2/ Why? Because grad+ courses massively benefit the teacher’s research. I designed and taught one such as a postdoc at Cornell back in 2006, and learned far more than I ever did as a student.
Undergrad service courses otoh, mainly teach logistics/presentation/packaging skills
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3/ It’s the enterprise/consumer difference: bespoke teaching relationships with 5-10 adults versus, mass-produced ones with 50 or 500 (let’s face it) kids.
I never taught UG courses but I TA’ed many large UG classes. I did learn a lot, but not things I was *looking* to learn.
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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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Strikes me grad seminars basically involve two things: (1) A small, smart, and focused group ready to learn together and (2) a commitment device for those people
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