Redefining Education in a Digital World

The world is changing, and we must change ahead of it

If you’re feeling generous, you could call this document a white paper written by an industry insider.

If you’re not, you could call it a social media rant by a low-level manager.

In one sense this is an internal document shared as a response to my team members of an important committee.

In another sense, it is a public worldwide manifesto written to every educator and student, instantly accessible from now until the end of human civilization.

The fact that I’m not an official mouthpiece to anything and yet you’re still able to access my thoughts is only a small part of how the world has changed. And it isn’t just opinions. High-quality instructional information is simultaneously more priceless than ever, and it is also infinitely abundant and free. That has big implications for education which we haven’t even begun to digest.

To stay relevant in the coming years, state colleges in particular but really all educational institutions generally will have to think differently. Radically differently. The hierarchical models and mindsets that have dominated academia since the medieval era are already starting to show signs of wear, but the revolution hasn’t even yet begun in earnest.

Physical malls and retail stores are closing as COVID-19 and the policies surrounding it have pushed consumers to become comfortable with eCommerce far sooner than anticipated.

If you think the trend towards eCom will reverse once Coronavirus has run its course, think again. The convenience of shopping from home combined with the price competition of being able to search the world for the lowest sale at the click of a button is irresistible for consumers once they’ve gotten a taste.

Similarly, the educational industry is no longer protected by regional barriers to entry. In a fully remote context, all of the same pressures faced by retailers of goods and services will now be faced by retailers of educational products and credentialing services. In a world where distance and seating capacity no longer matter, there are winner-take-all dynamics that will really begin to scale. The same network effects that make Google and Facebook extremely resistant to competitors, and the same economies of scale that caused first Walmart and then later Amazon to strangle smaller local competitors are going to begin to manifest fully in education, much as online blogs and video have already done to newspapers.

I remember the widespread fear as well as excitement (depending on which side one roots for) for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) when they first arrived in the late 2000s and early 2010s. This was followed by either relief or disappointment (again, depending on perspective) when disruption didn’t materialize. But as the Gartner Hype Cycle illustrates, that was always to be expected. We’ve reached the bottom of the “Trough of Disillusionment”. We are starting the ascent up the “Slope of Enlightenment”.

I expect that over the next 5–10 years, some platform — whether it is Coursera, or Udacity, or LinkedIn Learning, or maybe one of the others, is probably going to start to pulling ahead and buying out rival platforms to consolidate the space. But even if not, by 2025, the annual eLearning market will be approximately $325 billion.

But isn’t that good for colleges and universities who have eLearning departments?

Well, in my role I have the opportunity to speak candidly with students 1 on 1, and so I know that at our college there is a massive variance in the quality of online instruction. Some instructors have a “set it and forget it” approach to online “learning” where the student essentially has to teach themself on Pearson MyMathLab. There are no videos, there’s little discussion in the forums, and virtually no responsibility, effort, or attention needed on the part of the instructor. It’s free money for both the faculty cashing in, and the institution which collects tuition without offering a quality of service that would justify the cost to the student. On the other end of the spectrum, there are dedicated instructors who put their all into each lesson and are beloved by their students even in the online format (thankfully at our institution the ratio still skews in favor of excellence, for now).

Similarly, and related to that, there are faculty who are having students buy $200 and $300 textbooks that they rarely if ever use, but there are also faculty who have updated their courses to opensource textbooks and other materials that cost students absolutely nothing.

In other words, there is a very broad range of both costs borne by students as well as in the quality of instruction among college faculty.

Now with regard to that $325 billion per year that’s up for grabs by 2025, be honest in asking yourself about who that money is going to go to. Mainly brick and mortar regional institutions, which have hit or miss instructors and only a few dozen eLearning staff? Or behemoths who rake in $5 billion annually with an army of highly trained personnel, that reinvest the proceeds into improving their platforms year-over-year, and specialize purely in online education?

Who’s going to own this space?

We are, dear reader.

I’ve written this post to tell you how.

Who Are “We”?

But the first thing that we’re going to have to do is redefine what is meant by “we”.

There’s been a lot of that redefinition going on already. For me, “we” used to include about 40 temporary part-time staff (called “OPS professionals”). These are people I worked with for years, saw every day, shared a mission and countless birthday cakes with, and thought of almost as extended family. They were Jim’s, Phyllis’s, and Dwight’s to my Michael Scott. But although my own 9,986,000 minutes are coming up, rest assured there won’t be any songs for me. Of my staff of 40, only 9 remain on the payroll.

This has been difficult for me to process, as I’ve had to really come to terms with the fact that this isn’t going to be some temporary inconvenience. No, this is a meteor slamming into my nice, comfortable little Jurassic life and changing everything.

“We” in the coming educational market looks less like The Office which overlooks the incompetence of the Kevins or Creeds, and it looks more like a squad of ride-or-die survivors on the Walking Dead.

There are in this moment still instructors who were teaching with transparencies before COVID, and now that it has struck they can’t even manage to send me a link to visit their classes and invite their students for free tutoring. It isn’t that they don’t want to. They can’t figure out how to. This is after having been remote for six months.

I don’t mind offending people who are stuck in that past for two reasons. 1) they wouldn’t bother to read what I’m writing here anyway. The people I’m frustrated with would never have even bothered to click this link. Merely by virtue of your interest in taking the time to delve this deep you are in the “We” that I’m talking about, and 2) there’s no room in my tribe for prideful egos that can’t acknowledge the need for change and take action. Thre’s no room for timidity. No room for weakness. No room for complacency. No room for excuses.

It isn’t that I don’t like people who won’t adapt. It’s much worse than that because I can and have productively teamed up with people I don’t like. Rather, it’s that I don’t need them.

And so we come to it. You can define “We” in this new context the people who serve a valuable function and who adapt to changing circumstances. Often, these will be creators who make their own courses that solve a real problem, which is very different from pampered senior professors who have been indulged to teach their preferred topic year after year regardless of whether students sign up.

As the mom & pop stores learned from Walmart, in the ruthless logic of the marketplace, whatever doesn’t have greater utility than the available alternative is discarded. Capitalism is simply the calculus of evolution incorporated into human activity. The same rules apply. It is not the strongest of the species which survives, but the one most adaptive to change.

So be needed, or you lose. There are no cushy jobs anymore. There’s nowhere to hide, not behind other people’s work, not behind reputational pedigree, not behind the size of an organization. Throw away the transparencies and instead spend time watching enough YouTube tutorials to stay current. Otherwise, you won’t keep up. You won’t manage to stay part of the “Us” who survives this transformation.

That’s probably a tough pill to swallow for educators that feel safe because of things like tenure and customary norms wherein no one gets fired.

Here’s a fact of nature that many of us in the educational field have too long been sheltered from: our relationship as a worker to an employer is only ever transactional. Don’t fool yourself into believing that assurances like labor laws or tenure or cultural norms can ever make it more than that. These things are like sand castles which only give an illusion of security, but they’ll wash away quickly when the tide changes.

You are essentially providing your employer with a subscription to your services, and it will be cut the moment that it makes economic sense for them. Students, similarly, are subscribing to college education That’s all there is to it.

Again, I know that sounds harsh, and it isn’t that companies are bad or mean. It’s nothing personal. This is simply how the companies that survive will play it.

By contrast, the universities, colleges, and companies that aren’t so ruthless, the ones that don’t cut the fat, the ones that sentimentally hang on to ineffective, unadaptive, low-quality workers — those companies will falter and disappear entirely.

Either way, you only have “job security” to the extent that you have the skills, network, savings, and psychological flexibility to immediately get another job at any time that it becomes necessary. As a worker, you can never sit back, relax, and take it easy in the new economy. That just doesn’t exist unless you have ownership of assets.

The name of the game is to leverage your knowledge into transitioning from being strictly a worker collecting a wage to being an owner of your own work and content, which is desirable to the tribe that you yourself have built.

Become A Mentor

What’s the best way to both be needed and learn things at a high level, find out what the market craves, and built a market that you can fulfill?

Mentor others.

Make no mistake, we are all influencers building our own tribes now. As the saying goes, “lead, follow, or get out of the way.” In the new model, we are always both students and teachers simultaneously. I may know algebra and calculus, but my students know how to use this cool new app that just came out. I need to have the humility to ask one of them for help and learn what they have to teach me. You don’t want to be that professor who still doesn’t know how to send a link 6 months later because he won’t ask for help, and won’t even respond when I offer it.

Many of the skills professors learned 20 years ago just aren’t part of what students care about now, and I don’t just mean the skills that are obviously obsolete like looking things up by the Dewey Decimal System.

I’m writing this on a platform like Medium to drive home the point that no one cares about writing five-paragraph essays that meet a certain word count. What people care about is living the 4-Hour Workweek. They care about having passive income from their blogs. That means writing in a way that the reader will find interesting, not writing to meet some artificial standard of academic perfection to get published in a journal that will collect dust on a shelf and maybe be read by 20 people.

People don’t care about learning algebra for its own sake, they care about being able to program (which algebra is conceptually useful for). They care about being able to understand sales data and produce growth.

People don’t care about memorizing facts in a history class, they care about learning the story, and being able to tell it themselves in an interesting way. What does the grade in a speech class matter if you can’t hold the viewer’s attention during a podcast? People don’t care about art or film appreciation, they care about learning how to put out viral videos that can generate ad money.

Versatility and learning by doing are the names of the game, which is why I kill multiple birds with one stone. To demonstrate the point, I made this YouTube video in which I tell an interesting and compelling story about how AI relates to our history. And I’m incorporating that video into a blog because obviously, I can write blogs too.

That’s where we’re going. We are moving towards a trustless society where everyone needs a variety of skills. That sounds bad, but if you’ve got the goods it is actually fantastic.

I’ve developed skills that students and employers value, but instead of just writing a typical resume that claims I can do certain things and hoping that you trust me, I’m building a digital presence that demonstrates I can do these things.

I’m not quite viral in my reach yet, but I’ve built an active Facebook group with 400 followers (including some current and former students), and I’ve so far attracted more than 1,000 followers on my Medium account. That’s instant social proof, instant credibility to be able to reach people with your message, without having to go through any gatekeepers or seek approval from any hierarchy. And instead of a boilerplate cover letter to introduce myself, I have this.

WIIFM — What’s In It For Me?

So why mentor?

Because again, that’s part of how I got these skills, and that’s part of how I’ve built a following that wants to learn and use these skills too.

One of my mentees ended up becoming a Vice President at a major corporation, and although we don’t get to see each other much now that he has a kid, he had me as a groomsman at his wedding. Another former student of mine is a lawyer that I could reach out to if needed. Another is working towards a geology degree to go with his appraisal license. I’m a 40% owner in a business a former student recently started. Another mentee is successful at options trading and is teaching me how to do it. Another is the director of marketing for an educational company.

It is said that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” and while I think skills are actually a lot more essential than they’re made to sound there, there’s a lot of truth in that quote about the power of social networks. Access to students and mentees presents the opportunity over the course of several years to build your own network of powerful, successful, positive friends that you may or may not have been lucky to have thanks to family connections when you started, but without which no one can achieve at a high level.

Building your own social network of mentees takes luck out of the equation. Former students will be among the most loyal and generous members of your network because they appreciate that you respected them as equals and helped them find their way.

What’s In It For The College?

Learners progress much more quickly when they see the relevance of the subject matter. What we’re talking about is teaching students skills that they actually want to learn, on platforms that have the potential to generate income for them.

An easy and obvious example exists for English composition. If instructors in comp, or if Writer’s Club advisors/mentors assign students projects to write on Medium then the “grade” is how much money it generates for the student. Res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.

While it is rare for writers to earn more than $100 per month on Medium (only about 6% do), for students even a little bit of extra money would help, especially when they’re used to seeing most learning experiences cost them money.

More importantly, there is just no describing the feeling of validation a student receives from realizing that something they can deliver generates actual income. This is what I found so intoxicating as a math tutor in the Student Learning Center, so much so that I still haven’t left all these years later. How many students will fall in love with writing by their activity on this platform?

Instead of having to pay stipends to advisors and mentors, mentors will be compensated by the expansion of our own networks, and by the Medium partner program. In the same way that state colleges host their own Facebook pages, they can create an official Medium publication easily enough on which to publish student and faculty content. Instead of a salary increase or stipend paid by the college for the person who runs the publication, the editor will get the income from the publication. If a professor wanted to, they can start their own publication, just like anyone else can.

Ultimately, this suggestion of incorporating Medium into mentoring and the college mindset is just one small starting point of a much larger cultural shift. What I’m really advocating is an entrepreneurial, independent, self-directed form of learning rather than exclusively relying on the structure of a top-down bureaucratic order.

I’m suggesting students learn by doing with the identity that they are authors and creators building valuable assets that they own from day one. Because the best way to predict the future is to take responsibility for creating it.