Content is Dead. Long live Content.

On the future of educational content amidst an explosion of AI generated learning material.

Everyday, on the platform Udemy alone, over 100 new courses are published. At the end of 2024, Udemy was publishing around 5000 new courses every month. And that is just one online platform. It’s a fraction of the amount of learning content generated online and offline.

We are swimming in learning content and we are just at the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible with the rise of generative AI.

Of course, higher education serves many purposes other than just “delivering” content. We all know that there is intrinsically more to any learning journey than just the course material, but instructional quantity (and hopefully quality) remain the primary yardstick by which we compare learning institutions.

So what happens, when the ability to create learning material drops to almost zero? Paradoxically, while content’s production value is commoditized, its role in the learning experience deepens. This is because the role of content in the learning experience fundamentally changes. Educational content is no longer the product: it is the substrate on which practice, assessment, and credible signals of capability are built. Yet the quality of that product as a medium of the experience matters a lot.

Content is Dead

The production of content is less valuable because it is commoditized. The value in content creation accrues to those with the advantages in content aggregation and distribution not the producers of the content. These players do so via their brand (pull) and network (push).

The more established brands will find it easier to attract learners to their courses in a sea of apparent sameness. Critically, brand will matter because employers recognize it, not only because learners like it. The aggregation is not just that of content but that of trust.

Similarly, players with the right network and ready distribution channels (physical and digital) will be better positioned to deliver content to a large audience. The distribution to a large audience itself creates a valuable flywheel of it creates the proprietary data needed to keep improving the content production and delivery processes. This becomes a key differeniator for content created with and on top of the foundational models that everybody has access to.

Long Live Content

This commoditization will in turn force us to redefine the content to encompass the entire product and experience. We will shift away from just thinking about a course for learning to a learning product.

Some of this will be about applying the latest technology (AR/VR, AI, Metaverse, [insert buzzword]), but more importantly it should be about building a better learning platform that redefines the experience and journey. In the end, the biggest impact of this shift is enabling simulated work and more project-based learning, not just better “personalized” explanations.

Naturally, we don’t learn alone. The learning experience will continue to expand to include other factors like community and after care services. Providers who reconceive the learning journey beyond the traditional bounds of content (alone or more likely by working with others) will win.

Bundling & Unbundling

A wise man once said that all innovation is about bundling or unbundling, in many ways this seems like both an unbundling and bundling moment for education. Content production itself might be unbundled but big parts of the learning experience could be bundled together to redefine what learning means.

My expectation is that we will see many players specialize across some of the key aspects of the learning journey like assessment, credentialing and content. A helpful analogy here is from the gaming industry where we might have certain institutions building the consoles (where the learning happens), others building the games that go on top (the course content itself), and others building the memory sticks we used to take around in the 90s (the assessment and credentialing layers).

If you don’t know what this is…ask your parents

In a world where content is both ubiquitous and devalued, its true importance lies not in its creation but in its orchestration. As the cost of production plummets and the abundance of material surges, the real differentiators will be how learning providers curate, contextualize, and scaffold content into coherent, motivating, and verifiable learning experiences. Content, once king, is now the terrain—what matters is how well learners can navigate it.

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I hope you enjoyed the last edition of Nafez’s Notes.

I’m constantly refining my personal thesis on innovation in learning and education. Please do reach out if you have any thoughts on learning - especially as it relates to my favorite problems.

If you are building a startup in the learning space and taking a pedagogy-first approach - I’d love to hear from you. I’m especially keen to talk to people building in the assessment space.

Finally, if you are new here you might also enjoy some of my most popular pieces:

• The Gameboy instead of the Metaverse of Education - An attempt to emphasize the importance of modifying the learning process itself as opposed to the technology we are using.

• Using First Principles to Push Past the Hype in Edtech - A call to ground all attempts at innovating in edtech in first principles and move beyond the hype

• We knew it was broken. Now we might just have to fix it - An optimistic view on how generative AI will transform education by creating “lower floors and higher ceilings”.