We don't usually spotlight a member we can't name, but this week's story belongs to enough of our members at once that naming one would undersell it. So: a composite, drawn from several calls and a few enrollment questions that landed in our inbox this month.
She's an apprentice at a small creamery, two years into the trade, working toward a cheese foundations credential one course at a time. Her in-person workshop — a hands-on session on rind development, the kind where an instructor walks the room and puts a hand on your cheese to show you what "tacky" actually feels like — was canceled with four days' notice. Her employer's cave is short-staffed this month because two part-time counter staff can't come in, so she's covering both jobs. And yet she finished the module anyway, on a laptop at the kitchen table, because the course had a remote option and she used it.
What moved, and what didn't
The rind-development workshop itself didn't move online — some things genuinely need a hand on the cheese, and we're not going to pretend a video call replaces that. What moved was the written and video coursework that normally supplements the in-person day: the chemistry behind what she was supposed to feel in the room, the troubleshooting decision trees for a tacky or slimy rind, the quiz that checks whether the concept actually landed. She'll take the hands-on half of the course later this year, once workshops resume, but she isn't waiting on it to keep moving.
That's the pattern we're hearing about more broadly this month: course enrollment is up sharply across several of our programs, particularly in the written and recorded coursework that doesn't require a room. Foundational modules — starter cultures, pH and moisture record-keeping, make-sheet fundamentals — travel well to a screen. The washing schedule for a washed-rind wheel travels less well; you still need someone to show you the smell you're checking for.
The part worth naming
What struck us about this particular story wasn't the coursework at all. It was that she kept a paper log of every batch she made that month, by hand, in a notebook, alongside the digital module — because she wasn't sure her home internet would hold up for a video call and she wasn't going to let a bad connection cost her the record. That's not a heroic gesture. It's the kind of quiet redundancy that keeps a small operation running when nothing else about the month is going according to plan.
If you're an apprentice or a mentor navigating a canceled workshop right now, the coursework catalog has more remote-friendly modules than it did even a few weeks ago, and we're adding capacity as demand grows. Talk to the Education Committee if a course you were counting on this spring got pulled — in several cases we've been able to move a seat to a later cohort without penalty.
We're also hearing that some members are trying to take a remote module on a phone because a household laptop is now shared among three people working or schooling from home at once. We can't fix a bandwidth problem, but we can make the coursework itself lighter to load and easier to pick up in short sessions between other obligations, and we're prioritizing that this month over adding brand-new course titles. If a module isn't working for you on the connection or device you actually have, tell the Education Committee specifically what broke — a video that won't buffer, a quiz that times out, a PDF too large to open on a phone. Those are fixable problems, but only if we hear about the actual failure rather than a general sense that "the online version isn't the same." It rarely is the same as the room. Our job this month is making sure it's still useful anyway.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.