☠ Is AI the Death of the Online Course?

Creating just one online course requires a huge amount of work. But thanks to artificial intelligence, this can now be accomplished in just a matter of minutes. Though it may sound exciting at first, it still has its own share of disadvantages. Kendra Perry explains how AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, can lead to a plethora of online courses without proper quality control, which could saturate and overwhelm the market. She shares her predictions on how this technological advancement could transform the virtual world forever – perhaps for the worst if we are not careful.

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☠ Is AI the Death of the Online Course?

In this episode, we’re going to be talking a little bit about AI. It’s a hot topic. I’ve talked about it before on the show. I’m speaking with it a ton inside Health Coach Accelerator and teaching my students how to leverage it as their personal marketing assistant. When used properly, it makes your world and life so much easier. I want to talk about the question I’ve been posing to myself, which is, is Artificial Intelligence the death of the online course?

Before I talk about that, it occurred to me that I was asked an interesting question inside Health Coach Accelerator by one of my students that is an interesting conversation. I’ve noticed something with my students because I’ve been a big pusher of using something like ChatGPT. I did an episode on ChatGPT. That is going to be episode 170. It dropped on May 8th, 2023. Go back and check that out. You can find that at KendraPerry.net/Episode170 where I talk all about how to use it. It is a very valuable episode.

There was a question that one of my students posed. She said, “I’m nervous to download this app. I know you’ve said it helps a lot and it can make your life a lot easier but I’m wondering what the downsides are of using it.” It seems like a simple question but it’s a big question. It is the same thing as the types of questions that maybe people were asking when the internet first came out back in the ‘90s. They were like, “What are the downsides of this going to be?” The truth is, at that point, we didn’t know. At this point, with AI being relatively new, we don’t know. With anything, there are going to be a ton of benefits and disadvantages.

When we think about the internet, it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened and one of the worst things that’s ever happened. It gives us this amazing ability to communicate with each other, get instant access to information, and do something like run an online business, which I am incredibly grateful for. There’s a lot of hate that happens online. There’s cancel culture, screen addiction, social media addiction, comparison, body dysmorphia, and all these other things that come with it. Like any type of technology, there’s always going to be a light side and a dark side.

I understand the reason why people are hesitant because they’re freaked out by it. What I told this student is, “It is new but it is not new.” Many of the platforms that we already use and that we’ve been using for years have been using AI for a long time. For example, Facebook uses AI for its algorithm and so does TikTok and Instagram. At this point, almost every platform is rolling out some sort of AI feature. For example, Zoom rolled out a meeting feature that summarizes your meetings. Buzzsprout, which is the show host that I use, asked me to upgrade my subscription to get access to their AI, which creates show notes for your episode and transcribes it. Even Canva has AI. You can’t avoid it. Every social media platform is integrating AI into what they do.

The truth is when you look at something like ChatGPT or some of these other AI platforms, you can’t avoid them. I don’t look at them any differently than I would look at something like Slack, Thinkific, FG Funnels, or Canva. I look at them as another platform. The truth is you can’t avoid AI at this point, especially if you want to have an online business. That is because every platform that you’re going to need for online business is probably going to be integrating some sort of AI. I’ve seen it everywhere. It’s coming. Do I think humanity is ready for Artificial Intelligence? No. Do I think it’s scary and creepy? Yes, but it is here. At this point, we need to embrace it and move forward. That’s what we have to do with technology. It’s like a rolling train and we got to roll with it.

I want to come back to this question that I’ve been asking myself. Is Artificial Intelligence the death of the online course? We’ve talked about AI. If you’re new to Artificial Intelligence, it’s a machine learning system that thinks for itself. That’s maybe not the best way to describe it but it almost acts like a human without being a human.

When I say online course, I’m talking about info products. I’m talking about taking a course, like buying a course online that shows you how to do something. Usually, when I think about an online course, I am thinking about limited support. Maybe it’s do-it-yourself and there’s nowhere for you to ask questions or maybe there’s something like a simple Facebook group. A lot of people might look at online courses a little bit differently but that’s how I’m defining an online course.

The reason why I’m wondering if AI is the death of the online course is it boils down to two key things. I don’t know about you but I’ve been getting fed so many ads from so many different companies that are showing you how to make an entire course with something like ChatGPT. ChatGPT is not the only one. There are other ones out there. ChatGPT is the one that I’m familiar with and that I’m using.

You can use AI to write an entire course for you very quickly. I had a student inside HCA tell me that she created this online course. She created this 18-page or 180-page. I can’t remember what she said. It was a PDF outlined for a course. She’s like, “ChatGPT did a lot of it for me.” That’s very exciting but what this means is that anyone and their dog is going to be able to create an online course. What is that going to do? It is going to flood the market.

There are going to be so many courses out there because you don’t even need to do it yourself. A big reason why a lot of people don’t end up completing online courses is because it is a shitload of work. It is way more work than you think it would be. It could take a long time to create but you can get ChatGPT to write an entire course for you.

On top of that, there are AI platforms that will create slides for you. There are AI tools that will edit for you and that sort of thing. We can get AI to do a lot of it for us where previously, we would have to do this all manually. It could take us months to do it but this time, you could potentially create a whole online course in a week or less depending on the length of the course. Ultimately, that is going to flood the market with courses. That’s going to make more competition.

The other thing that’s going to happen is it’s going to lead to a lot of crappy courses on the market. If anyone can do it, then it’s going to reduce the quality. What that means is that consumers are going to have a lot more bad experiences. I’m already seeing this within the coaching industry. This is an objection that I have to do a lot of work to respond to lately that I didn’t have to do previously.

We’ve had a lot of big transitions in the past few years. COVID was a big transition for the online space because it pushed everyone online. I always knew that people would realize how amazing online business was. I got online in 2013. Back then, it was so weird. I remember every time I told people I have an online business, they were like, “That’s so interesting. What do you do?” It was so crazy for everyone. This time, people are like, “That’s cool,” because so many people have online businesses or work remotely or work from home.

COVID pushed everyone online. It flooded the online business market. It greatly increased business applications. Online business has a much lower barrier to entry than in-person business. If you’re going to start a retail store or a restaurant, there is a huge investment that needs to go into that. You need to rent a space and create infrastructure. You need employees and inventory.

If you’re starting a retail store, you’re probably investing a minimum of $100,000. I don’t know exactly but it’s a big capital investment. Versus online business, you can go in with nothing. You don’t need to have any money, which is great because it means that it’s very available to anyone who wants to do it but it floods the market.

In 2020, when we had COVID, it pushed all these businesses online. We also had people who were in lockdown. They were at home. People weren’t traveling. People had a lot of time on their hands and we weren’t in a recession. People had lots of expendable money. They had money to spend. People had time and money so they invested in programs, courses, and that sort of thing.

Fortunately, in 2020, it was easy to be an online business owner. You didn’t even have to be that good to make money. What a lot of businesses are noticing in 2023 is it’s a lot harder, mostly because we’re dealing with buyer hesitancy. Most places in the world are in somewhat of a recession. People are more hesitant to spend their money.

This other problem is that people had a lot of bad experiences because anyone could be an online business owner in 2020. Maybe there were people who shouldn’t have been online business owners or had crappy products. They had no problem selling their crappy products. What happened was people invested in things and they had a bad experience. A big objection I’m getting for Health Coach Accelerator is, “I’ve been burned before.”

I updated a lot of my messaging, all my sales emails, and my sales page. We had to spend a lot of time addressing that objection because people are hesitant. They’re like, “I was burned. I signed up for this coaching program and it didn’t deliver. The coach didn’t support me. I felt like I was left out to the sharks.” That is what’s going to happen even more as more online courses flood the market. It’s so easy to create a course that there’s going to be a lot of bad courses out there. It reduces the quality and then people are going to have bad experiences.

The other problem is that online courses that don’t have any support have bad statistics when it comes to completing them. There’s a crazy statistic out there that only 15% of people complete an online course. That is a staggering statistic. When we think about that, that means 85% of people who sign up for an online course don’t complete it. If you don’t complete it, you don’t get the result. When people don’t get the result, they say that course sucked even if it wasn’t necessarily the course. Maybe it was them not wanting to commit. This comes down to the fact that it’s hard to DIY transformation.

I signed up for this neurolinguistic programming course. It was a DIY course. I signed up for it in, I believe, September 2022. I still haven’t gotten through the 3rd or 4th lesson. Why is that? It is because there’s no teacher, energy, or accountability. I’ve struggled. As much as I want to learn NLP, I probably need to learn it in a bit of a different way because I have not been able to get myself to follow through with this course. It’s a common story.

What’s going to happen with that is people are going to have bad experiences with a lot of online courses. It’s going to make it a lot harder to sell like it’s harder to sell coaching because people have had bad experiences. That’s something we need to think about. Also, people are going to have so many options. They may even are going to feel overwhelmed by all their options out there. When people are overwhelmed, they’re way less likely to buy. That’s the first thing we need to think about.

The second thing we need to think about is the fact that consumers can also leverage AI, things like ChatGPT, to find out anything they want to know. That’s going to make it less likely that they even need to purchase an online course, to begin with. For example, I was putting together an Excel spreadsheet for something and I couldn’t figure out the formula. I asked ChatGPT and it told me. Rather than having to spend hours learning it on my own and maybe even investing in an Excel course so I know how to do my spreadsheet, I can ask ChatGPT.

Consumers may not need a course anymore as they learn to utilize AI because AI can get them the answer to anything. It can also build things for them. There’s something called auto AI, which I haven’t used personally but apparently, it can build an entire website for you. If it doesn’t know how to do something, it will do its research to learn how to do it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years.

To summarize, 1) ChatGPT can create a course making it possible for anyone to create a course even when they don’t know the topic. That’s going to flood the market with a lot of crappy courses. We’re going to have increased competition and buyer hesitancy due to bad experiences. 2) Consumers can leverage ChatGPT and other AI platforms to figure out whatever they need to know, meaning that they don’t need to learn it from you.

What does this mean for you? Does it mean that you can’t have an online course? No. You can always be successful with what you want to be successful if you figure it out. What this means is we have to look at how we are supporting people. My prediction is that this rising of Artificial Intelligence is going to increase the demand for full support programs. Artificial Intelligence cannot replace human connection, community, and coaching from a live human.

Something that we learned with COVID is that Zoom hangouts suck. You can’t mimic hanging out in person with your best friend and catching up. The energy is different. Everyone at first was like, “We’ll have these Zoom parties and hangouts.” We quickly learned that they suck and they are not a replacement for in-person connection. That will never replace it.

Over time, as people realize that they don’t get a transformation from an online course because it’s hard to finish it without the ability to ask someone questions, accountability, and community, people are going to want those full support programs with community connection and coaching. That’s good news for you if you are selling a high-ticket online program. This is what I help my students do inside Health Coach Accelerator.

If you are interested in creating an online program and learning how to market and sell it online, DM me the word Biz Audit on my Instagram or Facebook. My handle is @KendraPerryInc. I will give you a free business audit and let you know if HCA is a good fit for your business. That is something that we want to be doing. I don’t think AI will ever be able to mimic it. There is nothing that mimics nature and human connection in the online space or with an Artificial Intelligence entity.

If you are someone who wants an online course, you can still have an online course but you want to ask yourself, “How can I create connection, community, and coaching within that course?” You can do this with coaching calls or Q&A calls. You can do this with an awesome Facebook community and maybe a community manager who tries to keep the energy of the community. You can try to create more connections with your students inside your online course. We can still have online courses but I do think DIY online courses are going to become less popular. I might be wrong but we will see what happens. I’m interested to see how things play out over the next few years because it is a very exciting time in online business.

It is so interesting for me to look at how things have shifted. I’ve been online for several years. I started my blog in 2011. It is so crazy to see how things have shifted. When I was online, when I first started, we didn’t even have Canva. I don’t even know how I created graphics. I was having to hire professional graphic designers to make things for me in Photoshop. This time, you can pull a quick design from Canva. It’s wild how things have shifted.

This is the next error. Artificial Intelligence and online business are almost as exciting as when the internet first came out. It’s that big of a thing. It will be fascinating to see what happens. I am freaked out by it but it is here and is happening. We got to roll with it. Those are some two cents for you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the show.

If you have any questions, you want to send me some feedback about your favorite take homes, or you want to ask me a question, you can send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook. I would love to hear from you. If you want to support the show, please give this show a five-star review on iTunes. I would love that. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/Wealthy. Thank you so much for reading. I so appreciate your time. I will see you next time, same time, same place, where I help you become wealthy AF.

Important Links

• Health Coach Accelerator
• Episode 170 – ChatGPT: How to Use Artificial Intelligence As Your Free Virtual Assistant – Past episode
• Instagram – Kendra Perry
• @KendraPerryInc – Facebook
• iTunes – The Wealthy Coach
• RateThisPodcast.com/Wealthy