[FKPXLS] SPECIAL VOLUME: Embedded Education

EdTech companies in the past decade have delivered a 10x product experience to the consumers through innovating on three main pillars: content delivery, learning experience, and skills credentialing.

Learning no longer lives on an individual platform. Rather, learning happens everywhere. We’re entering a new age of “Embedded Education”.

These EdTech companies have also innovated on content supply by morphing the idea of an instructor, providing tools and platforms that allow both esteemed professors at an Ivy League or an otherwise unknown white-collar worker to reach millions of students, and providing them attractive economic incentives to do so.

By creating real platform-native encounters rather than broadcasting information, embedded education is a more effective way to change behaviors. By shortening the feedback loop from theory to practice, it engages people to more deeply internalize what they’ve just learned.

Despite the superior product experience and the explosive growth of market participants, the liberty of a curious learner extends only as far as the palms of the invisible hands of market demand. The opportunity cost of sitting through an 80-hour course load is the ability to spend it on hacking the game directly.

Being embedded doesn’t come without its shortcomings. My backend engineer friend shared his frustration with AWS as he’s convinced that Amazon intentionally keeps the UX extremely difficult to navigate, thereby intensifying the lock-in effect its certification program continues justify a cost of up to $300 and breed a class of consulting companies.... See more

After binge-watching the entire writing catalog of Masterclass in a few days, I’m not sure whether I’ve become a better writer, but I’ve sure become more eloquent talking about the “act of writing” when I attend my next book club.

If the purpose of education is to inspire courage to expand our collective understanding of the world, the vision of Embedded Education is that every time we see something that inspires us, the path to actualizing this new-found dream starts right where we find it.

Embedded education is the practice of educating people through encounters that they already have with systems that exist primarily for non-educational purposes.