[FKPXLS] SPECIAL VOLUME: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

EdTech platforms eventually need to accommodate the skill-training demand of the market as the largest revenue drivers are corporate training and credentialing.

The learning experience needs to be as engaging as a Youtube video or a video game. Quizlet, Duolingo, and Codecademy make learning feel just like that. Yet that alone isn’t enough. No matter how fun the game gets, learning, by the end of the day, is about applying the skills to contribute to our community. Can you confidently build a secure, funct... See more

The thought is no longer “I will go to Coursera to learn how to do this”, but rather “I’ll do it and see how it goes.” This approach is the founding principle of hackers — intentional Googling and faithful reliance on crowd-sourced wisdom. A combination of Docs reading, repo forking, Figma board replicating, CodePen project remixing, and business c... See more

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

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.