There are a lot of benefits to online courses. The flexibility of the digital world allows students to control their schedules, manage their own time, or pick up part-time work to support their education and living expenses. Online courses also improve the accessibility of education, allowing anyone to learn from the top teachers around the world — instantly. However, traditional universities aren’t taking full advantage of these benefits, because they are structured in a way that disincentivizes quality course design.
I’m a UX designer who has taken multiple online courses during my educational career. Clearly, designing an online course is hard. It’s hard in a completely different way than teaching a lecture is hard. To understand why, let’s take a look at Youtube.
Youtube is the glowing poster child of the online education movement. Youtube is a place for grassroots educational communities to take hold, transferring knowledge and passions that would never have seen the light of day if it were not for this platform. Take Wintergatan, for example. This content creator has over 1 million subscribers. These subscribers what Wintergatan design and build an enormous marble machine instrument from scratch. If 1 million university students were this passionate about a class so niche and obscure at a public university, it would be a revolution. Students just don’t get that excited about classes, especially at the undergraduate level. But it’s just another day on Youtube, where people voluntarily go to learn every single day.