Lessons from the first millionaire online teacher
Or at least that’s the recent experience of Scott Allen, a programmer and teacher the tech-y online education platform Pluralsight.com. Allen has earned more than $1.8 million through fees and royalties from Pluralsight over the last five years. He says each monthly royalty check has increased in size over that period — the smallest increase being 10 percent month-over-month. That far outdid his expectations when he started making educational videos for Pluralsight. “It’s amazing,” he says.
I got pitched this story this morning with the subject line “Online ed’s first millionaire teacher.” I was drawn to it, because I could imagine the same story being pitched about blogging or online journalism several years ago. There are a lot of parallels between what those two industries are going through, and how each are grappling with the Web’s potential for disruption.
Just as the experiences of Marco Arment with the Magazine, Michael Arrington with TechCrunch, or Andrew Sullivan with the Dish, can’t be readily replicated to every journalist, so to is the experience of Scott Allen not representative of every educator. Tellingly, he doesn’t really consider himself “an educator” — the same way many of the early bloggers who made the most money didn’t consider themselves “real journalists.” The same way a journeyman reporter can’t just up and quit the New York Times, start blogging and watch the dollars roll in, a professor can’t exactly decide to start putting courses online and suddenly count the Benjamins.
Both higher education and journalism have recently had their economic foundations rocked. The purists in both industries are wary of the democratizing potential of the Internet to replace august