Content Creation vs Content Aggregation
[This is a part of series of essays on Epsilearn, an educational content aggregator I’m making. Here’s an intro explaining everything.]
You hear a lot about the internet and how it’s revolutionized education — the totality of mankind’s knowledge can be accessed on a device that can fit in your pocket. That is pretty cool.
However, I believe most of the internet’s disruptive potential for education has yet to be tapped.
Content Creation vs Content Aggregation
Look at the players in the EdTech space dedicated to online learning. You might find names like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udemy, and Pluralsight. These are amazing sites, and I’ve used all of them; a Pluralsight course on Unity is what got me into programming as a hobby.
They have another thing in common, which is that they produce all their content in house. That’s no easy feat, and it has it’s advantages — Khan Academy’s problem sets look simple on the surface, but under the hood an incredible amount of thought has been put into how they’re formatted and how they give feedback to students.
Khan Academy does an excellent job covering most academic subjects. If you’re a high school student, Khan Academy greatly eases your metacognitive burden: if you need to study something chances are it’s on Khan Academy. You won’t need to scour the internet for resources; all your AP prep, SAT practice, and calculus problems are in one place.
But this can’t scale. I took a Sociolinguistics class my fall quarter; Khan Academy had nothing on that. Looking for material to study for my midterm with, I eventually settled on a Quizlet set a friend found. This quarter, I learned a great deal of Linear Algebra off Khan Academy — but when I looked for practice problems, I was dismayed to find Khan Academy didn’t have any.
The bottom line is creating content in house doesn’t scale. Khan Academy, Coursera, Udemy, all the titans of online education falter before the gargantuan task of teaching literally everything. And if you, a humble student, venture outside the edenic garden of content Salman Khan so generously created, the full metacognitive burden of finding your own resources will bear upon your shoulders.
If everything’s a vertical, nothing is
We can think of Khan Academy as a “vertical”, a site that tries to be somewhat comprehensive. The opposite would be a horizontal, a space where resources are scattered, unorganized, and there’s no clear progression from one resource to another.
In a horizontal learning space, metacognitive burden is high. One site explains one concept to you, but you’re not sure where to look for more. Let’s say you were trying to learn Quantum Physics from Wikipedia. You load up the page on Quantum Physics, only to find you understand nothing. Where to start? Maybe the page on physics would be easier, but it’s so broad you learn nothing. Where to learn? Where to learn…
Contrast this to a vertical learning space, like a textbook or Khan Academy. You finish a set of exercises, and a pop-up shows up, directing you to a video building upon those concepts.
In recent years, a great amount of interest has been put into tech education. A lot of very smart people have dedicated themselves to teaching the world how to code — as a result, a ton of amazing resources have been created.
The problem is, they’re all trying to be their own “verticals.” That’s fine, but the whole point of a vertical is that it relieves metacognitive burden —so that it’s not hard to continue learning.
But all of these verticals are half-developed. Tyler McGinnis’ tutorials are amazing (I used quite a few to teach myself React), but if I wanted to go full-stack and learn Node.js/backend development afterwards, I’d have to seek out another site. The largest and most well developed tech verticals are sites like Pluralsight — which charge a hefty price. And even then, it’s not really a vertical. Imagine I finish learning Unity, React, Node, and C++ on Pluralsight, and want to learn some Linear Algebra so I can make an online matrix calculator. I’d have to find somewhere else to do that. Any time I spend finding a new site to learn from is metacognitive burden.
None of this is to mention the paradox of choice. There are a billion courses on front end development on the web, each trying to be their own vertical.
If everything’s a vertical, nothing is.
One vertical to rule them all…
Epsilearn is a content aggregator. We don’t do content creation.
Content creation has it’s advantages, and content creating sites like Khan Academy have brought educational opportunity to millions. But at the end of the day, they scale with labor. If you want more lessons on Khan Academy, you have to hire more people to make those lessons.¹ Same goes for Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, and the infinite front end development verticals. Labor is a terrible resource to scale with.
At the start of this essay I made the bold claim that most of the internet’s disruptive potential for education has yet to be tapped. That potential lies in the hundreds of thousands of content creators who make educational content for free, every day, on sites like Youtube and Medium. I taught myself React with articles off Hackernoon. I made an ML project at a hackathon with no prior AI experience, with a 20 minute video on neural networks and a Medium article on an ML library in Javascript. The kicker? People make these resources for free.
As part of my market research while making Epsilearn, I reached out to Codebasics, who runs a Youtube channel dedicated to teaching Python and Machine Learning. His videos all have great production value, and his instructive narration is reminiscent of Salman Khan’s — if you put them onto Khan Academy’s homepage, they’d look right at home.
He was generous enough to grant me an interview. On the phone, I asked him why he posted such great content for free.
His answer? “Because I like doing it, and I want to help people learn.”²
What Coursera, Udemy, and Pluralsight spend millions doing, ordinary people do every day on the web — for free. The problem is that all this content is “horizontal”; it’s scattered all over the web. There’s a high metacognitive burden required to find these hidden gems.
Epsilearn aims to collect scattered verticals and horizontal resources, and put them into one vertical. Imagine Khan Academy…but it has everything.
Conclusion
When it comes to the internet, pessimism is in. Facebook’s infinite data scandals, Amazon’s labor practices, Cambridge Analytica; it all looks like the internet’s sent the world to hell in a handbasket.
But for every Twitter bot spreading fake news, there’s someone like Codebasics making free educational content, just because. For every Flat-Earther following that Twitter bot, there’s an 8th grader learning to code for the first time from Youtube.
And maybe one day, that 8th grader will perfect an algorithm to defeat those Twitter bots.
At Epsilearn, we’re betting on the good in the internet. Big content creators like Khan Academy and Coursera have done lots of good for education. But they haven’t tapped into the internet’s greatest resource — passionate content creators who teach things for free.
More on Epsilearn
You can try the site right now! Go to epsilearn.co to give it a spin.
If you have a favorite educational resource you’d like to submit, you can do that here.
Here are more essays about Epsilearn:
Footnotes
- I suspect Khan Academy interns are hard at work adding Linear Algebra practice problems (hopefully they’ll finish that before I take my final).
- Paraphrased. Can’t really get an exact quote off a phone interview.
