Online Education Connecting Learners to Enterprising Teachers Worldwide

Universities began putting their courses online in the form of “Massively Open Online Courses” (MOOCs) about a decade ago, with the idea of making a wide range of high-quality academic instruction accessible and affordable to people around the world. One famous, early success story was that of Battushig Myanganbayar, a teenager in Mongolia who aced an online MIT engineering course and earned himself a scholarship to the university. Today MOOCs are available by the thousands on marketplace platforms with global reach, such as edX, Udacity, and Coursera.

But there is also another tier of online courses feeding global education, offered not by universities but by individuals. Learning platforms such as Teachable, Thinkific, and Ruzuku have flipped the script on MOOCs: now anyone anywhere can not only take an online course but build and teach one, too. And many thousands do, offering instruction on just about anything you can think of, from business management to blacksmithing, cardio training to calligraphy, leadership to lepidoptery. Online learning is a global bazaar, where anyone can offer up their expertise, enthusiasm, or experience for the whole world’s edification — and earn a rupee (or try to) in the process.

Open online learning platforms are not just for hobbyists and dilettantes; experts of all types are well represented, including plenty of moonlighting school teachers plying lessons in grammar, geometry, chemistry, art, computer science, and every other traditional school subject. In a sense, online learning platforms have given rise to a global gig economy for educators — a way for them to independently leverage their expertise and supplement their income. If the success of these courses demonstrates a worldwide demand for learning not satisfied by conventional schooling, perhaps it also demonstrates how difficult it is for teachers around the planet to make ends meet with just their day job.

Global online learning outside the bounds of institutional education takes a variety of forms. Here are some of the other types of platforms connecting otherwise disconnected students and teachers around the world:

Online Course Marketplaces

Most open platforms require that course developers find and recruit their own students, which generally entails building email lists and working social media channels. If you’re a teacher looking to market your DIY algebra course to ninth-graders, this is a hard pull. Another breed of platform, however, functions as a searchable marketplace, where students come looking for what’s on offer. The largest, Udemy, hosts some 80,000 courses. Your algebra course pops up (along with all your competitors) when an interested student searches the site.

Social Media

YouTube makes a vast array of instructional videos accessible for free, including videos on every academic subject under the sun. Plenty of schools maintain a presence on YouTube as part of their recruitment and visibility strategy. Likewise, many online teaching entrepreneurs offer free content as lead magnets for the courses they charge for on other platforms.

It’s not all about business, though; plenty of content developers just like to share. One of the most prolific academic presences is Khan Academy, a non-profit that posts hundreds of videos for K-12 students on subjects from literature and civics to calculus and finance. As an instrument of unregulated global education, YouTube is an unsung powerhouse: 37% of users surveyed say they’re looking to improve school or job skills — and YouTube has 1.9 billion active monthly users.

Learning Management Systems

Many K-12 and most higher ed schools now use learning management systems (LMSs) to deliver online courses to their own students. Increasingly, even traditional classroom-based courses incorporate an LMS site that instructors can use to manage their class and post their syllabus, readings, videos, quizzes, and so forth.

But LMS platforms can also be used by individuals and companies to offer courses to the general public—typically courses that are more text-based and extensive than the video-centric offerings commonly found on other types of platform. For example, my company, BetterRhetor, recently launched College-Ready Writing Essentials via Canvas, an LMS widely used by colleges and universities. In contrast to the one-student-at-a-time model, it is a teacher-facilitated resource for high school and college classroom use. Since it is hosted on a Web-accessed LMS, it’s available to any classroom anywhere.

Dedicated Platforms

Khan Academy is all over YouTube, as noted above, but they also make all of their videos available through their own website. Any student in the world can, for example, survey 20th Century History through a series of more than 50 video lessons for free on the Khan Academy site. Math, science, humanities, economics—it’s all there.

For-profit learning companies likewise offer education globally on their own dedicated platforms. At VIPKID, for example, home-based teachers located anywhere (again, many of them moonlighting) connect with individual students in China, who learn a traditional curriculum, but in English.

Many of the courses found on these teaching platforms are developed by individuals or entities with no formal accountability for their content—so, it’s buyer beware. Even so, independently developed online courses constitute a busy market connecting eager learners to enterprising teachers worldwide. Online learning platforms spread global education beyond the purview and confines of conventional models and institutions.

For more, see:

• 8 Trends Improving Student Options In Online Learning
• Agilix Announces Dawn to Provide Engaged Learning Anywhere

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