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Last month, Coursera published a podcast with Dhawal Shah, our founder, where he discussed the MOOC hype era, why platforms like Coursera, edX, and Udacity grew exponentially, and what today’s courses miss (and need). But first, he shares how his journey with online courses began, with his venture.
Class Central was a side project. Over a Thanksgiving weekend, I thought, “I need to just create a simple GitHub project, make a list of all the courses with start dates and end dates”. 2012 was the year of the MOOC. So I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I wasn’t thinking of it as a business. I was just having fun exploring.
Dhawal mentioned witnessing the beginning of every large, medium, and small online education platform, and how amazing it was to see courses and communities evolve.
“The courses were being created while they were in progress. If the first week was going on, they were shooting the second week. You could say something, and it made it to the next videos. A lot of early adopters, even if they knew the topic, were like, “Hey, even if we’re pretty good at AI and other topics, we still want to be part of that community.”
A huge distinction was the passion instructors had back then to teach and adapt to the transition.
“Barbara Oakley built a studio in her basement for around $5,000, got her husband to record the videos, and got her family involved to do other aspects. This was similar to other professors who bought their own cameras and tried to do their own thing.”
Then, Dhawal moved on to the monetizing era — a phase of several trials and errors.
“I think they were all trying to figure out; they all had a seed of ‘this is what people want’ or ‘some people want this’ as opposed to ‘this is what the world wants.’ They had to do a lot of experimentation to get to where they are. I saw a few experiments that Coursera, Udacity, or edX did. There was parity in how platforms with hundreds of courses monetize, versus what some smaller platforms charge.”
He also mentions how integrating global, leading companies into the platforms was a pivotal move, but also a product of failed experiments.
“There were a few failed attempts at the beginning to get companies involved. I think Udacity had Google partnerships very early on, but the exact packaging and branding, I think, Coursera cracked it by framing it as professional certificates and career certificates.”
Moving on to scaling online courses, Dhawal shared his fears about using AI to increase the quantity of courses, which means a decrease in their quality.
“My worry is people will focus too much on trying to scale too quickly, and put in a lot of generic audio, video, PowerPoint slides with video over it. Seeing a human professor who’s an expert in the field connects you with the content. I think it’s the quirkiness of instructors that makes you feel like you’re in the same room with them.”
This brought him to discuss a major challenge that online platforms haven’t solved for yet — motivation.
“Julius Stiglitz, who founded another edtech company, says, “I want to and I can.” While online learning solves a big part of the “I can” problem, “I want to” still requires a lot of interventions. Learning is often a hard process. The way the motivation problem is solved is through more structure, more instruction, mentorship, but then suddenly the price jumps up, and that makes it inaccessible. Class Central’s mission is to make online education work for everyone, which is a high-level goal.”
Read the Transcript Here
Arun (Host): It’s always better if you try to do something, fail, and then somebody gives you the answer as opposed to somebody just giving you the answer. Learning is a journey, not a destination.
Welcome to the Coursera podcast, where we have conversations with renowned experts and industry leaders to explore global trends impacting the future of education and work. I’m your host, Arun Vasa, vice president of global communications at Coursera.
Over the last decade, MOOCs—massive open online courses—have gone from bold experiment to a transformative force in global education. How did we get here, and what’s next as AI and new technologies continue to reshape the way we learn? We will dig into all that today.
Joining us is Dhawal Shah, the founder and CEO of Class Central, a platform millions of learners use to find and review online courses. Dhawal has been following the online learning space since its very beginning and has incredible insights on how it has evolved, where it is going, and what it means for learners everywhere.
Dhawal, welcome to the Coursera podcast. We are excited to have you.
Dhawal: Thank you, Arun. It’s great to be here. It’s almost been 12 years since someone from Coursera interviewed me, and I didn’t get the job. Great to be back here again.
Arun: Yeah, this is even better. You’ve been deeply involved in the online learning space since the very beginning. In fact, I came to this field in 2016, and you were one of the first people I met, and I was completely startled by how you have catalogued the history and how many insights you have. You’ve really seen some of the founders starting these online ventures, which have gone on to become platforms for the world in many ways. Can you share how your journey with online education started and what inspired you to launch Class Central?
Dhawal: Class Central was a side project. I had just graduated from my master’s in computer science from Georgia Tech, and I couldn’t clear technical interviews in Silicon Valley. So I eventually found a job in Dallas, and I was trying to look at online resources to learn about data structures and algorithms. The platforms today are much more evolved, but back then, there weren’t that many resources or structural resources.
So right around that time, Stanford, at that time, we didn’t know about Coursera, Udacity, or edX—Stanford offered free courses. It was mid-2011 or something. There was ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’, and there was ‘Database and Machine Learning’ from Andrew Ng, the Coursera co-founder. So these courses just launched very ad hoc; a simple website, simple announcement, and I was taking one of them. And while I was taking this course, more and more courses were popping up.
And over a Thanksgiving weekend, I thought, “Oh, I need to just create a simple GitHub project, make a simple list of all the courses with start dates and end dates so I can just sort it by start date and know which ones I’m taking when.” At that time, they were very close to university courses put online—structure-wise, semester patterns, hard deadlines. So, scheduling was much more important.
So I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I launched it with a comment on Hacker News, and if people remember the history, 2012 was the year of the MOOC. So I just happened to be that person who, from a course perspective and from an industry perspective, would write, “Hey, these many courses are launched. This is how many enrollments they have.” Google+ was popular then. So now I post on LinkedIn, but back then I was posting on Google+. It had more formatting options and more ways to do things. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I wasn’t thinking of it as a business. I was just having fun exploring social media. Everything was new back then. I was doing those courses. I actually interviewed at both Coursera and Udacity. I didn’t get a job there, but eventually I did a Stanford course from Tim Roughgarden on Coursera, Data Structures and Algorithms, and that helped me get my first job in Silicon Valley.
Once you’re in Silicon Valley, there are no side projects, you’re a CEO. So eventually I started looking for opportunities to work on it full-time, and I eventually got into an incubator. Finally, at the end of 2013, I quit my job and have been working on Class Central since then.
Arun: It was very clear that God had other plans for you, and you turned that setback into an opportunity which has now become a resource for people around the world. You’ve done an incredible job with what you’ve created.
But back in early 2010 and 2012, which you’re talking about, that window, online courses were seen as revolutionary in many ways, and you became a beneficiary of that as well. What was it like in those early days, and what do you think drove that initial popularity, despite the fact that you mentioned that initially the courses had hard deadlines, hard cohorts, and all of that, yet it became so popular?
Dhawal: I’ll compare it to the same Tim Roughgarden course that was available on Stanford Engineering Everywhere or something like that, but the video was recorded in class. So that era was when we were just transitioning from OCW, and for our audience, OCW means Open Courseware. OCW is not made for online learning. It’s in-class content recorded and just put online. They’re pretty useful, but you might not have access to assignment resources and other things. It didn’t feel like you were taking the course.
But as soon as Coursera, Udacity, and edX launched, it felt like you were getting access to a university course, and you were getting access to the same course that somebody offline gets. You can do the assignments, there’s grading, homework, and there’s a huge community. So I think it was the allure of, “Hey, you can take a course online from Stanford, you can take a course online from MIT”, all these great universities. And obviously this was a bit of a hype era. The media also started promoting it, and there was so much coverage in 2012 about how universities were going to be disrupted. There were fewer courses, so they got a lot of enrollments, but there was also a marketing media environment that helped these companies reach a much bigger audience than they would have organically.
And I think people were just starving for the right resource, the right knowledge, the right structure. Back then there was another aspect—the courses were made while the course was going on. Episode one was happening, the first lecture and first week were going on, and they were shooting the second week. So there was a feedback loop that you could say something and it would make it into the next videos. And some of the professors were in the forums. There was this early energy, and a lot of early adopters, even if they knew the topic, were like, “Hey, even if I’m pretty good at AI or those topics, I still want to be part of that community.” So I think that helped create this sort of change from OCW to courses that are made for online audiences. I think that was the big difference.
Arun: And I think it was also the allure, tell me if I’m wrong, of access to some of the most renowned professors from some of the best universities. Now suddenly somebody in India or Africa or Latin America has access to Andrew Ng’s course, which was iconic in many ways.
Dhawal: Yeah. Aspiration played a huge role. When I applied to come to the US to study, I didn’t even apply to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. I just self-selected myself out. Most people don’t even apply because they know they’re not going to get in. And now you’re getting access to the same instructors who are putting their energies online and getting access to similar assignments.
I think there’s a TED talk by Daphne Koller back then where she showed that activity actually went up on the weekend. She showed a graph because activity went up on the weekend, because we were all on the forums doing the assignments and homework. Because it had hard deadlines or sometimes softer deadlines—”Yeah, you can submit now, but if you submit a bit later, you’ll get some points cut off”—there was always a hard deadline. So that made all of us come to the forums, and the forums had a lot of energy there.
Arun: Got it. And then you also saw that suddenly the popularity led to the creation of certain platforms and companies. Coursera, edX, and Udemy all came around the same time frame, but they all carved up their unique paths in online learning, each shaping the space in different ways, and they took different approaches. What have been the most pivotal moments in their evolution, and what stands out as the most impactful for learners?
Dhawal: I think they were all trying to figure out; they all had a seed of “this is what people want” or “some people want this,” as opposed to “this is what the world wants.” They always had that seed, and they had to do a lot of experimentation to get to where they are.
For example, I remember the first specialization that Coursera launched, I think it was from Johns Hopkins about data science or something. And I think for them, that was the pivotal moment in monetization, where they started monetizing. So I think there were a lot of little experiments. The core model was validated from a user perspective, but there was the packaging of how to get to the learner, how to monetize, and what’s important to the learner. I think there was a lot of learning from video recording. Universities or professors who were recording themselves had to develop their skills.
I remember this moment at a Coursera conference in UC Irvine or some place, where my colleague and I interviewed 10-plus professors who taught on Coursera over 2 days, and we published some of the posts on the blogs. It was very interesting to hear that as soon as they came in, Coursera obviously had professional videographers, some of them started asking questions about the camera and about certain aspects of recording. So you could see a lot of these early adopters. Barbara Oakley is famous, right? She built her studio in her basement. So they all had to develop media and semi-media expertise. The early adopters didn’t have as many resources from universities initially, so they had to develop it themselves. So it was very interesting to see them ask those questions about media and recording from Coursera’s experts. You could tell they were very passionate about the topic and the domain and teaching online, and they really cared about the experience.
So those kinds of experiences shaped the product little by little. And monetization was obviously important. It was pretty much free for the first year, two years, or something, so they had to be sustainable. So that was a lot of little experiments I saw Coursera do, Udacity do, edX do. And I think you all learned from each other. So you come to a point where, monetization-wise, there’s parity in how you monetize, what you charge, and what the scale models, which have hundreds or thousands of courses, charge versus what some smaller platforms with dozens of courses charge. So there’s much more variation. And now you see the variation sort of collapse as people have figured out the right pricing for the right product to a certain extent.
Arun: And also the fact that the first versions were often courses which were shot in the class, professors instructing students in classrooms, and that were put online with some packaging, and later some of the instructors who understood that if you have to succeed in this medium, you have to have an online-first mindset and have some level of production in order to succeed and resonate with the audience.
Dhawal: And they had to develop their own skills because I don’t think the universities had that capability back then. So they had to, like Barbara Oakley building a studio in her basement for $5,000, getting her husband to record the videos, getting her family involved to do other aspects. Similar to other professors who bought their own cameras and tried to do their own thing. And eventually universities, as it got bigger, I think more universities took control of centralizing some of these aspects and giving the resources to professors. Because not everybody would want to learn about videography just to teach online. So I think taking care of those aspects and letting the professors or instructors focus on what they do best, the domain expertise, and building learning experts and other things around them, allows for more courses.
As much as the success of educators is from an institutional perspective, it is also a success of individuals. And a big part of the success of the online movement lies on the shoulders of people like Barbara Oakley and Laurie Santos and Dr. Chuck and all of them who brought their unique personality and connected with a worldwide audience and developed a fan following, which was unprecedented for professors.
Arun: Yeah. Especially back then, I remember a lot of professors would say because the courses were smaller, they would get recognized in real life, which is pretty unique for professors.
Dhawal: That’s right.
Arun: I want to change gears and move along the timeline a little bit. So the widespread adoption of online learning created the opportunity to make education accessible to everyone, as we established in our prelude. But following universities, even leading companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM launched courses and became educators, which was another very pivotal point in the evolution of online learning. And seeing them, universities also became much more agile and responsive to the demand of what learners are looking for and started creating content at a much faster rate. For example, last year, universities launched as many as 650 courses on Coursera, which is unprecedented in many ways, and a lot of them are in these high-demand areas like GenAI, leadership, creativity, resilience, change management, all of that.
Dhawal: I think with the companies aspect, there were a few failed attempts at the beginning to get companies involved. I think Udacity had Google partnerships very early on and tried that, but maybe the exact packaging and branding, I think Coursera cracked it by framing it as professional certificates and career certificates. But I’ve seen those experiments over the years. Udacity also launched with AT&T for the Georgia master’s online, but it didn’t work for Udacity, and they finally split off. So I think it’s something that took more than half a decade for Coursera to get right. At a high level, it looks the same, but at some point, you had to figure out the exact packaging, exact product. And so that was very interesting to see that cycle. People probably forgot that this was a failed experiment, and new people came in, and they had more energy and different ideas, and they were not influenced by the past experiences, and they were able to crack it.
Coursera, IBM, Meta, and all these certificates and getting them to—probably there’s a lot of logistics behind the scenes. Putting a logo is easy, but getting them to create content, and maybe you had more capacity now than six, seven years ago to execute on that. So I think probably a number of factors had to come into play before companies could really launch courses that could be at scale.
I think it’s always interesting to see. I always felt like universities can teach you more conceptual things, like the ideas behind data science, as opposed to the specific tool. So trying to design UX/UI—trying more around the concepts and the framework of thinking, while external non-university creators can be more specific to teaching you the tools to do it. So trying to see how that space evolves, how they figure out what’s best for them, what can you teach best as opposed to trying to teach everything.
Arun: If you look back in retrospect, do you think online learning delivered on its original promise of what it stood for, and are there still barriers to overcome?
Dhawal: I think some of the barriers still exist. I think motivation is still a problem. I think content exists, certification exists. I think the motivation of doing something—imagine if I want to learn Rust programming, which I want to. Sure, I can find a lot of guides and tutorials, but to really learn it, I need to spend 50 to 100-plus hours, and most of them should not be passive, watching a video or just doing a quiz. I have to put in my own energy and projects and all that. So I think that’s something that’s still difficult to crack.
And the way the motivation problem is solved is through more structure, more instruction, mentorship, but then suddenly the price jumps up. Suddenly a human is semi-involved, and suddenly the cost of the programs makes it inaccessible. So you have the scale versus completion rate issue. Completion rate is low, but actually that’s low because more people are getting into it, but as soon as you increase the completion rate, the actual number of people getting out of the program is significantly lower. So you’ve created problems.
So I never liked the argument around completion itself. There are many books that all of us buy and never read. That doesn’t make it the book’s fault in some cases, it’s just how we are structured, how our lives are structured in the current era. So I think that’s still a challenge of how do you get people to take advantage of the resources that already exist?
Class Central’s mission goal is to make online education work for everyone, which I don’t know how to do, but that’s the high-level goal. Here’s a course that if you do really well, you will benefit, but sometimes you end up changing the goal from learning to earning a certificate. You just breeze through the course, do the bare minimum to get a certificate. So then you do not get the learning that you desire. Especially if, in many cases, the lower the cost, the less rigorous the quizzes and the assignments are. You’re not getting human grading. You’re not getting unstructured assignments. So you have to put in that extra effort.
Usually, I know I do more online courses when I’m less happy. When I’m happy, I feel like I don’t want to do the tough work of actually getting through the material and really making sure I soak it in, as opposed to just watching it like another YouTube or Netflix video. So I think it’s like fitness. You can give people a whole gym, but that doesn’t mean they’ll go in and use it regularly. I think the same problem exists in the fitness industry.
And RC often says—and he took it from Julius Stiglitz, who founded another edtech company, “I want to and I can,” and while online learning solves a big part of the “I can” problem, “I want to” still requires a lot of interventions. The value of credentials, all that motivates people to “I want to,” but learning is often a hard process. And hopefully, with the innovations that we are introducing, that will make it a much more pleasant experience, so that you can do these courses when you’re actually happy and not sad.
Arun: Online learning is one of the few things where you pay money and the problem isn’t solved. The problem just starts after you pay money. So I never liked the comparison to YouTube, TikTok, Netflix. You should make it engaging, but it’s not similar just because it has videos. We ask for different things from different platforms. On one platform we’re looking to escape, on the other platform we take it back into our real world. So those two parallels don’t really apply.
Dhawal: That’s true.
Arun: And now with the advent of AI, especially GenAI, it was already playing a big role in online learning in many ways because some of the founders of online platforms like Coursera and Udacity were themselves AI practitioners in many ways, especially when it comes to scaling content. What role do you see AI can play? You recently in your own LinkedIn post mentioned the striking enrollment trends in 2024, where courses like Google’s AI Essentials drew huge numbers on Coursera, and clearly all companies will start deploying it to generate content faster. But what are the guardrails that you need to keep in mind, and what are the opportunities you see with AI in that process?
Dhawal: I think AI generally, I personally feel AI should be invisible. If you’re using AI to create content and all that, that’s fine, but I think you still need to be like, “Why you? What is your expertise in using that AI to help me learn?” So my worry is people will focus too much on scale, trying to scale too quickly, and put in a lot of generic audio, video, PowerPoint slides with voiceover. And I think again, motivation is a big factor for learning. So seeing a human professor who’s an expert in the field connects you with the content.
So I think somehow from a learner who’s sitting at home in an empty room or library, how do I connect with the content? And I feel like that’s where the university brand or the individual people who are on camera, the quirkiness of Barbara Oakley and Dr. Chuck, make you feel like you’re in the same room with them. They somehow bring this into their content and courses and create an experience around it.
So I think Dr. Chuck published something on his LinkedIn saying he’s going back to his courses not using AI for his on-campus courses. And I’m rephrasing what he said, but I think I feel like there’s the same challenge with what we saw with MOOCs, those who can will do really well, but those who are not able to leverage that technology as individuals, the gap might even further increase. And that was the early concern with MOOCs also, anybody can learn, but then you look at the data, only people with degrees were the ones who were finishing it. So again, that’s not the fault of the medium or the platform, but that’s the reality of what would happen. And I think GenAI might also be a similar process.
But that’s why having courses on how to use AI at this point are getting a lot more enrollments because that’s like the first—it’s similar to “Learning How to Learn.” You should do “Learning How to Learn” first so that you can know how to learn. “Learning How to Learn” from Barbara Oakley became that horizontal layer of all the courses. It’s something we used to recommend in our newsletter—”Hey, start with one of these courses so that you know how to learn online and you know how to fail and get back again.” And the way Barbara explains it with the scientific reasoning, you feel like, “Okay, I didn’t understand it now, but it’s okay.”
So I think the same with GenAI, explaining how people use it. In the end, you have to ask it questions. You can’t just sit there and wait for it to tell you things. You have to ask it the right questions, which is probably a skill that helps anywhere else. So I think that’s one of those things of getting people to ask questions and not passively consume content. And it’s always better if you try to do something, fail, and then somebody gives you the answer, as opposed to somebody just giving you the answer. So if you search directly for the answer, then you’re not learning. Andrew Ng often says you should be minimally helpful as an instructor, just about where you can make the next step but without really helping you find a solution.
Arun: And I think that’s going to be very critical to online learning. That’s one of the first things I learned at Georgia Tech: the content is at one level, and the quizzes and assignments are at a completely different level. And I was not used to that academic system in India, where it’s really one-to-one mapping. So you would go to a computer science class, and you would have programming assignments, and they would not teach you programming. But once you get over the barrier, suddenly you’re like, “Oh, wow, you feel confident like I can solve any problem.” Learning is a journey, not a destination.
Dhawal: That’s right.
Arun: You raised a good point about how GenAI can further create a gap, and in fact, some of it is what we are seeing in terms of gender gaps. We have more men enrolling in GenAI courses compared to women. So clearly, compared to our traditional gender mix on the platform, it is more skewed towards men when it comes to GenAI content. In March, we are actually releasing a full report where we have hypothesized and done some experiments to understand why those things are happening and what steps we as a company, other institutions, employers, governments can take to mitigate this gap, to reduce this gap. So stay tuned, that’ll be coming in March, so that’ll be a fantastic resource for the community at large.
I want to move forward, and you’ve seen a lot of the past, and you’ve seen the evolution of AI-driven tools as well. You talked a little bit about the risk, but what are the ways in which technology can redefine the learning experience in the next 5 to 10 years? What are the things that are striking in your mind in terms of possibilities?
Dhawal: I think the biggest thing is being able to ask someone. There’s a technique called rubber duck coding or rubber duck debugging where you just say the problem out loud to a rubber duck, and sometimes the solution pops up. So even if AI isn’t giving you the answers, just being able to ask someone who gives you some answer gives you some hope of moving forward. Because I think when you’re learning online, you just get immediately blocked. If you don’t know something, you’re immediately blocked. You have no one to call, no friends to ask. So I think there is this wall that learning is always overcoming these walls when you’re learning these topics, new topics, new ideas, concepts.
So I think that’s where I find it at a personal level the most useful, all these little things. Yeah, there’s big things it can do, but I think all these little things are the ones that matter most to me at a personal level than the big things. Like if I write a LinkedIn post, I can just get the grammar verified. I don’t have to ask someone else. There’s a thought or idea that I need to verbalize, I can ask it. Before, I had my colleagues do it, and they would spend a lot of time editing my articles. So I think in that sense, we’ll find a lot of places where we use it at the right amount for us.
I think it’s more powerful in that sense. I don’t see it as “Oh, it’ll change everything.” I still believe that if I hadn’t gone through the journey of writing articles on my own for almost a decade, I don’t think AI would have been useful for me. I think it enhances the skills I have, but I don’t know, there’s certain things where I need an Excel formula or little things. I think that’s extremely useful. But I think that’s for me the primary purpose—just furthering the stuff I already know. I already can write. I used to take months to write an article. Now I take days. And some of it just happened through practice. But if I try to do something that I’ve never done before, I don’t know if it’s right, I don’t know if it’s—I don’t have an opinion. I have to just take it as it is.
So I think that’s where I feel like it will be little by little in different aspects of our lives, we’ll use it, and that’s where I think it will have a cumulative impact as opposed to one big change like how the iPhone was or phones in general, or the internet. I think it’s little by little where it cumulatively adds up.
Arun: How do you think about innovations like Coursera Coach? Have you had a chance to experience it, especially for this notion that you mentioned: if you’re blocked, you don’t have anybody to call, but now something like a coach is available to help you during that process? Have you had a chance to experience that?
Dhawal: Not directly. I have subscriptions to all of them—Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. I haven’t directly used it, but I think that’s one of those things where it’s up to the learner to ask the right question. And it’s very easy to ask the question and get the answer, but the answer itself might still get you blocked because you just got the answer but not the thinking behind the answer or something. So it’s still up to the learner to ask the right question and digest it and whether you do it for the sake of learning or just finishing the assignment or the quiz. So I think those are very helpful, but it’s still a tool, and it depends on the learner’s motivations and attitude on how to use it effectively.
Arun: In fact, some of those things we have carefully kept in mind while developing Coach. One is that it is grounded in the content of that course. So it’s not going around and finding answers for you. Number two, it will not give you the answer right away. So people cannot just find the answer and answer the quiz, but obviously this is a space which is rapidly moving, and we have to keep iterating.
You have explored many courses through Class Central, and you’ve seen thousands of them. You might have done hundreds of them as well. Have you taken a recent course that you highly recommend, along with some of your all-time favorites like Barbara Oakley’s “Learning How to Learn” or Stanford’s Algorithms Design and Analysis?
Dhawal: Recently, I haven’t done many full courses. I usually go and do what I want and don’t really finish from scratch. The one I did most recently was offline, going to De Anza College and doing Japanese 101. So that was also an interesting experience of going back to the textbook, learning from the textbook, but also using GenAI to say, “Hey, I know three languages. Can you explain this concept I am not understanding in Japanese? Can you explain the same concept and how it applies in Hindi, how it applies in English?” So I think that’s something interesting to me: how do you combine all of these into something that works for you?
For some topics, I just want to be online and absorb from the lectures and videos. But for some topics, maybe I need to just open a book and write down the Japanese characters to practice hiragana and katakana. So I think it depends on the topic and the person; some things are harder for you, some things are easier. So for harder stuff, you need to figure out a different way of learning, as opposed to—I tried all the language learning apps, the podcasts, and all that, but I could never break through the wall, but the textbook finally helped me and the lectures in person.
I think online can be too efficient. The videos can have too many concepts in one video. Too many, it’s too compressed, too well-defined. So sometimes, even when the professor is rambling in a class, I think that’s sometimes good because you get time to absorb the content. Sure, if you’re someone who’s very good at learning, that’s inefficient, but maybe inefficiency is a good thing. I don’t know, I’m just grappling with that concept; sometimes you zone out, but you come back in, and because the instructor is not going that fast, you can get back into it. But sometimes a 5- 10-minute video of deep concepts, and you’re like, “This is tiring me out because it’s a lot of information in a short amount of time.”
Arun: So you’ve been a consumer of courses, you write a lot obviously for Class Central and other places, but if you could create a course on any topic with no limits, anything, what would it cover, and who would you like to teach it with?
Dhawal: Maybe something like how to find a course, how to choose a course that’s right for you? I think that might be my expertise. I think failing is important. I also fail a lot during courses. So telling them that it’s okay to not complete a course. It’s okay to not—people have this opinion that you need to know everything before moving ahead. Some people need to know before moving ahead. Some people are like, “Just let me do the whole thing even if I don’t understand.” And so I think giving those mental models, the first step is I’ll just tell them, “Go do Barbara’s course, do ‘Learning How to Learn,’” because sometimes you’re intimidated by information from people who are very successful and good at learning, and I think they can do. I have not done hundreds of courses. I’ve probably done 20, 25 courses, and that’s over a decade. So it’s still hard for me to do a new course and to take it from zero to something that’s tangible.
So I think maybe that’s where I could give people a mental model of allowing them to fail and allowing them to find their rhythm of taking a course.
Arun: That might be the most profound insight people can take away—give yourself permission to try different things, have a flexible mental model, and permission to fail and permission to celebrate when you succeed. So it’s totally okay because it’s online, it’s low cost, and learning is, as you rightly mentioned, a journey. It’s not a destination.
So thank you very much, Dhawal. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for sharing your story and your incredible insights on the evolution of online learning.
Dhawal: No worries. Thank you for having me.
Arun: To our listeners, if you’re curious about online courses, check out classcentral.com. It’s an amazing resource for discovering the next learning adventure. And don’t forget to explore coursera.org for a wide range of programs to help you upskill and prepare for the next career move. If you enjoyed this episode of the Coursera podcast, please rate, review, and share. Until next time, I’m Arun Vasa. Thank you for tuning in.
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