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Why hyperspecific courses are the best!

The best way for students to learn asynchronously

I believe that AI is a game changer for education. But I doubt that the effect of chatbots will be the most important tool.

I never really understood what personalized learning meant. I thought it was just a buzzword.

In this post, I want to share my view on personalized learning, the role of AI and the greatest opportunity for online education.

Hyperspecific courses

What is a hyperspecific course?

Imagine you are studying for a math exam. You are stuck on some topics and start to search for help online.

Youtube is likely your best option. For every topic you need to find a video that is on your level and treats the problem in the way you are also taught at school / university. A positive outcome is not guarenteed though not unlikely. But in most cases you will spend more time searching for the right video and assessing it, than actually learning.

Alternatively, you can go to Udemy/Coursera/... and search for a course on the topic. But you will find a lot of courses that are not exactly what you are looking for. The 'Math for beginners' course will most likely only cover a small subset of the topics you are struggling with.

These are 'unspecific' courses. They are not tailored to your needs.

A hyperspecific course is a course that is exactly about the topics you are struggling with.

The perfect hyperspecific course was created by someone who recently stood at the same point as you. E.g. an older student from your university, who took the same course last year.

The advantages for students

  1. High trust: You can relate to the course and the teacher. You know that the teacher was in the same situation as you and probably knows better what to focus on.

  2. High efficiency: You do not spend hours searching for content instead of learning. The content is exactly on the level you need it to be.

The situation for teachers

Creating hyperspecific courses is a great opportunity for teachers. They can have the maximum possible positive impact on their students by niching down.

Among their target group, they enjoy little to no competition. They can charge a premium price for their course and still have a high conversion rate. Everybody would choose the course "Math for business students at the university of Münster" over the "Math for first year students" course.

I successfully created a hyperspecific course myself here is the story.

Of course the target group is very limited in comparison to a broader course. But they enable teachers with no following to instantly make sales because their offer is so much more attractive than the competition.

The opportunity for online education

I believe that hyperspecific courses are the best way for students to learn asynchronously. There should be courses like this for every topic and the demand is definitely there.

Demand is the problem?

The problem is that hyperspecific courses are time consuming and require a target group that is large enough to be worth it (at least > 400 potential students per year).

Work smarter not harder

I believe that collaboration between teachers is the solution. If there is a platform that allows teachers to seamlessly collaborate on courses, by slowly developing a large database of materials that are easy to edit and adjust, the time investment for creating a hyperspecific course is drastically reduced.

Teachers could transform from pure content creators to content curators.

In my opinion, we can enable personalized learning if we offer multiple ways of studying each topic to the student. Short videos, long videos, a lot of (interactive) practice problems, flashcards, documents.

This is too much work for only a few hundred teachers!

The role of AI

AI can help to create and curate content.

Generating quality flashcards is definitely possible. We ran a test that proved that humans were not able to differentiate between human and AI generated flashcards.

We can auto-translate all materials, even entire videos into different languages. This enables learning across multiple languages without the hustle of creating content for each language seperately.

There are so much more ways!

  • I created an AI-based video editor for educational videos that reduces the time investment for creating videos by 80% and allows for easy collaboration

  • automated assessment of complex tasks

  • and of course the good old AI-based chatbot

My vision

I think having an open-source database, that is constantly growing and improving, is the best way to facilitate hyperspecific courses and improve the quality of online education.

I go into greater detail in my vision for online education post.