Cats, musicians & bookcases. And what traditional colleges can learn from them.
A sucker for punishment
I met 1,428 new people in July of 2020. Cumulatively, they were my new classmates over four fascinating online courses that I had over-ambitiously enrolled for. All at the same time.
Foolhardy? Perhaps.
Over-ambitious? For sure.
In my defense, there were real connective tissues between the four. That, coupled with the fact that they are not offered all year round made me sign up.
The first course was Scribe Book School, an online book writing course for aspiring writers of non-fiction. Upon embarking on it, I realized that my writing could benefit from a fresh coat of paint. And that I had various medium (pun intended) form articles in my head.
Searching for the plumbing to give vent to this led me to David Perell’s Write of Passage course. This was the best online course experience I’ve ever had to date, thanks in particular to the quality of students and twenty-five-year-old Perell and co’s body of admirable work and their virtual-red-bull-injecting personalities.
The third happened because I expected to do interviews for my non-fiction book. Interviews naturally lend themselves to podcasts.
Google: Podcasting courses
And the fourth? Well, midway through writing my book, for reasons detailed here, I decided to write it in the format of a fable instead of the traditional ‘knowledge share’ format.
Google: Storytelling courses
I found the podcasting and storytelling courses at Akimbo, Seth Godin’s online school. Between the lovely name “Akimbo” and my age-old adulation of all things Seth, I was sold. Both courses happened to be in July too. So, there. Four courses signed up and paid for. Ah, the beauty of plastic money.
Besides the wisdom from the courses themselves, I got a free masterclass I hadn’t expected or enrolled in- on the business of online education.
Many of the classes, especially Perell’s Write of Passage, encouraged active interaction between students. Mostly over Zoom breakout rooms. Cats, musical instruments and bookcases were the preferred backgrounds of my classmates’ webcams. It reminded me of another world - of Narnia’s lion, witch and wardrobe!
Between the four courses, I learned a lot about the self-education market. The industry is currently estimated at $355 million a day. A day! Forbes expects this to grow to $1 billion a day by 2025. Equally interesting and growing is the industry supporting this.
Tools, Jeans & Services
The California Gold Rush of 1848 saw 300,000 people come to California to try their luck in making their fortunes. A few certainly did. Samuel Branan, the first millionaire from the gold rush, for one. He simply sold miners picks, shovels, and pans. Then, there’s Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis. Like Branan, they were not miners. They made the work pants we now call “jeans”. Add to the list all the folks who made micro-fortunes selling food, groceries, and haircuts to the miners.
I got a glimpse into the folks selling the shovels and pick-axes in this new gold rush of online self-education. Like the tools, jeans, and services during the California Gold Rush, there are three categories here as well. It’s actually useful to think of them in the same way - as tools, jeans, and services.
1. Tools
Tech companies like Teachable, Kajabi, and Buddy Boss help deliver online education at scale. And Slack, Microsoft Teams, Circle, and Discourse infuse connective glue and interaction between students. How do you get those students? Clickfunnels, Webinarjam, and Leadpages can help convert traffic. Then, of course, there’s Zoom, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, and Webex for facilitating digital face to digital face interaction. For each name mentioned here, there are at least ten others in the same space competing for market share. The markets are HUGE and will become bigger by orders of magnitude. Hence, minuscule percentage gains translate to gargantuan dollar values!
But what do you teach?
2. Jeans
Jeans are an apt metaphor for your unique style aka YOUR educational content. YKS. That’s short for You Know Stuff. At least, that’s what Tony Robbins, Danielle Leslie, and Jeff Walker would have you believe. In a fascination for three-letter acronyms for their meta-courses on creating courses, they respectively offer KBB, CFS, and PLF. That’s short for Knowledge Broker Blueprint, Course From Scratch, and Product Launch Formula. All of these are multi-week programs that help you transform your unique knowledge and body of work into an online education experience. All towards carving your niche and claiming your share of the riches in the $365 billion industry expected in 2025.
3. Services
Full-service stacks, interestingly, were the first beacons of this new gold rush. These are platforms that offer the tech and the courses - and can also get the students for you. The leading ones are Udemy, Coursera, Skillshare, Udacity, and Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning). Their model is predicated on controlling the distribution, aka the students.
Photo by Darya Tryfanava on Unsplash
Along came a virus!
This burgeoning industry of online small and medium businesses (and large ones like Udemy) is typically scoffed at by the traditional education institutions. Read, colleges. But the numbers told otherwise. Online education has been booming and will continue to do so as people focus on upskilling over degrees and letters.
The Coronavirus imparted a new veneer of respectability to online education. Forced to eat their words from days before, all traditional colleges hastily went online. Architecture, Art, Medicine, Law - all those disciplines that could ostensibly never go online - went online. The fear of loss of lucrative tuition dollars is a powerful catalyst. This hurried transition by the colleges simply lent credibility to the existing online education market - a market that was light years ahead of the colleges on online student engagement and knowledge delivery technologies.
To the colleges, going online typically meant drones! This was, sadly and often, an anachronistic professor droning on over a pre-recorded video - to simultaneously accommodate his fear of being live and students across time-zones. The student at the other end of a broadband connection could, in his pajamas, easily afford to be totally disengaged. Playing a video game, perhaps, while leaving the TV on. And still, get an A+.
Adding fuel to the traditional colleges’ fire are folks like Scott Galloway, who ironically, among many other things, is also a professor at NYU. Galloway predicts that a large number of colleges will be dead on arrival on the other side of a vaccine. And David Perell encourages students to take a gap semester and simply not go to college this fall. He makes a very compelling argument with advice on how students can use the opportunity to embrace a maker mentality, and learn practical, monetizable skills.
Lighthouses
It would be wrong, however, to paint all traditional colleges with the same brush. As with any sea, there are lighthouses on the shore, shining a leading light. One such light is from Harvard’s CS50. The New Yorker details the story of David Malan, the person behind this popular, engaging, and entertaining course in this elaborately crafted piece, aptly titled “How Harvard’s Star Computer-Science Professor Built a Distance-Learning Empire”. Malan is a ‘traditionalist’ way ahead of his peers. An early recognizer of the need for education to entertain, young Malan would teach binary search algorithms by progressively tearing a gargantuan phone book on stage. His production values rival Netflix’s with multi-camera setups and a crew that is in the double digits. Currently, Malan is teaching teachers to adapt to the new world. And, thankfully so.
There are many things that traditional colleges can learn from the tools, jeans, and services of the online education market. And from how getting students to interact and see each others’ cats, musical instruments, and bookcases boosts class engagement and interest. I expect to synthesize this into a separate essay of its own but if I had to severely paraphrase, the lessons would simply be 3Es:
Educate - in new ways that allow students to tangibly see progress
Engage - and facilitate engagement
Encourage - student cross-pollination of ideas and efforts
Speaking of educative, engaging online courses that encourage cross-pollination of ideas…
My book writing course encourages students to post their word counts every day. And to get and give encouragement. I must admit I initially scoffed at the idea. Now, I’m hooked.
My podcasting and storytelling courses at Akimbo employ a mix of podcasts (of course), videos and coaches to move students to their next milestone. A well executed online platform and sporadic Google meets keep things human.
Speaking of keeping things human…
My classmates at my Write of Passage course, Joe, Gwyn, Jen and Tim gave me feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. It was originally fostered in zoom breakout rooms with Alex, Cynthia and Sherlyn. I have lawyers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bestselling authors, and programmers, among others, for classmates. This, to me, is the new face of education. One that is unshackled by age, race, location, class, career, and education. One that, instead, is united by purpose. United by a learnable skill. In this particular case, very simply, the purpose and skill of writing online.
