When Nick Walter graduated with an information-systems degree, he intended to start his own tech company to create the next big iPhone app, as so many twenty-somethings have tried in recent years. But then something dawned on him: He could make more money teaching.
He set up a free account on a site called Udemy, which lets anyone teach online courses and charge for them, and then uploaded a series of lecture videos and exercises showing other people how to make apps.
Walter had no experience teaching, no affiliation with a university or accredited educational institution, and—by his own admission—no particular gifts as a computer-science student. But that doesn’t matter to Udemy, or to any of a number of similar platforms that have emerged in recent years.
Walter’s thin credentials didn’t bother his students, either. They’ve signed up in droves. And that’s precisely because he isn’t a typical teacher.
Like any good entrepreneur, Walter identified an untapped need. He knew there were plenty of how-to videos and short in-person workshops run by certified coding wizards, but he viewed their very expertise as their weakness. “Almost every one of these tutorials or classes assumed you had some kind of programming experience,” he says. For people like him who didn’t consider themselves computer nerds but who wanted to build things, “it was super hard to pick up stuff.”
So he pointedly never utters the word “Boolean” or other coding jargon in his video lectures if he can avoid it. And he never takes himself too seriously: In one promotional video for his course, the 25-year-old Walter dances to techno music while slogans such as “no programming experience required” appear next to him. By traditional standards, he’s an anti-professor.
Thousands of people have paid up to $199 to take that first course he created. And when the course was promoted by Udemy, Walter made $20,000 in a single day. That’s more than some adjunct professors make in a year.
These sites that let anyone teach courses might just change the way people think about the value of education, about the nature of expertise, and about what teaching is worth.
Walter now earns his living as a renegade professor. On a typical morning, he spends a couple of hours filming new lectures in the living room of the house he shares with four other people in Provo, Utah, with the help of a videographer who works for him part time. In the afternoon he commutes to a coworking space—which has a faster Internet connection—and spends time answering questions from students and marketing his courses. He has never taught in a classroom, and doesn’t have much interest in doing so. “To be honest,” he confesses, “I never thought I would be a teacher.”
This is what happens when the so-called sharing economy meets education—when the do-it-yourself spirit of Silicon Valley is applied to teaching. Much has been written about how Uber is disrupting the taxi business by letting people moonlight as taxi drivers using their own cars, and how Airbnb offers an alternative to hotels by helping people rent out their spare rooms. But little attention has been paid to emerging platforms that let people use the knowledge in their heads to teach occasional courses online, for a fee.
Such online services are growing fast. Udemy boasts more than five million students, more than 22,000 courses, and more than $48-million in venture-capital investment. And Google has announced a partnership with edX, the online-education nonprofit started by Harvard University and MIT, to open a similar platform, called MOOC.org, that will let anyone teach in what leaders call a “YouTube for courses.”
Kim Raff for The Chronicle Review
Nick Walter, a recent college graduate who makes a living teaching app-building courses on Udemy, records voice-overs at home.
So far most of the courses on Udemy make no attempt to compete with colleges. The site’s most popular offerings involve technology, like Walter’s iPhone-app course, or seem more akin to self-help books than to college courses. But you can also find subjects like linear algebra, introductory philosophy, and art history. A few professors are already teaching on the platform with hopes of eventually breaking away from academe, and its leaders say there’s no reason full-scale introductory college courses like calculus and physics can’t find a lucrative home here.
The bigger, more immediate threat to colleges is indirect. These sites that let anyone teach courses might just change the way people think about the value of education, about the nature of expertise, and about what teaching is worth.
Here comes Professor Everybody.
At first glance, online teaching platforms like Udemy may not sound that new. For years, aspiring computer programmers have relied on video-tutorial sites and other online resources to teach themselves the latest programming languages. A cottage industry has emerged, including sites like Lynda.com.
Likewise, colleges themselves have been experimenting with massive open online courses. With video lectures and online homework produced by top lecturers at the world’s leading universities, MOOCs serve as a kind of self-service college—without a credential to go with it.
So what’s different about Udemy?
The earlier sites largely mimicked the old publishing or broadcast model of production: Only the few, and the carefully chosen, are allowed to teach college MOOCs or Lynda.com courses. But Udemy, like Mooc.org to come, stresses that teaching is not just for the elite. The message is that anyone can be both learner and professor, and that no matter who you are, your teaching might even have monetary value.
The participation in Mooc.org by Google—one of the biggest tech players—seemed to me like a major endorsement of the idea. I was curious about why the company is creating an open, global schoolhouse. So last year when Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, spoke at an event at Tufts University while promoting his book The New Digital Age, I asked him during a public question-and-answer session.
“We really want to democratize the access to education, and the access to teaching, and then let the marketplace figure it out,” he said. “You’ll discover that teaching is an art. That there are people who are gifted at it, and because of the way the Internet works, eventually the very most talented teachers will emerge, from everywhere. It’s a great thing.”
His tone suggested that letting the marketplace “figure out” teaching was the most common-sense plan in the world. But having covered colleges for more than 15 years, I found his comment subversive, even aggressive. Because in the typical college system, the marketplace doesn’t decide the best teaching, at least not in any direct way. Professors are typically hired and promoted based on the quality of their research, and most undergraduates choose a college based not on a specific instructor but on a range of other factors, from geographic location to the quality of grub in the food court.
Udemy’s chief executive, Dennis Yang, takes Schmidt’s argument even further. “What we have is competition among teachers” on the platform, he says. “It’s one of the few environments where teachers and instructors have to compete with each other.” Someone considering Walter’s iPhone course is shown how many stars previous students rated it, along with a list of other, similar courses, many of them cheaper.
That strikes some academics as a nightmare scenario. After all, when it comes to learning, the customer isn’t always right. Students might rate challenging professors more harshly simply because they are more difficult. Yet students may learn more in a challenging class. Or they may simply not know whether the information they learned is up to date—or even accurate.
“That’s kind of the elephant in the room,” says Burton J. Bledstein, an expert on the history of professionalism and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “I’ve spent my entire career trying to teach kids that not everybody’s opinion is equal.” He worries that some popular video instructors are all flash and little analysis.
But Bledstein also thinks the emergence of Udemy is a symptom of what he sees as the death of professions. “We have an anti-authoritarian mood in the country from the Vietnam War on through the Iraq War, where we had all these professional experts leading us down these paths,” he says. Learning marketplaces tap into this mood, he says, by not only allowing everyone to express themselves, but also giving out certificates of learning blessed by no other authority than that of the self-described professor.
Other critics see the education marketplaces even more darkly. One of them is Guy Standing, a professor of development studies at the University of London, who argues that various sharing-economy trends, including education marketplaces, are creating a new social class: the “precariat.” Its members suffer from a mash-up of economic ills, including job insecurity, lack of worker protections, and insecurity of identity.
Standing worries that vulnerable consumers eager for a shortcut into a better job are being “seduced” into buying these online courses. “Essentially you are hooked into sort of an addictive process where you hope—or you’ve been told—that doing such a course will lead to an improvement in your career,” he says. “But often there is absolutely no evidence that this is true.”
Yang, of Udemy, defends the quality of the courses. He says that although the company makes no attempt to check their accuracy, all submissions are reviewed by staff members—for technical quality and to make sure that the topics are not “offensive, inappropriate, or illegal.”
Yang even argues that the student-rating system provides better quality control for teaching than at traditional colleges. “In an open marketplace where there is competition, if you’re an instructor and you can’t teach well or you don’t know what you’re talking about, students will say so with ratings,” he says. “If you’re not providing value, you won’t make money—only the best teachers go to the top.”
Today online-teaching marketplaces focus on what Yang calls the “lifelong learning” demographic—people who may already hold college degrees but want to update their skills or learn for fun. He believes that’s a growing audience.
“Technology is changing faster than it ever has,” he argues. “Let’s say you graduated from college 10 years ago, and you’re in marketing—Facebook didn’t exist back then,” he adds. As he describes it, many people who pay for Udemy courses say to themselves, “Schools didn’t really teach me this stuff, how do I get up to speed?”
But he says that down the road he sees no reason why Udemy can’t play a role in college courses. There are already professors who see these new marketplaces as a possible alternative to teaching at a college, if the sites mature and gain wider acceptance.
Cliff Jette for The Chronicle Review
Kevin deLaplante, an associate professor at Iowa State U., makes an average of $2,500 per month teaching from his home studio (above) on sites like Udemy.
Among the traditional professors teaching on Udemy is Kevin deLaplante, a 47-year-old whose day job is as an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Iowa State University.
He’s the kind of academic who has always been interested in being a public intellectual. “As a kid I was inspired by Carl Sagan,” he says. “I went into academia hoping I could do more public-outreach stuff.”
So back in 2010 he started a free podcast, called the Critical Thinker Podcast, aimed at a general audience.
He also doodles and often draws cartoons to illustrate material for his courses, and calls himself a “frustrated cartoonist.” When he first heard about Udemy a couple of years ago, he saw a way to take his hobbies and bring in some extra income. He has set up a critical-thinking course on Udemy, and he also used another teaching platform, called Fedora, to build what is essentially his own school, which he calls Critical Thinker Academy.
He says he now makes an average of $2,500 per month through his online teaching, and he dreams of one day detaching himself from traditional academic affiliations.
“Academia is one of the least mobile jobs,” he points out. While young scholars may have some options for moving around, and academic superstars do too, people like him wind up with far fewer choices over time. “My extended family is all around the Ottawa area in Canada—that’s where my wife’s family is,” he adds. “If I want to get a chance of moving back there, I have very few options.” So he hopes that one day he might make enough money through his freelance teaching to make the move. He’s starting a couple of new courses and says he is on track to match his monthly income from his university salary “at some point in 2015.”
But he argues that money is not the only benefit of experimenting with education marketplaces. “It also frees you up to do different kinds of teaching,” he says, noting that because his department at Iowa State does not have a doctoral component, there are courses he would like to teach that the university doesn’t offer. On his Critical Thinker Academy, there’s no faculty committee to convince. He can teach whatever he wants.
About 1,000 students have registered for his academy, though not all of those have paid. He’s had about 4,600 paying students on his Udemy courses. He is heartened, though, by the audience he drew for his podcast, which he says reached about 1.6 million listeners over several years.
“This is an important part of the story about how independent online educators can create an audience that can support a sustainable business,” he argues. “If pessimistically we estimate that one in 100 students has a strong interest in what you teach, then over 20 years, that’s only 50 students who are really interested in the questions that I’m interested in, and would be willing to follow what I do, and support and encourage what I do, outside of the classroom. But 1 percent of 1.6 million is 16,000.”
The more I talked with people, the more I realized that the format raises questions about the basic definition of what it means to teach.
“I don’t even think of it as teaching in any normal sense of the word. I think of it more like writing an audio/visual multimedia textbook for the Internet audience” says deLaplante. “There are some discussion features,” he adds, “but it’s more like having access to the author to clarify certain points. I don’t have the ongoing relationship with students.”
Walter, the iPhone-app instructor, says his inspiration for teaching online was a series of video lectures he was required to watch in an accounting course he took at Brigham Young University. Using a “flipped classroom,” his professor assigned video lectures for homework and then used class time for other things, like group work.
“That format just fit so well with me,” he says. “Being able to watch these lectures whenever I wanted and be able to rewind when I needed to—that was huge to me. I loved that class.”
Walter now hopes that some professors may want to assign his Udemy courses as replacements for a textbook and for their own lectures so that their class time can be used for more-interactive problem solving.
Udemy’s leaders say that a professor at San Jose State University is already assigning a Udemy course on personal finance as a digital textbook for his students.
If that’s the way Udemy courses are used, it will threaten the textbook-publishing industry more than it will imperil traditional colleges and universities.
Clay Shirky, an associate arts professor in New York University’s interactive-telecommunications program and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, says he sees such marketplaces as a sign that the lines between formal and informal education are blurring.
“There used to be this big gulf between how-to guides and higher education. There’s no clean break anymore,” he says. “There’s always been a big gap between ‘acquisition of skills’ and ‘education,’ as if they’re different things,” he adds. “In many ways what the Udemys of the world are doing is they’re simply denying that things that people thought were fundamental differences are actually fundamental.”
However you categorize these new kinds of online courses and learning materials, though, Shirky worries that they favor a certain kind of learner. “If you’re not a self-starter in this world you’re kind of screwed,” he says. Talking of his own experience as a student, he remembers moments of frustration where he wanted to quit but pushed on because he didn’t want to let his instructor down. He doubts that students in a Udemy course will stick with it when they hit a similar rough patch. “They’re not going to push through,” he says. “They’re not going to finish it.”
Then again, services are emerging that let learners reach live people to talk them through situations when video lectures aren’t enough. The biggest example of that is another Google project, called Google Helpouts, which provides a set of self-described experts willing to give brief, one-on-one consulting sessions via video chat. It’s essentially on-demand tutoring, but on an eclectic range of topics, such as calculus, nutrition, fashion, furniture design, and guitar.
Robert Woods, director of Faulkner University’s Great Books Honors College, charges $25 for 30 minutes of a “conversational guide” to great books, and $10 for 15 minutes of talking through a personal reading plan. When I asked him why he chose those prices—experts on the service can charge whatever they want—he said the cost serves as more of a screening function than a profit-making one. “I said, I’m not in it for the money, but let me go ahead and charge a rate that would bring in people who were serious about doing the readings.” He says the conversations have been “fascinating"—from a mother home-schooling her son and looking for suggested readings for him, to a woman who just wanted someone to talk to about Jane Eyre. About half of his clients were in the United States and half overseas. Most everyone has given him a five-star rating. As one of the glowing reviews points out: “If you are committed to investing the time and energy to read any of the great books, it would be silly NOT to invest in a conversation to get these resources and insights.”
Woods typically conducts the video consulting chats in his study, with a tall bookshelf in the background. He said he decided to try the Helpouts when he first read about the service, and he sees it as a kind of public outreach. “As a professor of great books, I frequently have people ask me what would you read, what would you recommend,” he says. But he admits the role he plays in the video chats is an unusual one, especially since a few have been with repeat customers whom he has gotten to know better over time. As he put it: “It’s a combination of coach, mentor, and a consultant that you keep on retainer.” He said he can’t imagine the format letting him make any serious money, and he has no plan to quit his university day job. But he says that he could imagine someday—maybe after he retires—trying such an alternative path, if he could teach larger numbers of students at a time. (He imagines leading online book groups for a fee.)
Helpouts hasn’t been a hit for Google. Some providers complain that Google hasn’t done much to market the service, and others say it is awkward to schedule the help sessions. Even so, it has formed an interesting community: hundreds of self-appointed teachers who trade tips and stories in a discussion group on Google Plus.
Some of them have even bartered with their teaching. When Matt Gibson, who teaches guitar on Helpouts, wanted to learn how to make his videos better, he agreed to teach someone a free guitar Helpout in return for a free session of a video-making Helpout. No money changed hands, but both sides learned something.
In its short history, the Internet has given voice to millions of people with something to say. First came blogging, then social-media curation. Perhaps online education will be the next great form of digitized democratized expression. And if that happens, colleges will have to reckon with it—and college professors may lose their once-exclusive franchise on authority.
Jeffrey R. Young is a senior editor at The Chronicle.
