The state of online learning:

1) YouTube will eat the low-end of the market.

2) People will pay 5-15x more for live courses.

3) The three biggest competitive advantages are the personality of a creator, the warmth of the community, and the quality of the student experience.
4) Most of the big companies have been designed for pre-recorded courses. The market is ready for a platform focused on live courses.

5) Course creators should take guidance from fitness communities like SoulCycle, ToughMudder, and CrossFit.
6) The pedagogy of traditional education is unhelpful for online learning.

7) People don't pay for information. They pay for outcomes.

8) Low-end courses improve their offer by adding features. High-end instructors improve it by taking them away. Elegance wins at the high end.
9) Until now, homeschooling has been prohibitively expensive. But by lowering the costs of it, companies like @withprimer will expand the market.

10) The education industry is limited by the idea that learning and fun are inversely correlated.

11) Lack of community is the biggest reason why homeschooling isn't more common.

12) Just as remote work shows us how much time we waste at the office, homeschooling will show parents how much time kids waste at school.
13) MBA programs have a scarier future than undergraduate ones.

14) The President of every struggling liberal arts school should focus on increasing enrollment.

15) Small liberal arts schools compete with state schools, not each other.

16) Curriculum is destined to become a commodity.

17) Teachers should study entertainers.

18) School teachers will struggle to build online schools because they'll obsess over the curriculum and under-rating the importance of marketing and business.

19) You can’t sell a $1,500+ course without a strong word-of-mouth component.

20) Time zones plague every live course creator. The inability for all students to be together at once lowers their market size.

21) Somebody will make a fortune building a “Zoom for education.”
22) History will remember Y-Combinator as the most innovative school in the world today.

23) Colleges will survive by doubling down on the college experience and partnering with yet-to-be-built, white labeled online education platforms.
24) Over time, economic power will shift from the colleges to the education platforms. At that point, they’ll build their own brands and launch their own universities — similar to how Netflix now has a global brand, produces its own movies, and owns the customer relationship.
25) The ideal course completion rate isn’t 100%. If it’s that high, the course is too easy.

26) For every emerging software platform, there’s a course to be built for general onboarding or advanced user tutorials, but the majority of these courses will be obsolete in 3-5 years.
27) The loose labor market inflates demand for courses that explicitly help people get jobs.

28) Courses will partner with companies. Courses benefit from the prestige, companies benefit from reduced onboarding and recruiting costs. High unemployment accelerates this process.
29) Instructors are experts in changing student identity at scale.

30) You can't think clearly about childhood education until you separate the daycare benefits for parents from the education one for kids.

31) If nothing else, homeschooling can improve student outcomes because kids don't have to wake up so early.

32) Culturally, we should be studying the "Middle School Engagement Drop." In 5th grade, 74% of students are engaged. But by 9th grade, that number falls to 40%. Why?
33) Like Silicon Valley startups, online courses need a "technical co-founder" to run technical integrations.

34) Most online courses are B2C, but the B2B market will explode once social norms change. Right now, people don't take courses at work.

35) Low-end online courses sell convenience. High-end ones stand in opposition to it because hard things are never easy.

36) High-end courses are $2,000+ in part because of affiliate links. At that price point, the affiliate makes $1,000 per purchase, which is easy profit.
37) Online course businesses are hard to sell because of key-man risk with the instructor.

38) Because the courses are hard to sell, creators talk more about cash than equity.

39) Every course walks the spectrum between a performance marketing focus and a brand marketing one.
40) Instructor key-man risk doubles as a moat. People can copy your curriculum and your marketing strategy, but they can never copy your personality.

41) Online course instructors climb a ladder of three marketing channels: from social media, to an email list, to a book.

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More from @david_perell

Feb 17
Imitate, then Innovate is my motto for improving at any skill.

Thread:
It’s counterintuitive, but the more we imitate others, the faster we can discover our unique style.

Modern creators do the opposite though.

They stubbornly insist on originality, which they hold as their highest virtue — even when it comes at the expense of quality.
What does productive imitation look like?

Look at Quentin Tarantino. When people think of him, they see a singular talent for making original movies.

But he's famous for building upon scenes from other movies, and once said: “I steal from every single movie ever made.”
Read 16 tweets
Feb 16
Here's what the future of education looks like:

1. Teaching will become an extremely lucrative profession. Salaries will follow a power law. The best teachers will make millions of dollars per year and teach thousands of students every year. In fact, this is already happening.
2. Mass market courses will have Hollywood-level production budgets.

People who teach mass-market subjects like statistics and economics will attract millions of students. Teaching at scale will give them the financial resources to invest in high-end graphics and production.
3. Classes will be big and small.

The education industry is obsessed with the "average class size metric." People think that smaller is always better. Not true. You want scale when you're delivering lectures so you can invest in production. At other times, you want small groups.
Read 11 tweets
Feb 2
My favorite business frameworks:
Strong Culture, Fewer Rules

When a culture is tight-knit, people don't need to be told what to do explicitly. They just copy what everybody else does, which allows them to be entrepreneurial.

But weak cultures need many precise rules to keep people in check.

(Source: Airbnb)
Christensen's Disruptive Innovation Framework

Innovators win market share when they serve a segment of the market that is over-served by incumbents.

Startups offer the exact level of product or service they need and use this wedge to expand market share.

(Source: @SahilBloom)
Read 14 tweets
Jan 30
Why you should write in public:
1. Attract friends and business partners.

It's hard to meet people as passionate about learning as you are.

But when you publish your ideas, you attract people who think like you.

The more niche the topic, the easier it is to attract people on your intellectual wavelength.
2. Writing helps you understand yourself.

All of us have unprocessed feelings and emotions. Writing is the best way to identify what's making you uncomfortable. By writing, you gain clarity in your life.

The increased clarity you receive reduces stress and anxiety in your life.
Read 12 tweets
Jan 18
If you're feeling stuck in your professional life, start writing online.

Here's how it can accelerate your career:
1. Building a Network:

Writing shrinks the world.

Historically, if you wanted to break into an industry, you had to move to its hub. Not anymore. By writing online, you can build a network from your couch.

Meet people online. Then travel to build relationships in person.
2. Building Expertise:

Quality writing begins with clear thinking.

Once you write about a topic, you can speak about it more clearly, which will help you crush job interviews and establish yourself as an authority.

Learn about topics that interest you and share what you learn.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 10
The Inversion of Censorship:
The 20th century had two iconic dystopian novelists: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

Everybody knows Orwell's book: 1984. He outlined a dystopian future where censorship comes from banned books and ideas. Without access to truth, people would be passive and easily manipulated.
Orwell's vision became the standard.

Growing up, my book fairs had a "banned books" section. We were rightly encouraged to read them and explore suppressed ideas.

The lesson: In a world of information scarcity, banning information is the most effective form of thought control.
Read 15 tweets

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