They've Been Predicting This Since 1913

Part of The Shift, our series on what's actually changing in online education, and why the creators who move first, win.

"Books will soon be obsolete in public schools."

Read that again and guess the year. Most people guess sometime in the last three. It was 1913. The man who said it was Thomas Edison, and the rest of the quote gives away why he was so sure: he believed every branch of human knowledge could be taught with motion pictures, and that the school system would be completely changed inside of ten years.

Edison had a slight conflict of interest. He helped invent motion pictures.

That was the first confident obituary written for education. It was not the last.

Five funerals, no body

There's a consistent thread in the back rooms of high end course creators these days, and that is that courses may be dead, mostly because sales seem down. These are big names that you'd recognize, looking at real numbers, with genuine fear.

Thing is, this all sounds familiar to some of us. Turns out there's a pattern, and it runs about 115 years deep.

1913. Motion pictures. Edison, above. Books were finished, and film would teach everything.

1932. Radio. Educators of the day promised radio would bring the world into the classroom and make the finest teachers universally available to everyone. Swap in the word "internet" or "ChatGPT" and you could publish that sentence this morning.

1945. Radio, again. A follow up prediction held that a portable radio receiver would one day be as common in the classroom as the blackboard. Close, in a way. Something did become as common as the blackboard. It just wasn't a radio.

1984. The computer. A researcher at MIT predicted there wouldn't be schools in the future, because the computer was going to blow up the school.

1997. The internet. Peter Drucker, in Forbes, said that thirty years out the big university campuses would be relics, and that universities wouldn't survive. Drucker was one of the sharpest business minds of the last century. Thirty years later, campuses are bigger, more expensive, and harder to get into than they've ever been.

2012. Free courses. Stanford put its curriculum online for free. The New York Times declared it the year of the MOOC, the Massively Open Online Course. One of the people behind Udacity predicted that in fifty years there would be only ten institutions left in the world delivering higher education.

Here's our favorite detail in the whole story. Almost nobody remembers what MOOC stood for. We had to look it up.

Every prediction was smart. Every one was wrong.

Notice who was making these calls. Not cranks. An inventor who changed the world. A researcher at MIT. The father of modern management. The founder of an online education company betting against his own industry's structure.

Every one of them was right about the technology and wrong about the market.

Motion pictures were real. Radio was real. The internet was extraordinarily real. Each one genuinely changed how education is delivered. And after each one, more people spent more money learning things than before.

The scoreboard, for anyone keeping count: five confident predictions, five expanding markets.

The numbers nobody quotes

Around the early 2000s, a few years after the internet went mainstream, online education was roughly a $500 million market.

Today it's about $353 billion a year.

And the projection for 2030, made after ChatGPT and Claude and the rest arrived, is around $843 billion. That's nearly triple, in the era that was supposed to end all of this.

Logic would say that as information got cheaper, the market for teaching it should have collapsed. The opposite happened, every single time, for a hundred years running. When a pattern is that consistent, it stops being a coincidence and starts being a rule.

The thing that actually keeps changing

So if the market never dies, what does?

The delivery method. Every time.

Courses on cassette disappeared, and they disappeared fast. Encyclopedia sets that families saved up for got wiped out by a CD-ROM, and then the CD-ROM got wiped out by the internet. Nobody stopped wanting to know things. They just stopped wanting to know them that way.

That's the whole pattern in one line. Demand for education keeps going up. The way people are willing to receive it keeps changing underneath the people selling it.

Which means the panic behind the scenes we keep hearing isn't wrong, exactly. It's aimed at the wrong target. The question isn't whether courses are dead. It's whether the way you deliver yours is.

Why free answers made you more necessary

There's a version of this argument that says AI is different, because now everyone walks around with a genius in their pocket and can get an instant answer to any question.

We had a keynote speaker on one of our stages a few years back, someone we'd paid well, who told a room full of our people that they didn't need to buy anything because everything was free on the internet. We were standing backstage having a small heart attack. And here's the honest part: that statement wasn't untrue.

It just wasn't the point.

Nobody was ever buying the information. They were buying your filter. Your lens. The judgment that tells them which of the ten thousand available answers is the one that applies to them.

A speaker at one of our events years ago said something we've never forgotten: people don't pay you to tell them everything you know, they pay you to tell them what they need to know. That was true when information was scarce. It's worth more now that it's infinite.

Go search something complicated and see what happens. You don't come back with an answer. You come back with twelve of them, half of them contradicting each other, and less confidence than you started with. Then there's the harder problem. To get a good answer out of any of these tools, you have to ask a good question. You have to already know that the thing you should be asking about exists. That's exactly what your students don't have.

Information was never the problem. Access to information was never the problem.

Direction is the problem. People need specific direction to get a specific outcome, and that has never come from a search bar.

What this means for you

If your renewals are soft or your completion rates are ugly, that is real. But read it as a delivery signal, not an extinction event. Every generation of experts got the same message in the same way, and the ones who thrived read it correctly: the audience hasn't left, their expectations have moved.

And they've moved somewhere specific. People want the bespoke experience, the one that's built around their exact situation, and they want it instantly. That used to be impossible to give at scale, which is the real story of what's changing now, and what we'll get into next.

For today, just take the hundred year scoreboard with you. Motion pictures, radio, television, the internet, free courses from Stanford, and now AI. Six technologies, five obituaries already proven wrong, and a market on its way to $843 billion.

Your expertise isn't worth less in this world. It's worth more than it has ever been. The delivery just has to catch up.

The Shift is happening, and the creators who move first, win. See what outcome delivery looks like at Obie.io.