Why We're Here
Online learning has long been one of the cornerstones and main benefits of technology. Every year more and more people turn to learning online as a way to up-skill, change careers, or simply learn something new. Regardless of age, location, and level of expertise, great online learning has been a long awaited promise in the minds of many.
Unfortunately, this long-awaited land has never reached its full potential. Always in sight, but never truely tangible, the vision of a personalised learning experience has become more of a jaded myth, than a real thing to build and back.
Why is this? One of the largest problems to solve in learning has always been the sheer amount of content needed for a personalised experience. If everyone learns differently, ever piece of content (in theory) needs to be different in order to achieve the perfect content-student match. The classic example of this is one teacher to 30 children. The distribution or access to expertise has long been a bottle neck in better learning. To solve this "access-to-content" problem, many companies turned to marketplaces as a way to outsource and mass produce content. This temporarily solved the "access-to-content" problem, but also introduced some fatal flaws that stop online learning from reaching it's full potential.
Fatal flaw #1 - The learning experience of a student is completely outsourced.
By relying on third party creators to populate a content bank, learning giants have outsourced the most important part of the student experience; the actual learning journey. These companies are missing out on understanding the incredible nuances of when someone has learnt a new concept, not understood a lesson, or just quit of sheer boredom. Furthermore, they have no control to update or adjust this content, even if they did have that data.
Fatal flaw #2 - Access to content does not mean learning.
One of the great misconceptions of online learning is that simply having access to content is enough. In fact, a great learning experience is made up of three parts; new knowledge, application, and social validation. We call this "the learning loop." Having access to new knowledge is a good start, but can lead to confusion, overwhelm, and disappointment if not properly curated for a particular student. It doesn't lead to a true learning experience at all unless combined with application of knowledge, followed by social validation from peers or the market.
The introduction of AI changes all of this. Content creation will increase rapidly to the point where creating content about any skill, in thousands of different ways, will be the norm. In this future, the value is no longer in creating content...it is the ability to accurately match up the right piece of content with the right student, at exactly the moment they need it, as they learn.
Fatal Flaw #3 - Online Learning is lonely
Online learning today is an incredibly lonely experience. By nature learning something new will involve some struggle which the student needs to overcome. This is a wonderful part of a learners' hero's journey and should be celebrated. At this point of struggle, having no one else around to work with or to empathise can be really painful and lead to students giving up. Learning online often resembles an exam scenario at school; you can't ask anyone for help, you're on your own, and a lot of the time you don't know if you're right or wrong. Not fun.
Fatal Flaw #4 - Industry has trust issues with online learning
Largely due to the number of self-made course available online, it has become difficult to judge the objective quality of an online course. Employers and peers don't understand and therefore don't trust the skill-set that completing an online course guarantees. Course completion badges and certificates are quickly losing value in the market due to a lack of transparency about what skills are actually gained during a course, and how proficient a student is at that skill. Participation awards are not enough.
Fatal Flaw #5 - Learning today is detached from reality
The most concerning problem with learning in general is it's ever-increasing detachment from reality. We seem to have lost sight of what the purpose of learning really is. At it's core, the reason we learn to solve problems. The "ivory tower problem" refers to this separation. When scholars or educators operate in their own exclusive spheres - "ivory towers" - their theories and knowledge is developed without being connected or informed by real-world challenges. This has lead to mass detachment from practical skills, outdated curricula, academic-politics over industry results, and limited real-world exposure for students. Employers point out a skills gap and growing skill irrelevance in recent graduates, while students complain about not being able to get jobs and pass recruitment screening. Innovation among younger generations is tanking despite leaps in breakthroughs in AI, biotech, and quantum computing. We need to recenter learning around the value it brings to society and the real-world problems that learning a new skill solves.
Our Mission
This is why we decided to start NextWork. We wanted to re-envision the learning experience, for any topic. Our mission is to create the world's best learning experience for any vocational skill. By doing this we hope to meet the ongoing skill demand required to solve our greatest challenges, specifically the development of AI, then unlimited renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, housing, aging population.
Solving these problems without a significant leap in pace of learning will be extremely challenging. Even if we eventually solve these issues with our current skill supply, the time needed would result in the suffering of millions of individuals who would benefit from such problems being solved sooner.
Here's how we're creating the world's best learning experience:
- Deliver a beautiful UX that laser focuses you on learning.
- Perfect getting exactly the right content, at the right moment, for you.
- Build the world's best learning community and support.
- Create stunning and trusted ways to showcase your skills as you learn.
The Path
We're starting with teaching AWS and plan to expand to other topics as we grow. Over the past six months we've been happy to see how much our vision has resonated with other learners around the world. Since releasing the first version of NextWork in July focused entirely on AWS, we have had tens of thousands of people sign up. We have received countless messages of love, including students running events to promote NextWork, and making their own NextWork merch to share with friends.
Today thousands of people actively use NextWork to learn AWS. We are especially excited about this traction given the number of existing cloud and AWS specific learning platforms. Many of our top students have mentioned that they have come to NextWork directly from one of these existing platforms specifically for the quality NextWork provides in learning experience, community, and content.
"I don't think I'll ever leave NextWork. If I do, it won't be because of me...I love being here because I'm always learning and I have an identity. "
"I'm currently the facilitator of a cohort of an AWS Cloud Engineering program. I saw how valuable your resources are in terms of hands-on learning. I assigned my trainees to complete all projects on NextWork before the cohort ends. "
"NextWork has been essential in bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. A huge thank you to NextWork for providing me with AWS projects that helped me gain invaluable hands-on experience with AWS services. "
We are always looking for people who believe in the mission of building the world's best learning experience. Reach out anyway you can, we'd love to chat.
See you in the future.
