【新译Y宇宙】No.56 在线时代，稀缺的是社区

We’re in a post-content age. It used to be that original educational content was scarce: a decade ago, such content was a major selling point for universities and accelerators.

我们正处于后内容时代。过去，原始教育内容是稀缺的：十年前，这类内容是大学和加速器的主要卖点。

Today, however, educational content is cheap and abundant on YouTube, in newsletters, on blogs, and on social media. People view learning-related content on YouTube 500 million times every day; the free YouTube channel Crash Course, for instance, features instructors with PhDs in everything from physics to organic chemistry.

然而，如今，YouTube、时事通讯、博客和社交媒体上的教育内容都便宜且丰富。人们每天在YouTube上浏览与学习相关的内容5亿次; 例如，免费YouTube频道的Crash Course教授博士，从物理到有机化学。

In addition, dozens of accelerators, incubators, low-cost or free online courses, and alternative education programs have popped up to serve working professionals who want to learn. On the online course provider Udemy, for example, students pay an average of just $10 to $20 to learn skills like how to code in JavaScript or how to give an effective presentation. On Udacity, students can get what are called “nanodegrees,” designed for companies seeking to upskill existing workers. And LinkedIn Learning (formerly known as Lynda, one of the oldest online learning platforms), focuses on specific skills for professional development.

此外，数十个加速器、孵化器、低成本或免费在线课程以及替代教育项目也纷纷涌现，为想学习的职业专业人士服务。例如，在在线课程提供商Udemy上，学生平均只需支付10至20美元，学习如何用JavaScript编写代码或如何进行有效演示等技能。在Udacity，学生可以获得所谓的“纳米学位”，专为寻求提高现有员工技能的公司设计。LinkedIn Learning（前身为Lynda，最古老的在线学习平台之一）专注于专业发展的特定技能。

Amid this excess of free content and accessibly priced online learning channels, it’s become nearly impossible for instructors to break out — let alone make a living — off their expertise, as they’ve been told they can. For many creators, the implications are discouraging: content generation is a losing battle. Traditional social platforms silo off monetization activities from community building; you post your expertise on YouTube or Twitter, then have to pursue other ways — brand partnerships, low-margin merchandise — to actually capitalize on it. Creators are effectively giving away valuable content, which means learners no longer pay a premium (or at all).

在如此过剩的免费内容和价格可及的在线学习渠道中，教师几乎不可能像他们被告知的那样，摆脱专业知识，更不用说谋生了。对许多创作者来说，其影响令人沮丧：内容生成是一场失败的战斗。传统社会平台孤立社区建设的货币化活动; 你在YouTube或Twitter上发布你的专业技能，然后必须寻求其他途径——品牌合作关系、低利润商品——来真正利用它。创造者正在有效地分发有价值的内容，这意味着学习者不再支付额外费用（或者根本就不付）。

Counterintuitively, most learners are actually worse off for all this cheap, abundant content — it’s become clear over the years that more access does not translate to more engagement. Many of the online course providers that gained prominence in the aughts sold the pretense that customers could learn anything, but relied on the learners’ willpower and motivation to stick through a course. It’s a familiar pattern in other self-directed programs, too: Anyone can access a workout and diet plan, but very few actually stick with it long enough to see results. Similarly, MOOCs — the massively open online courses that were popularized in the 2010s and continue in other modern forms today — offer evergreen, on-demand, recorded videos, often with a defined syllabus program. But their completion rate, as has been widely reported, is just 3 to 6 percent.

与直觉背道而驰的是，大多数学习者在这些廉价、丰富的内容上其实更糟糕——多年来，人们越来越清楚地看到，更多的访问并不意味着更多的参与。许多在线课程提供商以客户能学到任何东西为幌子而出名，但依赖学习者的意志力和动力坚持一门课程。这也是其他自我指导项目中常见的模式：任何人都可以访问锻炼和节食计划，但实际上很少有人坚持到能够看到效果。类似地，MOOC——在2010年代普及并以其他现代形式延续的大规模开放在线课程——提供常绿、点播、录制的视频，通常带有定义的教学大纲程序。但据广泛报道，他们的完成率只有3%到6%。

This gap between the grand promise of online education and its results has led to the rise of cohort-based courses (CBCs), interactive online courses where a group of students advances through the material together — in “cohorts” — with hands-on, feedback-based learning at the core. The key difference between this phase of online ed and the MOOCs in the past decade? They are engaging and real-time, not just self-paced, and involve community-driven, active learning, as opposed to solo, passive content consumption. Cohort-based courses have a fixed start and end date, enforcing the real-time aspect and creating a scarcity within the abundance of content out there, and are often taught live. It’s the equivalent of participating in a college discussion seminar — taught by an expert in the field, unconstrained by geography or school rank — as opposed to watching a static video. And, importantly, there’s a built-in social contract in the form of the cohort.

在线教育的宏大前景与其成果之间的这种差距，导致了基于队列的课程（CBCs）的兴起，即一组学生在“队列”中一起学习的交互式在线课程，核心是亲身实践、基于反馈的学习。这个阶段的在线编辑和过去十年的MOOC的关键区别是什么?它们具有吸引力和实时性，不只是自我调整，而是涉及社区驱动、主动学习，而不是单独、被动的内容消费。基于队列的课程有固定的开始和结束日期，强制实施实时方面，在丰富的内容范围内造成稀缺性，并且经常被现场授课。这相当于参加大学讨论研讨会——由该领域的专家授课，不受地理或学校等级的限制——而不是观看静态视频。重要的是，存在以群体形式的内建社会契约。

Consumers pay for what’s scarce. And in today’s content-rich world, what is scarce in online learning is community.

稀缺物品由消费者支付。在当今内容丰富的世界，在线学习中稀缺的是社区。

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