Why you keep quitting online courses (and then buy more)

i'm sure many of you guys have had the experience when you go and buy an online course you are super excited about it as time goes on the intervals of you actually doing this course starts becoming longer and at some point you stop you quit then you feel very sad and you feel very guilty well you're not alone in this situation in fact for each course it's estimated between four and ten percent of people actually finish that course which is pretty bad now what if i tell you though that it's not actually your fault well it's like a little bit your fault but there's actually a lot more to it the people who make these online platforms these online courses may not actually be optimizing for the best experience as you know most of us live in a capitalist society and what that means is that companies are optimizing towards their shareholders making money for their shareholders so this is not a discussion about politics and capitalism but such is the case now hypothetically what is good for the shareholders and making money is also good for the consumer but this is not always the case especially when companies exploit what i call like bad human tendencies for example the tendency towards wanting to get that dopamine rush when you're scrolling through tick tock instagram or the way that gym memberships work people get really excited they want to change themselves and then eventually they stop going so in this video let's dive a little bit more into this why do so many people quit their online courses is it actually designed such that companies want you to quit your online courses and do stay until the end because after you understand how all this fits together i'm going to explain what it is that you can consciously do so that you stop quitting your online courses before i get started i just want to mention that i have a newsletter called boop's keyboard and it's about coding productivity and basically how to get your together so you should check it out if you haven't already linked in description also this video is sponsored by brilliant but more about them later in the video all right let's first let's learn a little bit about the background the idea of distance learning may seem like it's something that's pretty new like maybe in the late 90s 2000s 2010 something like that but actually it's been around for a really long time ever since the 19th century this is when postal offices became a thing the notion of reliable long-distance correspondence led to the development and implementation of what was called commercial correspondence colleges what this basically means is that because of the postal office people are able to communicate now across distances and very reliably so although i'm sure back in the early days people were also communicating with pigeons and something like that pigeons were doves i don't know how people communicated in the olden days but it only became a reliable thing in the 19th century and then tv became a thing and this was revolutionary in many different ways including distance learning tv classes started becoming a thing and on the kuht which is now called the houston pbs this was the first tv station in the us that started broadcasting educational material for both children and for adults and then came the technology that changed everything the internet and in the early 2010s some of our favorites started popping up it was udemy skillshare udacity coursera and many more after that as well this democratization of information of education began to really take off as of 2022 the us market for online learning is estimated at 200 billion dollars so with a lot of money to be made in this area slowly but surely investors came in the company started being developed and as i'll talk about a little bit later it became not necessarily about having the best experience possible but about how to make money i'm going to be focusing on

the most popular online learning platforms which also happens to be the ones that i have had the most experience with personally so that will be udemy skillshare udacity and coursera both started academia from universities all coming from online courses that were developed in school and for you to me in skillshare i dug a little bit more into their histories and found that it was quite interesting because both of them had a pretty dramatic pivot udemy was first developed as a live virtual classroom and then it became what we know today which is the super low cost online platform which for some reason is constantly at 90 sales and for skillshare which kind of positions itself as more about the creative stuff it started off as 15 self-paced online courses in which students were meant to collaborate with each other to produce a final project but now they change it to a subscription-based model in which you have access to an entire catalog for i believe 14 a month 16 a month something like that so why this shift from these virtual online classrooms as well this

group-based self-paced learning which research has shown by the way are the vital components of what makes a good learning environment well very simple because there is much more money to be made because it scales much better virtual classroom self-paced courses that have projects involved these are great learning tools but they don't scale well so instead of focusing on making the best learning experience possible which a big metric determined this is focusing on the completion rates they instead decided to focus on what brings in more money which is getting more online courses into the platform and lowering costs so that it's more attractive to more students and this really impacted the quality of online learning to the point where the completion rates now are estimated between four to ten percent completion like if you look at udemy's website its tagline is literally save big learn more it has 185 000 video courses which is priced extremely low at nine dollars ten dollars and twenty dollars and udemy is absolutely notorious for using that marketing trick of marking a way down from courses that are supposed to cost 150 100 and in order to scale faster they really needed to build up that catalog of courses they can attract more people so pretty much anybody can be an instructor and actually the quality of these courses declined and for skillshare which started off as that project-based learning for more creative skills like drawing public speaking entrepreneurship and because they also wanted to be competitive in this market it became all about trying to get as much catalogue as possible which similarly if you keep lowering the standards of people so now at this point everybody can be an instructor then it also decrease the quality of these courses it's also subscription based which as another marketing thing it makes you feel like it's really worth it if you're able to access all of these different courses for only 14 a month a caveat here is for udemy and for skillshare i'm not saying that all these courses are terrible there are very good courses on there and they can be very great value but because of the quality issue you also get a bunch of courses this was enforced by the market skillshare and udemy they became huge people think it's a better deal where there's access to a lot of different courses and the cheaper it is the better it is right so of course these companies are like wow this is doing so well so we should focus on doing this more we should get more courses and we should cut more costs they invest a lot of money into marketing to get more instructors and they keep lowering that barrier of entry so that more and more instructors are able to get on and they can increase their catalog and to cut costs more obviously the more expensive stuff like group learning all these different things actually make courses good they all got cut so now bring this together you kind of get a glimpse now of why it is that you keep quitting your online courses well firstly because it's not optimized in order to get a great learning experience it's optimized in order to capture more market share and to make investors money and you think you're getting a better deal by having all of these courses available to you but there's actually something called the paradox of choice because you have all these courses available to you then you're like i don't know which course is supposed to be the best so then you buy a bunch of them and you jump from course to course like me personally i literally have like 30 plus courses from you to me because it's so cheap in my opinion these online platforms they also exploit this idea of self-improvement if you think about it logically if the completion rate is four to ten percent assuming that you're like an average person you probably don't complete more of your courses so why is it that you keep coming back well it's similar to a gym membership you have this huge desire to improve yourself so even though that you buy a course and you don't actually do it but you're like i need to improve myself that's the same mentality as people who keep getting gym memberships and never end up going so now that i have chat enough on skillshare and on youtube let us now circle back to coursera and udacity i must say that coursera and udacity are a lot better in terms of a business model um than skillshare and udemy there still is that competition of trying to increase the number of courses possible in your catalog because that's attractive to people but unlike udemy and skillshare it doesn't compete as much on trying to lower the price as much as possible so the quality of these courses are a lot higher it's more about justifying the cost by adding on more services udacity for example has these nano degrees and because it actually partners with different companies people who graduate from that company are able to then apply for those companies in order to get a job so this is how udacity is able to justify itself at dollars per month or its other one which is a thousand nine hundred ninety five dollars for a four month course access and coursera takes a step even further while udacity partners with different companies it's not an accredited degree that you get but for coursera there's actually certificates that companies and universities recognize like for the google ones there's 39 per month and for some of them you also pay a little bit more for a final exam but this is recognized by google as like a four-year degree and you attend these online degrees for universities you actually end up getting a degree from that university so it's kind of justified if you pay something like two thousand three thousand dollars or even up to twenty six thousand dollars for the mcit course that i took because compared to the actual on-campus one which cost me over a hundred thousand dollars without including rent and food and living expenses it's totally more worth it isn't it so how does the course completion rate of these higher cost better learning environment courses um compared to udemy and skillshare well of course companies don't really want to publicize as much because you know like the numbers are not the best and they kind of try to manipulate a little bit so with a grain of salt over here coursera says that in terms of its paid students 55. 4 graduate but then there's also a bunch of independent studies that were done and one in 2009 said if you don't differentiate between the paid students and the non-paid students um you end up getting around 15 which i guess is still higher than the four to ten percent so from personal perspective i'm gonna be honest with you guys i have also quit a lot of udacity courses and coursera courses but i guess if you compare that to the udemy courses of the skillshare courses i could it is less so if i were to rate these different learning platforms i would say that udacity is probably the best because the way that it does is marketing the way it is that it's trying to optimize for is less so about lowering cost as well as trying to increase his catalog as much as possible it's more about the results the number of people who graduate who get jobs in the end and things like that so while i was digging through the information on these different learning platforms i did also notice something that was very interesting from a financial side none of these online learning platforms are actually profitable coursera and udemy are public companies so these figures are published and it is for sure not profitable and for udacity and skillshare they're private companies but the estimate is that they're probably not profitable either in fact like a fifth to a third of the revenue that they're making is pretty much just put directly back into marketing okay now that we've kind of seen how online platforms online courses are not exactly targeted towards making the best learning experience possible which is why you often end up quitting your courses so what to do about this so i'm not saying that you should only do courses from udacity and coursera because they are a lot more expensive and also it's not like they're completely optimized for trying to make the best learning experience possible anyway um as most of its money is going to marketing but luckily there are a lot of things that you can do and it all centers around taking back control now that you understand how these companies operate how these courses operate you're able to take that control back to yourself in my opinion the first thing that you should do is get yourself out of that marketing scheme that they are trying to get you to buy into don't just be like this course is super cheap and this course is free so let me get all of them you should choose the courses that you're genuinely interested in and really just stick with those courses and if you have the ability it's okay to spend a little bit more money in order to get a better quality and the second thing i recommend

is to add back to qualities of good online learning that were lost and a hint of what it was like what udemy was at the very beginning a virtual classroom and what skillshare was in the beginning a group-based project-based learning method the way that i solve this issue is by live streaming myself so that i'm able to have that community based around me and i do try to work with other people in order to do projects but that doesn't really work that well but i do try my best in order to choose courses that are project-based or at least find my own projects to do so that i can apply to things that i learned and to make this a little bit more formal there were actually quite a lot of frameworks that were developed that talk about like what is considered a good learning experience a good online learning experience and one of them is study by the university of central florida and what you want to have is engaged learning an environment that promotes people to understand what it is that they're learning to be able to practice things to apply things you also want agency which is the feeling that you have control over the environment and also what you want is assessment which is how quickly instructors respond this one is a little bit hard you either have to pay for the more expensive course or you find someone who is able to guide you who's a little bit more experienced so i came up with my methods of how to incorporate these good learning techniques back into these online courses but there are a lot of other ways of doing this as well so now that you know what the ingredients are to make a good online experience what are the things that you think you can add onto it so that in the future you don't quit your online courses as much so one platform that i think also does a really good job on not trying to focus so much on the marketing side on the like cutting cost things like that and really trying to focus on the actual learning experience is brilliant who is kindly sponsoring today's video thank you brilliant is a stem learning platform that specializes in interactive hands-on learning this is less scalable which is also why brilliant has less courses available but the quality of these courses are so much higher brilliant is really about how to engage the audience better which is especially powerful for stem learning they have timeless course offerings like math and stats programming with python as well as new course offerings to explore topics like neural network and quantum computing you can join the millions of people who are already learning on brilliant and head over to this link over here also linked in description if you go through my link the first 200 people will get 20 off an annual membership which in my opinion is seriously so worth it i'm not gonna lie and say that i finish every single brilliant course i have done but my completion rate for these brilliant courses is much higher and i also feel like when i study something on brilliant i also leave with an understanding of how it is i can actually apply to things that i learned alright that is all that i have for you guys today i will see you guys in next video we're live streaming