Tomorrow University is a German-accredited online university. Students learn in cohorts with classmates on different continents. The founders wanted Tomorrow to feel like a campus, not a Zoom call.
"We believe that education needs an upgrade. We wanted to develop a social learning experience online that felt similar to a campus. With traditional video conferencing and messaging, we felt it was too transactional; you click a button, and you're in a conversation; you click a button, and you're out. Learning is not just confined to the classroom. But in a physical campus, the magic happens when students meet before the class, mingle, meet friends, and ask whether they prepared for the class. After the class, some students stay, stick around, and ask the academic a question."
That social layer is what Tomorrow had to rebuild online.
Tomorrow's team built their campus inside Cosmos. Class sessions happen in one part of the space, office hours in another, team meetings in a third. The visual environment is customised to match Tomorrow's identity, so students walk into something that looks like their university, not a generic meeting room. It is one application of the broader pattern of building a Cosmos space for learners.
"What I love about Cosmos is that it's not just a grid of videos. With other video conferencing tools, it's just a window with videos of people. You lack context. What does the environment look like? What is the culture I am in? Tomorrow University is all about culture — we are about curiosity, courage, and community. And we want to express this culture. The Cosmos space gives us an environment, which is so important. This is actually what next-generation learning looks like."
Students started using Cosmos the way they would use a physical campus, without anyone needing to teach them. Proximity audio means who you can hear depends on where you are standing, the way it does in any real room. Beyond that, Christian noticed three things in particular about how to create workshops students enjoy in this kind of space.
"The first one was transactionality. It's not about getting in and getting out. In Cosmos, you can fly in; you see who is there. You can chat with people. We didn't expect the random connections. After class, students can stick around in small groups and chat with classmates, some you know and some you don't."
"In Cosmos, conversations in a group are just so much better because students have possibilities. For example, students can whisper with people beside them, like in real life. Academics have drop-in office hours. Students can see if the academic is free and line up to talk to them. If it's really urgent, they can jump into the room if it's not locked and interrupt, like in a real university, where you just open the door. Sometimes, if it's locked, they can knock. This is really great because it supports the flow of conversation."
"We can share emotions. In most video calls, after a great talk, the most awkward thing is that there's silence afterwards. In Cosmos, you have the opportunity to clap, and there's also the sound of clapping. This gives a sense of the audience's reaction, and it gets louder the more people clap. So it's really a way more satisfying experience as a speaker, an attendee, or a student."
Cosmos became infrastructure at Tomorrow rather than another tool on the stack. New cohorts onboard into the same space their predecessors used. Other teams building on Cosmos are running their own versions of this in design studios, accounting firms, and EdTech startups.
"Cosmos is now an essential tool. We use it for every course discussion, lecture, internal meeting, and event. The students love it because it's not just another transactional call going in and out. It's something where you see what's going on so they can approach people to talk. In a nutshell, it's important because the community is all about bringing people together."
"Cosmos is a leap forward when it comes to having conversations and making a university more social. Cosmos is the right place to build a university that is social, where learning is about learning from each other to solve the big challenges of the world."
Christian Rebernick
Founder and CEO - Tomorrow University
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