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Most Online Courses Are a Waste of Your Time — Here’s How You Know

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A quick guide that helps you find the worthy ones.

Picture bought by the author via Canva.

This year I spent around $5000 on online courses.

Warren Buffet said, “the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you’ll earn.”

But his statement is flawed.

Not all learning investments are created equal. People who’ve excelled at their craft are often not the best teachers. Likewise, creators who write the best sales copy don’t offer the most value.

Here’s precisely how you can spot bad online courses so that you won’t waste your time and money.

1) They Tell But Don’t Show

Most online courses are useless because they focus on the why and what instead of the how.

In a Medium writer’s online course, for example, the instructors spend 90% of the time exploring what writing consists of. They have an hour-long conversation about the importance of consistency. Yet, they don’t show the students how they can write consistently.

The medium star could’ve talked about the roadblocks and how he overcame them. He could’ve shared his calendar or accountability system. He could’ve shared strategies for when you’re struggling to get started. But he didn’t. For me, the course felt like a time-waster.

“Never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead.”

— Steven King

What to look out for instead:

Look for how material instead of endless talks on the why and what. Valuable things often include templates, tutorials, spreadsheets, and screen-sharings.

Here are some examples, so you know how to tell the difference:

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim.

2) Instructors Teach in One Direction

“Active learning works, and social learning works,” said Anant Agarwal, founder and chief executive of edX, in an interview with the New York Times. To back this up, a recent study suggests social learning helps you complete online courses.

Yet, most online course creators choose alow-maintenance model. They pre-record videos so you can watch them at your own pace.

But what’s scalable for the instructors isn’t the best for you. Data from Harvard University and MIT shows only three to four percent complete self-paced online courses.

To increase your chances of success, you need a community.

I love Cam Houser’s comment in a joint Slack channel: “People don’t take courses for information. That’s what google and youtube are for. They take courses for outcomes, accountability, process, community.”

What to look out for instead:

A slack channel or Facebook group isn’t enough. Great courses offer structured space for social learning. You have an accountability group, comment on each other’s work, and have regular live touchpoints with your instructors or coaches.

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim.

3) They Ignore the Principle of Directness

Online courses are often distant from the actual application. You watch videos about your desired skill, but you never actually practice.

Let’s consider one of my favorite examples.

Imagine you’re a frequent flier. Before every start, you watch the video of a flight attendant putting on the life vest. You watch the video again and again.

But as this study shows, actually putting on the inflatable life vest a single time would be more valuable than repeatedly watching another person doing it. You acquire true mastery by performing the procedure yourself.

The author of ‘Ultralearning’ calls this principle directness. It is essential for mastering any skill. Yet, most online courses teach skills far from direct.

What to look out for instead:

You don’t learn by watching things. You learn by doing them. So the more you engage with the content, the likelier it will stick with you.

What’s your desired outcome behind taking the course? Check whether you have assignments that are directly linked to your desired skill. Pick a class as close to your end goal as possible.

If you take a course on e-mail newsletters, write your e-mail and ask for feedback. If you take a drawing class, do your first drawing. If you take a course on online writing, write your first article.

Just like the minimum viable product, find a minimum viable action. What is the simplest thing you can do based on what you’ve just learned?

Foster a bias towards action. You learn best when you do the work.

“Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.”

— Anders Ericsson

4) They Don’t Understand the Science of Learning

Masters might not be the best teachers. More likely, they’re beginners when it comes to instructional design and the science of learning.

Most online courses are built on the assumption that our brains work like recording devices. But students don’t acquire their desired skills by consuming content. Instead, learning is at least a three-step process — we acquire, encode, and retrieve.

Learning scientist Roediger writes: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow. Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.”

Learning through passive content consumption isn’t effortful. That’s why most online courses are a mere form of entertainment.

What to look out for instead:

Look out for active learning elements. Check whether the course uses evidence-based learning strategies such as:

  • retrieval practice ⇟ recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory
  • spaced repetition ⇟ repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals
  • interleaving ⇟ alternating before each practice is complete
  • elaboration ⇟ rephrasing new knowledge and connecting it with existing insights
  • reflection ⇟ synthesize, abstract, and articulate key lessons taught by experience
  • self-testing & calibration ⇟ answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer and identify knowledge gaps

“Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills and processes, is a quest. Don’t assume you’re doing something wrong if learning feels hard.”

— Roediger et al.

Conclusion

Most online courses don’t help you reach your desired outcome. You can spend thousands of dollars and hours without learning anything at all.

Learning doesn’t help you per se — it’s taking the right courses that can make all the difference:

  • Check whether the course curriculum goes beyond why and what and teaches the how to do stuff.
  • Evaluate whether you’ve got regular touchpoints with your instructor and learning opportunities with fellow students.
  • Understand whether you’ll practice your desired skill.
  • Look out for evidence-based learning elements such as spacing, retrieval, or reflection.

I’m building a course on how to write online based on evidence-based practices to make the most of your time. You won’t sit in front of pre-recorded videos and struggle to stick with them. If you’re interested in joining a group of 25 people, you can pre-register here.

How MasterClass Makes 9-Figure Revenues Without Really Selling Mastery

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Lessons from EdTech founder David Rogier.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

If you look at MasterClass from a business perspective, it’s a clear success story.

In 2015 David Rogier founded the company. Five years later, he closed a Series E financing round with a post-money valuation of $500M to $1B. In a recent interview, Rogier said MasterClass is on the path to an IPO.

In short: MasterClass is one of the few emerging unicorns in EdTech.

Yet, if you look at the education platform from a learner’s perspective, its success story is less clear. After all, mastery of complex skills and processes is the result of deliberate practice.

Michaelangelo, the painter of 5,000 square feet in the Sistine Chapel, once wrote:

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”

MasterClass Isn’t About Mastery

In December, a friend asked whether I’d share a 2-for-1 subscription. I read on their website, ‘MasterClass delivers a world-class online learning experience.’

I said yes. $90 a year for learning from world-class performers like James Patterson, Sara Blakely, and Yotam Ottolenghi seemed like an incredible deal.

The two-sided business model

Customers pay for accessing pre-recorded courses, and instructors get paid for recording them. The value proposition: “Getting the best in the world to teach and share and make it a price point that is affordable.”

From the consumer side, it works like Netflix — a streaming platform with a subscription model. For $180 per year, consumers have access to all classes.

Instructors receive a one-time payment and a revenue cut. In 2017, a source reported MasterClass teachers get at least $100,000 per course plus a 30% revenue cut. In 2018, Bloomberg wrote instructors get a guaranteed sum, plus up to a 25% cut. However, in a later interview, Rogier shared contracts vary by individuals.

Hence MasterClass’s key activities are:

  • Recruiting world-class talent and turning them into instructors.
  • Recording Hollywood-like videos.
  • Providing and maintaining the streaming platform and an online community thread.
  • Marketing activities to win paying customers.

What MasterClass got wrong about learning

According to Rogier, instructors design their classes. But education researchers agree: Masters might not be the best teachers. Likely, they’re beginners when it comes to instructional design and the science of learning.

Most MasterClasses build on the thesis that online, low-touch courses are for skill-building. But our brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by consuming content. Instead, learning is at least a three-step process — we acquire, encode, and retrieve.

I won’t bore you with the specifics. Barbara Oakley, Roediger, et al., and Lieberman have done a prolific job explaining how we learn and remember. But as a simplified rule of thumb:

“Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow. Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.”

Learning through passive content consumption isn’t truly effortful.

How humans acquire mastery

Anders Ericsson, author of ‘Peak’ studied high performing-individuals and found that the best among them spent thousands of hours practicing in solitary, deliberate practice. Mastery is a product of practice quantity and quality.

Think about frequent fliers. Before every start, they watch a video of a flight attendant putting on the life vest. But as this study shows, actually putting on the inflatable life vest a single time would be more valuable than repeatedly watching another person doing it.

You acquire true mastery by performing the procedure yourself. MasterClass instructors have surely not gotten where they are by sitting on the couch, watching videos about their craft.

The author of ‘Ultralearnering’ calls this principle directness. It is essential for mastering any skill.

Yet, with a few exceptions, classes are as far away from direct practice as they can get. It’s like someone studying the guitar but not holding a guitar — just looking at videos of how to play the guitar.

Don’t get me wrong; I like MasterClass. With its tips and anecdotes, it inspires millions of people to become lifelong learners. But as a learning expert, I cry when I read on the website of an emerging EdTech Unicorn that they offer a ‘world-class online learning experience.’

Because they don’t.

Key Entrepreneurship Lessons

When you spend hours researching MasterClass, you can’t help but admire founder and CEO David Rogier. His humble and authentic stories make him one of the most sympathetic founders I’ve listened to.

Here’s what we can learn from his entrepreneurial journey.

#1 Build something you can be proud of even if it fails

Rogier was raised in part by his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. When he was at her house as an 8-year-old, she told a story that changed him forever.

When his grandma fled to the States, her dream was to become a doctor. She sent applications to 25 medical schools — and got 25 rejections. When calling the deans to ask why they rejected her, all hang-up except for one, who said:

“You have three strikes against you:
You’re a woman. You’re an immigrant. You’re Jewish.”

She reapplied the next year. One school accepted her. Ultimately, she became a doctor. Here’s her lesson she shared with 8-year-old Rogier:

“Education is the only thing someone can’t take from you”

When Rogier graduated from Stanford Business School, he had so many ideas about starting up. He couldn’t decide. The advice that ultimately helped him decide was to pick something that, even if it fails, you’re gonna be proud of.

For Rogier, this meant building a product in education. He shared in an interview about his grandma’s story: “It’s what propelled me to create MasterClass, and to try to democratize mastery.”

So if there’s a lesson here for future entrepreneurs, it’s this: Don’t create a product based on market growth. Instead, build something you can be proud of, even if it fails.

#2 Don’t stop when people say your idea is unachievable

In 2014, Rogier told a former classmate about his MasterClass idea. The friend said it would be too difficult to get the instructors to sign up, especially in the beginning. How can you possibly attract world-class masters without having an existing customer base?

His friend was surprised Rogier presented the signed letters of world-class masters like Serena Williams. Yet, this journey wasn’t predestined.

Signing the best in the world wasn’t easy. He cold-called and e-mailed hundreds of masters in their craft. He says years went by without getting any yes.

Recruiting the first instructors was challenging, but Rogier says he rejects nine out of 10 people who want to become instructors.

Undoubtedly as a Stanford Graduate with an initial seed funding helped gave him credibility. Yet, he has one of the most important traits of founders: resilience.

#3 Reach out to people who can help you

Rogier decided he wanted to do something with education. Yet, he wasn’t sure what exactly this would be.

As a result, he posted ads on Craigslist to pay people $10 an hour to talk about their educational experiences. He asked his interview partners questions like:

  • Who did you learn the most from?
  • Which topics would you have loved to study more?
  • What things do you want to learn now? And how do you want to learn them?

These initial conversations helped him sharpen his vision. Plus, when he recorded the first videos, they looked like crap.

So Rogier reached out to a professor from his grad school who won two Oscars for filming. His professor offered to film the videos, and that’s how the courses started looking like high-class Hollywood movies.

Of course, most people don’t have Oscar winners in their direct network. Yet, asking for help when things don’t go your way certainly increases the chances of reaching the ultimate goal.

In Conclusion

Rogier said learning doesn’t have to be boring, and it doesn’t have to involve a classroom. And it’s true: When done right, education can be entertaining and online.

MasterClass managed to bring the quality of Netflix to the $100 billion e-learning industry. Yet, it failed to bring along state-of-art learning science.

Polished videos don’t lead to mastery. What matters more than lighting and sound are whether consumers really learn new skills. And without using evidence-based techniques for learning, this goal is out of reach.

If you want to feel inspired and listen to master’s success stories, go ahead and subscribe to MasterClass.

If you, however, want to achieve mastery, take courses that really help you learn new skills. Look out for features like:

  • Offering real-time feedback on learning progress. 
    (And no, not like MasterClass with collecting product feedback channel).
  • Giving direct access to instructors. 
    (And again, no, not like MasterClass offering contests to get a 1:1 in exchange for giving the instructors feedback).
  • Having assignments that are directly linked to your desired skill.
  • Including structured access to a fellow community.
  • Deploying spaced repetition features.
  • Using testing as a tool.

Whatever you choose, keep education researcher Terry Doyle’s words in mind who said:

“The one who does the work does the learning.”

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