The New Education Whales

Once upon a time, logging into class from your home would have sounded like a crazy fairy tale. Fast-forward to now, and that fairy tale has become everyday life.

Digital learning has sprinted from the edges into the spotlight of education and career training. Back in 2012, maybe a couple million people across the globe gave an online course a whirl. Fast-forward to 2023, and that number has risen to 220 million learners enrolled in MOOCs alone, with Coursera, edX, and Udemy steering the caravan. Industry surveys nearly corroborate that story: over 70% of students now believe online coursework is every bit as good, or even superior, to face-to-face classes, chiefly for the coveted prize of schedule freedom.

Flexibility, in fact, is the headline. Online classes invite students to set the clock and take part despite having complex schedules. Distance has vanished as well—a statistic any campus loyalist should consider: a software engineering tutorial in San Francisco is virtually the same whether you’re clicking “enrol” in Santiago, Nairobi, or New York, and the same Stanford professor is taping the same lecture.

Of course, it’s not all roses and sunshine. Discipline dominates the field while online learning has graduated from experiment to the new baseline, permanently altering how each of us graphs education from start to finish.