Hamilton & Disney's Education Flywheel (Audio Edition)

Studios work by letting the creators create, the producers produce, and the distributors distribute. Online education today requires teachers to be their own producers, marketers, salespeople, and guides. On the back of Hamilton, Disney could identify the best US History teachers in the country, pair them with actors from the play, and work with th... See more

Online education 2.0 is about group courses, community, vocational training, and edutainment. A lot of smart people are experimenting with new approaches. Teachable is taking the Shopify approach of “arming the rebels” by enabling anyone to easily set up an online course. David Perell, Tiago Forte and Nat Eliason are building online-first schools f... See more

Online education faces the same challenges that content does more broadly. There’s just too much good content out there, and very few have been able to rise above the noise.

Similarly, everything that you would ever want to learn is available online, for free. The challenge is not producing good content, it is creating content so great that it stands out from the noise. To that end, Iger wrote:

Online education 1.0 featured MOOCs, which were akin to banner ads in the early days of the internet - a clumsy attempt to bring the offline paradigm online. 1.0 was the Wild West - fragmented, scam-ridden, noisy, and uncredentialed. A much-cited MIT study highlighted MOOCs’ abysmal 4% completion rate.

In an age when more and more “content” was being created and distributed, we needed to bet on the fact that quality will matter more and more.