1 in 4 moments are referenced in a journey. That’s great! Journeys are a sign that:
When we first started Unrulr ages ago, the utopian vision was that learners would be so, so excited to share their learning and their story that communities would be flooded with amazing posts. And while we still think that an achievable goal, practically we’ve seen and learned a few things:
In 2025 ~ 63% of posts were responses to a prompt, up from ~ 55% in 2024. Is the change a significant trend? Maybe? It’ll be interesting to monitor as we continue to grow.
If a picture is worth 1000 words, then we had 132M words-worth-of-pictures in 2025. Which is more than the 7.2M actual words we had. And who knows how many words a video is worth?
The media mix remained largely the same between 2024 and 2025. We saw a slight drop in video usage (15-11%) and a slight increase in the other mediums. This could be driven by the shift away from mobile usage; more and more schools restrict personal devices on campus, and it’s pretty awkward to take a video on a laptop, unless you’re just recording yourself. We’ll have to see if the trend continues.
Posting frequency very closely follows the flow of the (northern hemisphere) school year: A ramp up in August/September when school starts, and a cliff in May/June when school breaks for the summer.
One of our goals is to better understand that ~20% gradual drop off over the course of the year. The drop off isn’t particularly surprising – that trajectory is common with many school initiatives. But we do hope that some of that trend reverses as we roll out portfolios. When a learner has a portfolio as a clear end goal, the documentation and reflection process will hopefully even gain momentum as the year progresses.
Also, growth! Those numbers are going up every year. We’ve seen a pretty consistent 50% increase in usage.
Every post in Unrulr is tagged with at least one COG (here’s a brief overview, if you’re unfamiliar). COGS are how we blend the qualitative and quantitative, and how we get learners doing a little metacognition while they are documenting.
And our orgs have embraced COGS. Nearly 90% of COGS tagged in Unrulr come from custom sets – sets which reflect the specific Concepts, Outcomes, Goals and Skills important to our partners. Many of the conversations we have with our partners revolve around the theme: “this is the best way we’re able to gather information about [the themes around COGS]”.
We know Unrulr still has rough edges, but that’s our goal: to make possible what wasn’t previously possible, and to blend story and data. Feedback from our partners is what keeps us excited to continue pushing forward.
We’ve got a list here. The biggest 3 are likely:
There’s probably a blog post worth writing for each of those. And we still owe a writeup of portfolios! But I think we have to cut this here – it’s already February and this post has been slowly building for two weeks.
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