'Better Than Free': how educators can monetise their expertise in a world of free learning content
If we can increasingly get all the digital content we need without paying for it, how might educators still find ways to monetise their skills beyond a classroom salary?
There’s not much out there in the digiverse that doesn’t have a free version. Music, movies, ebooks: there are downloading and streaming websites hosted in far off parts of the world that seem largely free of the grip of copyright laws.
The same goes for learning content. There’s masses of instruction on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and once AI truly takes hold there’ll be plenty more generated lessons and resources and quizzes to choose from. And the majority of it will be free.
So why bother paying for anything of value any more? What impels us to part with our cash when we know we can get something broadly similar, if not the same, without putting our hand in our pocket? What on earth creates this desire in us to ‘do the right thing’ and pay those who create value for us? After all, the majority of the time we are never going to meet the person who did the creating, so why should we care?
If we can unlock this, we can also understand why, when it comes to education, flesh and blood beings will still be important as we increasingly come to rely on AI. In fact, there will be educators who profit in entirely new and highly lucrative ways by harnessing what I’m about to share. So listen up, as the world of the educator is about to get interesting.
I’ve found Kevin Kelly’s ‘eight generatives’, from his book The Inevitable a good way to frame my thinking. Kelly defines a generative as ‘a quality or attribute that must be generated at the time of the transaction. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, and warehoused. A generative cannot be faked or replicated.’ Now bear in mind that Kelly was writing in 2016, quite some time before OpenAI was even a glimmer in Sam Altman’s eye. So in this regard he is not talking about generative AI.
Let’s go through these ‘generatives’ now, considering how they might apply to education.
1. Immediacy: aka getting it first, before everyone else. Why is this important? Two words. Bragging rights. Who of us hasn’t been just a little jealous when AI influencers have been given access to GPT plugins or Bard before anyone else? Being on the VIP list feels good. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on the visualiser than Ethan Mollick (
) has been teasing us with these last weeks.Creating beta versions of courses, books, and resources, and sharing them with your network, can give them the sense that they are in your inner circle, as well as being a useful way to get feedback before general release. Getting paid access to a ‘club’, for example on the back of a newsletter, podcast or free course, can be a way in which educators can monetise their expertise, giving their paid followers access to new and exclusive materials before anyone else.
2. Personalisation: creating free basic learning content (for example an overview of a topic without going into too much detail) can be a good way to hook learners into paid for versions that are more bespoke to the learner’s needs. For a student, the ultimate form of personalisation is one to one tutoring, but for most educators this isn’t something they want to be doing too much of.
However, let’s think for a moment how AI could play a role here. If you can create customised bots that can work within a course, perhaps a video course or ebook that has these bots embedded within, then you can charge a premium as the bots will adapt content based on the level of the student. It’s very early days, but I’m currently playing with Zapier integrations, creating bots for learners, teachers and managers. It would not take much to make these personalised to anyone willing to pay a premium.
3. Interpretation: you give the video away for free, but the learning content that goes with the video (adaptive quizzes, essay guides and extension materials) has to be paid for. Again, bringing AI bots into the mix is another additionality that your ‘shop window’ video can be helpful to draw learners towards. Never be afraid to give masses of your expertise away for free initially, as people trust people who help them get better at stuff. And if they trust you, they’re more likely to pay you.
4. Authenticity: this one is tough now we are surrounded by AI generated content. It’s all too easy to rely on ChatGPT to churn out content day in day out, but I believe that, the more we are surrounded by it, the more people will crave authentically created content, that has personality and soul. Teachers who are able to tap into their authentic selves will be in real demand as we are further flooded by AI avatars with their plastic skin, plastic voices and dead eyes. Your humanity is one of the most valuable things you have.
5. Accessibility: when we download stuff for free it tends to be randomly scattered in various download folders, on our mobile devices, laptops and so on. It’s often hard to work out where everything is, so having one place for everything is something people will pay for. Khan Academy is a good example of how to store and curate: much of their learning content is available for free on Youtube, but their new Khan Migo AI platform is paid for. Everything in one place and with an AI mentor for good measure.
6. Embodiment: couple your free digital learning content with paid-for physical classes, lectures, presentations and so on. If you grow a following online, whether through YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or LinkedIn, then your value as a physical deliverer of learning content grows significantly.
7. Patronage: this links back to number 1: if you create an online subscription service with benefits, you’ll find there are people willing to pay you direct to be part of this inner circle. In recent years, Patreon has grown in popularity with the creator economy: I don’t think it is much of a leap to see educators also benefiting from having their expertise rewarded through patronage.
8. Discoverability: as content explodes, and we are awash with videos and ebooks and podcasts and have no idea where to look, the ability for educators to curate content and present in a meaningful, simple and logical way will become increasingly important. It is therefore not necessarily the case that you have to create all the content yourself: you may find that assembling content, or developing ways for AI to automate this process, is another way of monetising both your expertise and your ability to sift through the crap so your subscribers don’t have to. We’ve already seen how search is changing radically with the advent of Bing Chat and Google Bard, but they still don’t curate to the point where students have learning materials presented in the right order at the right time that address their precise learning needs.
These are just a few broad examples of how, as we are further flooded by bland, generic, AI generated learning content, human teachers will stand out. We just need to figure out precisely how to do it.
References:
Kelly, Kevin, The Inevitable, Viking, 2016