If you are reading this, you are blessed to be alive on the planet in the best time that has EVER existed! We are experiencing the longest life span and the lowest rate of violence on this earth, ever. In developed countries like the United States, people who live in poverty today have more comforts and conveniences than wealthy people did 100 years ago.
And, if you’re an entrepreneur or anyone who wants to get paid to do what you love, there has NEVER been more opportunities than there are today. But, in this video we want to talk about an industry that represents one of the biggest opportunities of our times: online courses.
If you are watching this video, you are also positioned to take advantage of the TIMING advantage you will have if you create online courses now.
There are 3 massive shifts coming in the next 4 to 10 years that will explode the online course industry, making now the best time to be a course creator. So let’s take a look at these looming changes and what it means for the future of education, and the opportunity you have today to be part of it.
MASSIVE SHIFT #1: The Rising Billions
It is predicted that by 2024 every person on Earth will be online.
There are about 4 billion people online now, so that’s 4 billion “New Minds” connecting to the internet. Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize, refers to them as The Rising Billions. For the most part, these new internet surfers will be connecting through wireless internet through smart phones and tablets. But, this won’t be at the internet speed we have now. When wireless technology advanced from 3G (that’s Gigabytes) to 4G, that’s when smart phones became available and video streaming became possible on our devices. In 2020, 5G is being deployed at a massive scale. 5G is 100 times faster than 4G and 10 times faster than even your broadband, plug in internet at home.
This is good news for the online course industry for SO MANY REASONS.
First, the experience of viewing online courses is going to increase greatly! No more lagging, freezing, or slow loading.
But, even more importantly—and this is the point here—those 4 BILLION people who will be gaining access to the World Wide Web of information for the first time—what will they be looking for?
Of course, they’ll probably go online and buy stuff. But, even more so they’ll be eager for access to KNOWLEDGE. In many cases, it will be the first time they have access to information beyond their small towns or villages.
4 billion new people will be coming online, and they will be seeking to LEARN.
MASSIVE SHIFT #2: Exponential Growth and Economic Change
A child in a small village in Africa today has more computing power in their smart phone than US President Bill Clinton had access to from the White House. The reason for this is the exponential growth of technology. Moore’s Law is a principle that states the observable fact that processing speed of computing doubles roughly every 2 years, and it has done so consistently since about 1970. When we add to this the rapid growth in fields like artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, 3D printing, and many other technologies that change the way the world works, it is not surprising that experts are predicting a rapid period of economic and social change—exponentially more rapid change than what we’ve experienced in the last 100 years.
As a result, depending on the report you read, it is predicted that 1/3 to ½ of jobs that exist today will disappear by 2030. We don’t tell you this to scare you, we tell you this because all of this represents a HUGE opportunity!
This does not mean that up to half the population will lose their jobs. It means that up to half the population will need to CHANGE jobs. EVERY SINGLE TIME industries have died new ones have been born.
Ice used to be the biggest industry in the United States. Yes, ICE!
Automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages in only a few years when Ford released the Model T. We’ve been here before. While robots and AI may replace human labor in some industries, this period of rapid growth and expansion is CREATING new jobs. Entire new industries are being created. If you have young children or grandchildren right now, chances are the careers they will have as adults are in jobs that haven’t even been thought of yet.
Plus, the entire idea of “work” is going to change. Economists and those who spend their lives studying these things expect that the number of hours a full time worker works per week is going to decrease, giving us more time to spend with our families, travel, embrace our passions, start a side gig, or contemplate the meaning of life. Entrepreneurship is going to become much more common, and our children’s generation will be a lot more likely to have 5 different side gigs than one full time job. This is not surprising when we think that our grandparents’ generation often held only one job their entire lives. Look how much has already changed?
MASSIVE SHIFT #3: The Democratization of Education
Your smart phone contains within it a TV, computer, digital camera, radio, GPS, video games, and access to all of the information contained in all of the libraries around the world. Imagine if you had to carry all of those things around in your pocket! We have at our fingertips what used to cost thousands of dollars, and many people have access to these things for the very first time.
When something becomes digitized, it becomes dematerialized. You no longer need the physical component. This means that the cost of delivering this information or service becomes almost nothing because there is no longer a cost to produce the physical item. Once it is digitized, it is no longer able to be controlled by governments, large companies, or those in power. It becomes available to everyone.
It becomes democratized.
Democratizing an industry means putting the means of production and consumption into the hands of the people. No more middle man, who tends to discriminate about who has access and who collects a fee to access it. Many industries have been “democratized”. For example, AirBNB has democratized hotels. Uber has democratized the taxi/transportation market. Today, individual people can turn their home or car into a means to make money by offering it to someone who previously only could rent a room or catch a ride through hotels or taxis.
And this brings us to what we’re talking about here: online courses are democratizing education.
Knowledge was democratized when the printing press was invented, making books widely available. The internet democratized information even further, making the entire world’s worth of information available by anyone with a device and connection to the internet.
And now, another revolution of access to knowledge is upon us—and you can be part of it!
Yes, people can find the information they need for free on Google and YouTube. But this giant repository of information has never been able to compete with specialized, packaged or academic knowledge taught through schools, universities, and formal education.
However, with online courses, today anyone in the world who has knowledge, experience, or expertise can create a video-based course and make it available to anyone in the world.
University professors are not the only ones capable of teaching advanced knowledge in their industry. In fact, many people who actually work in an industry, hands-on, and keep up with the most recent advances often know more, and certainly have something more relevant and real-world to teach. Plus, many university professors have recognized this new opportunity and have started creating online courses of their own.
Not to mention, the student loan crisis in the US and the excessive cost of higher education hold many people back from being able to access education, and those who do attend spend years of their lives learning what is often outdated information without real-world application and walk away saddled with debt.
Online courses are available at a fraction of the cost, and students get to choose who they want to learn from.
The Universities no longer hold a monopoly on learning!
But academic education is only one part of the equation. In fact, MOST online courses are on non-academic topics! Online courses are how people who work in technology keep up with the exponentially changing digital world. People in any career can do a quick search online and find courses taught by experts in their field, teaching them best practices and often sharing decades of experience that will save them years of trial and error, not to mention thousands of dollars.
Whether you want to build a robot or bake a cake, change careers or start a business, learn a language or improve your relationships, write a book or learn how to play the guitar—there is an online course out there taught by someone who had been there, done that, made the course!
THIS IS WHERE THESE 3 MASSIVE SHIFTS CONVERGE
Exponential growth of technology has gotten us to the point where streaming online video content is good enough that there are already hundreds of millions of students learning from non-university instructors online. This technology will continue to improve, making online courses even MORE accessible.
Even today there is opportunity for ANYONE to teach ANYTHING that they know and love online, and there are people out there right now already looking for courses on the topics you could teach.
It is already an amazing industry to be in…
…and then add to it that 4 billion new people will be coming online in the next several years, many of which will be seeking education… and the fact that education through online courses can be made available at a cost low enough that students in developing countries can afford them…
…and then add to it that economic change will lead as much as half the population to have to LEARN something new in order to change their careers… and the fact that they won’t need to get this education through a college that takes years to complete and costs thousands of dollars; instead they can learn directly from those who know how to do what they want to do.
Studies already report that the size of the online education market is in the hundreds of BILLIONS. And the truth is, the industry is still in its infancy.
All of these massive shifts that are already underway converge to show us that, clearly, online education is the future.
