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4/ The free-agent world is developing its own maturing educational activities. A distinction is emerging between people who put together courses for things like SEO/SEM, Blogging 101, Productivity 101, etc. which are like UG service courses, and weird “grad seminar” types.
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5/ In this world btw, the zillions of hours of great YouTube instructional videos are like K-12. It’s great and free since you mostly can’t charge for it.
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6/ But anyway, though I’ve done a bunch of teaching/online course experiments, I’ve realized something: I really don’t like teaching the equivalent of “undergrad service courses”. I’m not good at it, and don’t care to learn the skills (logistics, scale, packaging) it teaches.
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7/ But the opportunity to design/teach grad school type things that would advance your own research/writing projects is severely supply limited. People who could use it are mostly already at real grad schools, taking seminars from Real Tenured Faculty ™
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8/ So the interesting challenge for the free-agent world is to develop the equivalent of grad school run by Fake, Untenured, Nonfaculty ™ I jokingly call this the “Not Even a Diploma Mill” problem.
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9/ If we leave out “new economy” service/101 type courses, what’s left? Two kinds of educational material. 1. Things that compete directly with graduate school on cost (1/10th) but don’t offer “extras” 2. “Weird” topics that would never get taught in universities at all
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10/ Many of us could teach the equivalent of an MBA level marketing or org psych course at 1/10th the cost. Maybe with some boutique idiosyncrasies. But then you take such courses for the Stanford/MIT networks, not the material). The material is pretty DIY+experience tbh.
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11/ That leaves Weird Topics as the ideal market for a free agent grad-school type world of courses. and I tried one such, an idiosyncratic ribbonfarm writing course that was neither Writing 101, nor Blogging 101, nor graduate creative writing at a univ.
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12/ It was great and I think we learned far more than any of the participants, which I how it should be for grad-seminar type teaching. I have many lazy ideas, based on my writing, for other Weird Topics grad-level courses (thinking with 2x2s, OODA loopology, fat thinking...)
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Replying to
Where does the learning come from? Or, in other words, what are the necessary preconditions? Do the students have to pay/be invested, or would it work as free courses?
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