What online education means for authors

Online education is exploding. Teachers and universities are embracing it by putting lectures online and using digital connetedness as a way to augment class time, grading, and interaction between students and teachers as well as with each other. But there is another side to the idea of taking what we do already with education from the classroom to the online.

We can also bring people who don't teach already, or who teach in other formats, to use online education and the growing awareness of its benefits to the table. And one of the key groups that is good at creating content and telling stories is...

Authors and Publishers!

What can authors and publishers offer the online education movement? And what does it have to do with the future of publishing?

Here are 3 ways I see it happening:

1. Skillshare

Skillshare is a website where anyone with a skill can set up a class, hold it either online or in person, and teach people about what they are good at. It's up to the teacher whether and how much to charge for the class. For example, I have taken classes about how to set up a small business (1 month, all online), about how to mix cocktails like a bartender (4 hours, in person), and many more. I even taught a few about how to do social media. For each of those courses, I paid or charged about $25.

Anyone in the publishing industry has a skill that is in the process of being decentralized. With self-publishing exploding, it will get harder and harder to find a good job in publishing. But the tens of thousands of authors and PR people flocking to all those self-publishers don't have experience in or with publishing. Skillshare is the perfect place for someone to teach classes about anything related to publishing. The students will self-select and pay piece by piece for what information they want.

2. Coursera

Coursera's slogan is "Take the world's best courses online. For free." Which is a pretty sweet promise. Most of what they offer is along the lines of a lecture series you remember from college, only about any topic you can imagine. Want in depth lectures from Harvard about 18th century French literature? Ok, no problem. Want to learn to code in Python? Ok. You get the idea.

Universities and colleges are putting their best lecturers up there. But I see very little from publishers or authors. Imagine the amazingness of a lecture series from a publisher about the history of their own books? Or from an author about other books in his/her genre, or that inspired him/her?

This is also a great place to see new content published. Sure, the lectures are free. But why shouldn't the teachers write books to sell to people who want to take an even deeper dive than the course goes into? This would be the ideal format to funnel people who are really interested in that topic to a storefront online that is specifically set up for people to dig deep into that topic. I smell niche series for a hungry audience.

3. Author Website

Authors are getting good at making website. Great? Not quite.

But online is still relatively new. And authors are starting to embrace the idea of building an author persona online and realizing all of the potential that it brings. First, the books we have already written can get repurposed, expanded on, and recorded for audio, not to mention sold in a much easier way.

But authors are content machines with a secretive process. There could be courses or blogs created to show what the writing process is like and dig into what it really takes to make a book come to life. Publishers could create lectures about what goes on behind the scenes to make a book real. And these could all be individual to the authors we love and be part of the site. Etc.

There are as many possibilities for education about the process of writing and creating a book as there are ideas for what to write a story about in the first place.

What do you think? What would you want to learn from an author or a publisher?

Image source: Lead by jurvetson, mid by gautsch , both via flickr