In Online Ed, Content Is No Longer King—Cohorts Are

But increasingly, creators with loyal followings are creating their own independent offerings—ranging from paid courses to niche communities to vertical social networks—with the basis of competition shifting to curated content and community, trust in a particular creator, and alignment to specific topics.

This recession will reinforce that individuals must take charge of their own careers and invest in their own upskilling. However, what remote learning has highlighted is that higher education is not about the content, it’s merely a proxy for trust and quality of network. As great content continues to be commoditized, we will see the emergence of in... 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

It’s relatively easy to make and distribute educational content. Even high-cost content isn’t hard to replicate; it’s just expensive. However, the scarcity in the education world isn’t the advice itself, but rather the credibility behind it: The credibility of being someone at the top of your field takes a lot of work. It’s hard — dare I say imposs... 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.

Phase 3: Education designed for the internet (e.g. MasterClass Codecademy). We are still early in this phase — actually designing classes for the web. When Phase 1 made information easily accessible, the role of education became not the transfer of facts (which many classes still rely on) — but to inspire you to go learn, to go do, to geek out. To ... See more

Online courses have become a crucial part of the creator, influencer, and thought leader economic ecosystem, especially as we know that creators are experiencing extremely high levels of burnout in their work. It’s hard to make a living from creator funds and tip jars. Online courses make it easy to monetize experience at scale. Again, a total win.