What a Youtuber's scandal reveals about the Future of Learning 📺 Transcend Newsletter XIV
Siraj Raval's fall from grace and what it means for learning communities
Morning!
We are switching things up this week - while we usually analyze specific sectors, an event that took place this week prompted lots of thoughts around the future of learning that were fascinating to break down. Hope you enjoy reading!
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tl;dr: content creators can build massive audiences at a pretty low cost, they should have the power to build powerful learning experiences based on their communities - let’s build more tools for these creators to avoid stuff like this.
1) What happened this week?
Siraj Raval is the popular creator of School of AI, a channel explaining complex topics around Artificial Intelligence to a general audience: the channel creates entertaining videos that reach almost 700,000 subscribers around the world.
This summer, Siraj announced an exciting project: an online Machine Learning course he’d open up to just 500 students. The applications for the course exploded, receiving thousands of applications to join the course and benefit from the numerous promises made to enrolled students, including exclusive content and livestreams with Siraj, weekly support and personalized feedback, a certificate, and connections to employers and founders. All this for $199 and a 10-hour-per-week commitment.
Too good to be true?
Well, it didn’t take too long to find out. Students were quick to complain about overcapacity (two separated hidden Slack groups were created to take on +1200 students), plagiarized research and content, and the lack of refund policy, and quickly took to Twitter to air their concerns with the course and Siraj’s approach. Not great PR.
2) Why should we care?
You may reasonably ask, what can we make of all this? A lot, actually: the failed promises of this viral online phenomenon point to a few important trends and opportunities for the future. Let’s break it down.
The main promises made to students were a) exclusive content, b) personalized instruction from Siraj, and c) access to employer opportunities. What went wrong?
A) Content - while Siraj created some of his own content, he took a lot from others’ online work. And that’s fine! Most courses utilize existing online content, but “exclusive” content is hard to scale. His videos, though, are what spread the word of the course and built the huge audience it has, so that’s clearly a differentiator with other learning institutions.
B) Instruction - this is another aspect where he underestimated the workload it takes to build this course. While he seems to have followed up doing his live streams, his real-time presence can only be stretched to a certain point. Instruction should be on others to do!
C) Employers - while the course is not over yet, it seems unlikely that through his personal connections he’ll be able to place in jobs or even connect the students with employers. It also remains unclear whether a graduate from this course could certify a sufficient level of skill to join an ML team at a technology company!
A part of these failures are on the course design, but I believe many of these could be resolved by having better tools for creators available to people like Siraj, who tried to do too much on his own and without relevant tools to build learning experiences.
3) Lessons for the future of learning
The incredible amount of attention and interest this course got makes me think that there’s an opportunity to improve how these 3 core offerings are delivered through better tools
My main question here is: what could the online courses of the future, led by content creators like Siraj, look like in a few years? Let’s get creative:
Capture the audience as a content creator - there are thousands of creators out there with massive followings that are starting to educate their audience on their crafts. Take The Futur as a perfect example - going from excellent client work to excellent educational resources for their audience
Build the course content - many highly successful programs are using content that’s widely available online, and can use some additional content through contractor services and micropayments, which is not systematized yet.
Instruction - facilitation and instruction are key to course success, and new platforms like The Forum are looking to scale the instructor’s capabilities to teach.
Community - we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to community tools: right now, Slack/Telegram/Whatsapp do the job but only focus on messaging rather than enabling deeper connections and community-enabled learning (watch out for Speckbit)
Employers: right now, employer access is proprietary, but there’s no reason why that should change and become a much more data-driven solution, matching the students to employers based on their progress and the type of course. An “employer API” of sorts.
Overall, I believe that we’ll see great content and learning experiences if we empower content creators to build rich educational experiences, and to do so we need to give them tools to scale their work! More examples of these tools below.
4) Projects in the space
🤝Creating courses and monetizing content
💻Creator tools + building audiences
Patreon, Substack, Anchor
👋Community learning
👪Successful community businesses
What do you think? We’d love to get your thoughts, please leave a comment at the bottom of the newsletter!
☀️Sunlight just launched The Sunlight 30, a list of 30 playlists curated by sector leaders across all functions, allowing startups to plug their teams into a ready-made learning and development plan.
🎧Junto is creating immersive audio courses to help you become a better leader, manager, and teammate. We are very excited to see this project grow and think you’ll love it too - use the invite code “TRANSCEND_OCT_2019” to sign up for early access on the website and access a course for free!
📝Bloomberg Beta just announced a third fund to continue investing in the future of work, and also published some of the lessons learned they have learned through the years.
🎓Underemployment among college graduates is a rising issue in countries like the US, where a university has been perceived as a vehicle for economic mobility. This report shows that 40% of US recent graduates experience it.
Psst psst, last week we launched our Job Board, where you can find the best opportunities in our network. If you are looking to hire or get hired, fill out this form.
Jake Schaeffer: “I'm a recent C.S. and Business grad from Minerva Schools, based in San Francisco, and looking to join a startup in the media technology space! Hit me up if you want to talk about product management, music tech, vocational training, or are just looking to upgrade your productivity app game (see: Notion).”
All the updated job opportunities can be found on our new Job Board!
DoSomething.org - Business Development Associate
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Graide Network - Marketing Manager
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Alberto(alberto@transcend-network.com) & Michael (michael@transcend-network.com)