In colloquial language, the expression gold standard means that a certain method remains unsurpassed by all others. Therefore, it clearly illustrates the statement I would like to make here on the topic of “learning in the future”. Due to Covid, conditions have shifted massively. E-learning is displacing traditional learning and will probably completely disrupt the market for education and training forever.
I noticed this mainly through my Facebook profile. Since Corona has had a stranglehold on the country, the ads have changed drastically. While they used to be pretty trivial stuff, now really good things are coming in. Most of them have to do with one e-learning platform or another. I was really surprised at the beginning. Suddenly I started seeing commercials from Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, INSEAD University, and so on. These are arguably the best universities in the world. These have always been regarded as a haven for the elite, where normally only people who are either geniuses or come from rich backgrounds get access.
I do neither, so I was surprised to see these online-only offerings. Unbelievable! Because if you take one, you’ll have a degree from arguably one of the best universities in the world forever and ever. An opportunity not to be missed if you’re looking to make a really big career in business.
Since these advertisements have been seen, new ones with similar backgrounds have been appearing every week. Some of them include other highly respected institutes. However, there are also a lot of offers from non-accredited companies from China, India or Malaysia. If you do your online MBA there, you will of course have problems exploiting it. So you have to be careful on the web.
The bottom line is that the education market has changed. The range of e-learning and online training courses has grown massively. And because this is the case, many people will naturally ask themselves why they should actually spend a six-figure sum to get a bachelor’s degree at a great university when it is also available on the Internet for a fraction of the money. The advantage for us ordinary consumers is that there is now access to education that was previously difficult to obtain.
Furthermore, it is to be expected that more and more training will be offered for ever narrower niches. E-learning is not tied to location and in many cases not tied to time. Training material can be created and used over and over again. A course could theoretically have 10 or up to a million viewers. Everything is possible. Accordingly, the cost per participant is reduced to a minimum. In this way, it becomes feasible to offer very specialised seminars that have a relatively small circle of interested participants. They would nevertheless be fully profitable.