About
At Tagoras (pronounced tah-GOR-us), we have more than 15 years of experience serving the global market for adult lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development. We consult with organizations in the learning business on how to maximize their reach, revenue, and impact, and we provide a range of educational content and experiences to support those who serve and are served by learning businesses.
Tagoras was launched in 2007 by Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele, veteran edupreneurs with deep roots in learning, technology, and the market for adult education. Over the years, the company has grown into a team with expertise in all major aspects of the learning business landscape. Through our consulting services as well as through our publishing channels we aim to be an indispensable source of knowledge, insight, and connection in the market for continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning.
Our name, Tagoras (pronounced tah-GOR-us), is a neologism that draws meaning from three sources.
Tag
Tags (< >) add descriptive metadata to online text, images, video, and other resources and are essential to the syntax and structure of the Web. Tags are about making sense of things. We are too, and our sense-making goal is reflected visually in the two connected tags that form the basis of our logo.
Agora
In ancient Greece, the agora was the public marketplace and the center of civic interaction. It was where citizens connected, transacted business, and learned. Today’s lifelong learning market is just as vital as the agora was.
Protagoras
Plato credits this ancient Greek philosopher with founding the Sophist movement. Unjustly maligned in subsequent centuries (especially by Plato himself), the Sophists were the first professional teachers, seeking truth through dialogue. We want to reclaim the tradition of teaching excellence that Protagoras started.
The Learning Business Landscape
Our work spans a landscape that includes learning businesses as well as the broader stakeholder groups they serve and rely upon.
Learning businesses are market-facing providers of learning. They create learning experiences and sell them to adult lifelong learners. They have to generate revenue, and most of them have to generate profit. So they are businesses and they are learning providers. The blend of those two roles makes them learning businesses.
Learning businesses are different from corporate learning and development and higher education degree programs. They operate within in a landscape that includes the trade and professional associations, academic continuing education units, and training firms that we serve through our consulting services and Leading Learning.
That landscape also includes individual subject matter experts and small expertise-based businesses we serve through Learning Revolution. These are people who have more options than ever to go out on their own to provide education and training to their audiences, but they often also work with learning businesses. Many learning businesses rely on subject matter experts to deliver conference sessions and online education, for example.
Finally, learning businesses and experts operate within and are participants in a broader landscape made up of the lifelong learners we serve through Mission to Learn. These are the individuals who are the followers and customers of learning businesses. Individuals who are continually trying to figure out what they need to know and how to keep their skills and knowledge up to date, looking at the wide – and often confusing – range of options now available to them, and trying to find ones that match what they need and want.
The reason we coined the term “learning business” is because there wasn’t a succinct term that encompassed all of these organizations and the audiences they serve, and yet we see commonalities, such as being market-facing and serving adult learners. In addition to be being useful for distinguishing these types of learning providers, the term also provides a sense of community and connection.
At Tagoras, our goal is to amplify each aspect of the learning business landscape, increase the impact of the work that learning businesses and experts do, and elevate the role of lifelong learning in society.
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