PODCAST - Do Courses Still Work in the Age of AI Deliver
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[00:00:00] Learning Transformed is brought to you by eLearning Partners, your guide to designing transformational learning experiences in the age of AI For millennia, human intelligence was the highest form of intelligence on Earth, until now. Hi, I'm AI. I can process more information in seconds than any human in a lifetime.
This shift raises not only practical questions about the future of learning, but existential ones about the meaning of human life, growth, and evolution
On this podcast hosted by me, Johnny Havey, we navigate these questions with clarity, creativity, and confidence. As the most adaptable species on the planet, we can not only survive the rise of [00:01:00] artificial intelligence but create better human-centered AI-powered learning experiences that elevate humanity to a new era of abundance, transformation, and meaning
AI is rising and so are we
Now let's dive in
Today on the show, we're gonna answer the question, do courses still work in the age of AI? I'm gonna start by going through a history of online courses and how they have been serving students and learners like you and I for decades. And we're gonna go through are courses actually dead? Lastly, I'm gonna share with you some steps that you can take in your business right now to ensure [00:02:00] that all the hard work that you've put into building courses, e-learning programs, and education doesn't go to waste, and how you can actually leverage what you have done as a competitive advantage to build your business, to plug any profit leaks you may have, to increase product and service adoption, and even customer retention.
Let's start with some background. The first online course to ever be offered for someone to actually take and buy and learn from was created in 1984, and it was created by a university. Makes sense. The university of Toronto. And since 1984, online courses continued to grow, at first through universities, then through businesses to train employees, and then [00:03:00] ultimately as a product that you and I can sell.
Well, growth really kept going until, what? 2020. In 2020, this is where online courses peaked. If you're listening to this as a podcast, I have a graph here with years on the bottom, online course growth on the side. And what we see is online courses grew until 2020, and this was the peak. And this is when so many people got into the game.
For me, I first started working with e-learning programs back in 2015. This was still, if I draw this graph more realistically, there was slow growth for a while, and then really the peak was sudden and [00:04:00] extreme. This was not a continuous growth model from 1984 to 2020. It was very subtle, and then all at once it skyrocketed.
Well, in 2021 and 2022, growth plateaued. We're looking at maybe a little bit of growth, but really it was just the side effects of what the world went through in 2020. Well, why did this occur? Well, online courses had a few different things going for them in 2020. The first thing is people had a lot of time And they needed a way to spend the time and be safe while spending the time, be at home, being at a place where you could learn, where that you could grow, and have a way to do that without interacting with people.
So that's the other thing, [00:05:00] is we were all at home. And then the last thing is the government was funding us, sending us checks, and different things that we didn't even have to earn and, and work for. Now, the reality is a lot of people lost their jobs and weren't making the money that they need, but a lot of people also took these bonus checks and invested in different things.
So these three things, time, being at home, money, and the fact that you couldn't actually do anything in person, made 2020 and the aftermath of 2020, which really flooded into 2021 and 2022, the peak in existence of online courses. Does this mean that courses will never reach the 2020 peak? No, but [00:06:00] it's gonna take a lot of different behavioral change for us to see something like we saw in 2020, 2021, and even 2022.
Now, the next part of our history of online courses here brings us to 2023. Now, AI was a thing before 2023. ChatGPT was a thing before 2023. But until 2023, it was not mainstream. And by the end of 2023, AI was on the cusp of becoming mainstream, ChatGPT being the fastest-growing software at the time, the fastest-growing technology tool at the time to a million-plus users.
And now, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing software of all time in 2023. So if we look at our graph here, we can project out to 2023, and- [00:07:00] Nothing crazy happens in 2023. We just start having this slow decline. It wasn't until you and I really figured out how we can use AI, which is 2024, 2025, 2026, where we really see course sales drop.
And for two or three years, if you had a solution that you could educate someone on how to get, how to achieve, then you could build an online course. You could build an e-learning program, and you can make decent money selling it, as long as you're able to communicate it to the right audience, and that audience could see themselves getting the solution from you.
And I know that it can be frustrating that course sales are on the decline, and on a significant decline. I mean, I've been in this industry for about 12 years, and I really enjoy watching [00:08:00] my clients succeed, watching my customers succeed, and consulting them in getting that powerful result to f- for their learners, so they can create impact in the world.
And I remember back in 2018 is when I really started seeing that I could sell courses myself. Before then, I was just working with organizations, partnering with organizations, e-learning partners. We partner with organizations, and we act as the e-learning, the education department, and we really integrate with the education, the L&D, the learning department for small businesses and for S&P 500 companies.
Well, in 2018, I realized that in addition to serving my clients powerfully, we could also sell our own courses. So we started creating our own courses in 2019 and really launched them in 2020. Now, even so, since I was so busy serving clients [00:09:00] powerfully, it took me until 2021, 2022 to get a course out there in the world to really powerfully serve my customers.
And in 2022, it did extremely well. In 2023, it didn't do as well, but it still did well. In 2024 and 2025, it dropped significantly. And really what it's shown me is that the problem or the biggest difference between creating courses before and after 2020 is this. Before 2020, all you had to do was create a course that solved A problem.
That's it. If you created a course that solved a problem that someone knew that they had, then you could create a course before 2020. Well, post-2020, and really we could [00:10:00] change this to post-2023, the game has changed. You can no longer just create a course that solves a problem. Now, this becomes extremely interesting because my clients have a different story to tell.
I have clients who are seeing a 30% year-over-year increase in the sales of their online courses. It's crazy. The whole industry is going this way, and I have clients who are still growing. And this year, other than my college education, I have spent more on online courses than I have ever in my life. And that's why even though online courses are dead, as you and I know it, online courses are actually being invested in more than ever.
And that's why I personally have spent more than $27,000 on online courses this year. And now I'm gonna share with you why. Kicking it off with the [00:11:00] three reasons the game has changed. Or really, this is what you need to be considering when revamping your online course strategy or looking at online courses, e-learning programs in general, because it is completely different now.
And it really starts with the fact that people no longer invest in online courses. For a while, online courses were looked at as, "Ooh, it's an online course. I wanna invest in that." Online course equals easy. Online course equals lower cost. Online course equals best way for me to get the solution I'm looking for.
Well, the reality is this first reason has always been a reason. Online courses just used to be the way to achieve this. But the first reason why the game has changed [00:12:00] is because people invest in solutions, not courses Online courses just used to be the best solution. They're not anymore, at least how we know them.
And it's really because people, in order to get quick information, answered questions quickly, you can go to Google and get your answer and get it tailored to yourself with Gemini responding. You can go to your favorite AI platform, maybe it's Claude, maybe it's ChatGPT, maybe it's something else, and you can c- and you can get customized answers.
So people invest in solutions, not courses. The great thing is that this statement will set you free, 'cause now you no longer have to worry about courses. And I invite you to start looking at any courses that you have created, any e-learning programs that you have created, and stop looking at them as courses.
Look [00:13:00] at them as solutions. This is only the first point, though, and that's why what we're talking about today is so important for you and your business. Because you really need to combine these three pieces that I'm sharing with you to take your business to the next level, to plug any profit leaks that are occurring, maybe because your business has slowed down a little bit because of your online course sales or how you're leveraging online courses to grow.
Well, the second reason why things have changed, and they have changed drastically, is because people and companies who have these challenges, who are looking to invest in the solutions that you have, want their problems, their challenges solved as quickly and simply [00:14:00] as possible. That's it. "But Johnny, people used to invest in my online courses, invest in my programs.
Now they're not. Why is that?" Well, because they don't believe that it is the quickest and simplest way to solve their challenge anymore. Think about that. People no longer look at your online courses, look at your e-learning programs as the simplest way, the quickest way, the most valuable way to solve their problems.
You still have your courses. They still solve problems. They are the solution. But people no longer think that is the quickest and simplest way to solve their problem. That doesn't mean that they aren't. They still may be the quickest and simplest way to solve your customer's problem. They may be the simplest and quickest way for your employees [00:15:00] to upskill and grow in their role, and serve customers more powerfully, be less stressed in their job.
It's about what they believe, not about what the reality is. And I'm not saying that online courses are the solution, the quickest and simplest solution either. I'm just saying that we need to look at them differently in this AI era. Number three: people don't want to buy a low-cost course when they can talk to AI for free.
And I know that a lot of us pay for AI. I pay for ChatGPT right now, and once my year-long subscription ends, I'm gonna decide if I wanna pay for Chat, Gemini, Claude, or whatever else is out in the next six months. But [00:16:00] this is fascinating. When sales drop, it means that demand has dropped. People no longer want the thing that you're investing in, and it might be because the supply of the answers to their problems is so much, is so vast, which this is true.
There's more people creating online courses today than there were 10 years ago. There's even more people creating online courses today than the peak of online courses in 2020 because people have seen how successful you and I have been with selling online courses, or maybe you've seen how successful other people have been in selling online courses, and you want to jump on that.
I get it. It makes sense. We go where we see the market going, and that's why you're here today trying to figure out, "Should I still be doing this?" And when demand goes down, how do we try and increase demand? By decreasing the cost. So since [00:17:00] 2023, another thing that I've seen is a race to the bottom A race to who can sell the cheapest course, the cheapest program, to try and keep market share, to try and keep people purchasing.
Well, this is the wrong way to go, because what's happening is when you have a price point so low and people can just spend 20 bucks a month for a pro version of their favorite AI tool, and it's gonna answer all their questions, not just the question that you're helping them answer, then why are they gonna spend the money on your product?
'Cause they can't tell the difference between what you're offering and what they can pay 20 bucks a month or free to get their answers for using AI. So this isn't the solution. Here's what you need to do instead, and it all starts with why are you looking to invest your time, your money, [00:18:00] your energy into creating online courses, e-learning programs, or just leveraging education in general?
Because if the answer is, "Well, I saw someone else doing it, and I thought I could create something and do it, too," that is not a reason. And this is why my clients have seen their businesses grow by leveraging education instead of finding themselves on this downward spiral with online courses. What we really need to look at is the basics, and it really starts with the profit equation.
If you're creating a business or you're looking to harness a new tool in your business of any sort, what we need to look at is how does it affect your profit? And what is profit? Profit equals revenue
minus [00:19:00] expenses Now, if you've listened to the show or watched my YouTube channel for a while, you'll know that I like to change this equation. And instead of looking at it as profit equals revenue minus expenses, I like to draw an arrow from expenses to revenue. And the reason why I do this is because anything we spend money on, anything we invest in in our businesses, anything, anything at all, and this could be our money, our time, our energy, other resources.
Whatever we expend, 'cause that's what we're doing when we invest in expense, when we spend money, we're expending something, and our goal should be to get a return. So expenses is really what we're investing in, our investments. And revenue is really the return that we are looking [00:20:00] at getting. And when you take what we spend on our investments, what we're expending, and you subtract our return, that's how you get profit Or really, this is what we call ROI, or return on investment.
So when you're looking at investing in anything, what you're really looking at doing is how can I increase my revenue or increase my return while decreasing my expenses, or being able to invest in less things? I want to invest in less and get more return. Well, it's the same thing with education and why I empower, and why I partner with my clients to leverage education as their competitive advantage.
And, uh, we dive deep into how to do this in my [00:21:00] Plug The Profit Leak Challenge, my multi-day group consulting experience. And within just a couple of hours, I have had clients uncover $100,000 of profit in their business with what they already have. No more sales, no more tools, no more AI, no more anything, just by harnessing the power of this equation and what I teach in my Plug The Profit Leak Challenge.
I invite you to grab your ticket to my next challenge by going to plugtheprofitleak.com. I also have it linked in the show notes and in the YouTube description. But this is the foundation of what you need to do when you're considering building an online course. And here's three steps that you can do right now.
We wanna start with defining What ROI you want? That's it. What return on investment are you looking to get by leveraging education? We don't just leverage education [00:22:00] blindly and hope that something happens. We need to define what return are we looking at getting, and the return falls into two buckets.
The first is internal. It is our internal bucket at our business. Well, internal is all about empowering our employees, empowering our team members, and we can do this in a couple different ways. We can either leverage education to increase the effectiveness of our teams or increase the efficiency. Now, this is great for you and I, our organization, because if we can have more effective employees, that means that we have more employees doing the right things.
And when we have more employees doing the right things, we're able to serve our [00:23:00] customers more powerfully, we're able to retain more customers, and we're able to grow our business, impact the world even more. Well, doing the right things isn't enough. We also wanna make sure that our employees are doing things right.
So once our employees know what the right things are, we need to make sure that they're doing them the right way. And by doing them the right way, you're gonna save a lot of time and money, and ultimately increase your profit margins because there's less waste in your business. But it doesn't end there, how we can harness education internally in our organizations.
When we harness it properly, we can see great increases of employee retention. And when we increase employee retention, we are decreasing expenses related to hiring and training [00:24:00] employees. We're also conserving industry knowledge. When a employee walks out the door, you're not just losing your employee, you're losing all the knowledge and skills that they have, and you need to spend money to find someone to fill that gap.
And a lot of the time, s- you won't even be able to completely fill the gap 'cause that employee had special knowledge that no one else can make up for. And the other thing we look at internally is decreasing time to competency. T- Time to competency is how long it takes for your team members to create value in your business.
How long does it take for them to serve customers powerfully? How long does it take for them to... your investment in them, the expense you're spending on them, to start getting that return, creating revenue? When we're able to harness education properly [00:25:00] as a competitive advantage for your company, you're able to significantly decrease time to competency, and therefore decrease expenses and increase revenue at the same time.
You're decreasing expenses because less energy, time, and money needs to be poured into employees to get them up to speed. You're increasing revenue because since they're coming up to speed faster, they're bringing more revenue in your business faster. This is amazing, and this is just how to leverage education internally.
Then we have externally, which You probably already have a little bit of an idea of how to leverage education externally. But I'm not even gonna start there because I believe that education can be harnessed externally so much more powerfully than selling it as a product. I believe that the best way to harness education externally is to focus on increasing [00:26:00] product adoption and increasing customer acquisition.
We wanna acquire more customers. We want our customers to use our products faster. We want them to understand how to use our products, how to get the value out of our services that we sell. This is what my S&P 500 company clients are doing, is harnessing the power of education to make sure that their customers know how to use their software products, make sure that they know how to get the most value out of them, so that they can serve people with their products.
When you care more about the results that your customer's customer get from interacting with you, from utilizing your product and service, and you can educate them effectively and efficiently how to do that, you're gonna create so much value for them that you're gonna get so many more customers. You're gonna have so many more [00:27:00] people buy your product.
You're gonna have so many more people become a customer of your business, and that's just the first part. The other thing is we wanna focus on increasing customer retention. I know we already talked about employee retention. We can do the same thing with our customers by educating them, by l- making sure that they know how to get the most value out of working with us.
This is something that Amazon has been doing forever. You and I knows their customers so well that they not only know what customers want to buy, they know what customers need to buy once they've already bought something. Well, you and I can learn from Amazon, from the top five businesses in the world, because they are all education companies.
It's what Apple does. Apple teaches people how to use their products for free. What does this do? This increases product [00:28:00] adoption. This increases customer acquisition, and this is why Apple has one of the most loyal customer bases in the world, which is the same thing as customer retention. And then, yes, you can sell education as a product.
We just need to make sure that when we're selling it, we're not selling an online course. I didn't purchase just an online course for $27,000. I purchased a payoff. I purchased an outcome. Remember earlier on, we were talking about your customers are purchasing solutions, not courses? And even though it looked like for a while that people were gonna keep investing in online courses because of the online course boom in 2020 to 2022, people were not investing in online courses.
They were investing in what they believed at the time was the best solution to their problem, and they are gonna do that today, they're gonna do that tomorrow, they're gonna do that 100 years from now. People will invest their money, [00:29:00] their time, and their resources in what they believe is the best solution to their problem.
You can be that for your customers. So now you've defined the ROI that you're looking for. Next, we need to align the ROI that we're looking for and the ROI that we can provide with the ROI that a couple different groups are looking for: purchasers with purchasers Ideal customers, who do you wanna serve, and employees.
And you may say that you have more stakeholders that your business affects, and great. We need to make sure we define the ROI for them as well. But really, what we're looking for is how can we best serve our customers? So if you're looking to increase your product adoption, and you wanna harness education to do so, we need to look at who is purchasing your product, [00:30:00] and what ROI are they looking for, and how can you educate them to know that your product, your service, will give them the ROI that they're looking for?
And not only give it to them, but give it to them in the simplest, easiest, fastest way possible. We also need to look at our ideal customers, the customers that we ideally want to serve. 'Cause I know you and I, we serve a lot of customers, and there's some that we love serving, and there's others we serve because we're a business, we gotta keep the lights on.
Well, what I've done in the past five years is I've tried to cut those customers out of my business and only focus on my ideal customers. And what this has done is it's empowered me to grow even more because I can more powerfully serve my ideal customer because I understand what they need, and I focus on educating them on how working with me, how investing in my products, how investing in my services, how investing their time in my paid and free programs serves them best.
And then we also gotta keep our teams aligned and figure [00:31:00] out the ROI that they're looking for. When you align the ROI of your business with your purchasers, your ideal customers, and your employees, this empowers you to grow your business and leverage the power of education. I dig deep into this in my plug, The Profit League Challenge.
And that's really step three. Once we figure all this out, and we align the ROI, then we need to leverage Education as a tool. We've already talked about what we can do with this, and we've seen that large companies like Apple or even Microsoft has harnessed the power of education to increase product adoption and retention.
Microsoft sells certifications, very similar to one of my S&P 500 company clients, where we sell certifications to empower our learners, empower our customers to get the most out of my customer's product. I remember back in college, I [00:32:00] was required to become Microsoft Office certified, just the whole suite: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
And it's been 17 years since I got those certifications, and I still invest in all three of those products today. I pay Microsoft about $100 a year, and I've been doing that for 17 years. They've retained me as a customer because they educated me and helped me get my first couple of internships. Because back in 2009, 2010, the employers I was looking at working for required or looked very highly at having these certifications.
Well, this is what one of my S&P 500 company clients has done as well, harnessing the power of education to create what I call a win-win-win. This is how you know if it's working. This is how you know if you're leveraging education properly. This is how you know if you've figured out the return on investment that your customers are looking for, that your employees are looking for, that your [00:33:00] purchasers are looking for, and that you're looking for.
Because your purchasers are winning, your customers are winning, your employees are winning, and when all three of these groups are winning, guess what? You are winning. I invite you to join me in my next Plug The Profit Leap challenge. Go grab your ticket at plugtheprofitleap.com, and we will dig into this together in your business and leverage education to create win-win-wins so that you can powerfully impact the world.
I'll see you in the next episode.
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AI is rising and so are we
