The concept of exponential education entrepreneurship applies directly to your online coursework success. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett explore what this is and what it means to you.
In their book, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis explain how exponential entrepreneurship has replaced linear growth in business and how you can leverage the power of technology to build and expand your own business in ways that were never before possible.
Technological entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos have built billion dollar businesses using disruptive technologies that outperform older established corporate entities. They accomplished this by following revolutionary philosophies based upon three factors that will help you as you develop a plan for your online courses.
The three basic factors that create exponential value are:
- Exponential technology
- Flow dynamics
- The power of the crowd
Exponential growth occurs far more quickly than linear growth, and is made possible by powerful, accessible technologies. One of the best examples is the internet, especially since it is available via mobile phone, and is now globally ubiquitous. What that does for eLearning is that it allows people to take online courses even if they don’t have a computer.
Flow dynamics is probably best known as “being in the zone.” It is a framework for thinking that you can use for creating your course content, not only in your own process of course development, but also for the student’s learning experience.
The power of the crowd is all about people. It includes crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, but also community building. When you create courses for people to use online you are addressing individuals, but also scaling for groups of people. You can also create a community for your students within your eLearning site.
You can visualize these concepts are working together in a scenario beginning with the technology you use to develop and present your course offerings to an exponentially larger population than ever before. Creating your content in a flow state helps students enter their own flow experience in learning. You could fund your courses through crowdsourcing. And the more students who take your courses and like them will refer you exponentially to other students.
The more passion you bring to your exponential education entrepreneurship endeavors, the greater your success will be. Our LifterLMS course development platform is designed to help you build your courses using these concepts. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you.
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And if you’re an already successful expert, teacher or entrepreneur looking to grow, check out the LifterLMS team’s signature service called Boost. It’s a complete done for you set up service where your learning platform goes live in just 5 days.
Episode Transcript
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage. I’m joined with Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking about exponential education entrepreneurship. What in the world are we talking about, Chris?
Chris: This stems from the work of two guys who are writing and speaking and creating content around exponential entrepreneurship. Their names are Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis.
I think their most recent book is called Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World. They study people like highly impactful entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos. They also are technologists.
They’re often looking at the impact of technology on business. They think a lot about the future in terms of what’s coming in medicine, or things like artificial intelligence and so on. They’re big tech business thinkers.
I’ve been listening to some of their stuff. I’ve realized that what they’re saying about exponential entrepreneurship is also applicable to more of our niche to education entrepreneurs who are building and creating online courses, and the online schools, or blended learning environments. There’s a lot of lessons that can be learned by studying what these guys are up to. Maybe we can start out by defining.
Joshua: Yeah, what’s a first or first concept?
Chris: I think the very first thing is to think about the three contributing factors that create exponential entrepreneurship, which really means just creating exponential value. Those three things that come into that mix include exponential technology. I’ll just run through them and then we can unpack what each of them are.
Exponential technology, the flow states, and then also the crowd, the power of the crowd, whether that’s crowd funding, or building online communities and so on. When those three things come together, that’s when that …. Exponential, meaning something that grows very fast, or spherically. Those are like those explosive growth things like when Facebook came out, or Amazon, and eCommerce, and that kind of thing. There’s some real exponential things happening there.
Joshua: The first concept in a nutshell is?
Chris: That it involves a technology that’s growing exponentially.
Joshua: Got it.
Chris: A couple examples of that beside the internet would be the things that are happening with processing power on a computer.
Joshua: Oh, speaking to like Moore’s law, I think it is?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Joshua: And then probably other things that are going …. They’re talking about artificial intelligence, too.
Chris: Say that again.
Joshua: Artificial intelligence is jumping exponentially right now all the time. They’re looking for the opportunities in technologies that are doing that.
Chris: Absolutely. There’s certain things like Peter Diamandis, I think is on the board of Singularity University. The singularity, if you will, is a theoretical moment in time that Ray Kurzweil talks about and wrote a book about what happens when the processing power of computing outstrips the processing power of the human brain. That inflection point is called the singularity. We don’t really know what’s going to happen after that, but we’re heading in that direction based on these exponentially growing technologies.
Joshua: Yeah, we’re heading there really quickly. That’s interesting. I like it. How can we leverage this idea in our courses?
Chris: If you take it and you’re not just looking at, if you bring it into the educational context, the internet is an exponentially growing technology. There’s more people coming online. There’s a lot of people who haven’t even come online yet. We take that for granted in the developed world. Some areas of the world have skipped the laptop or the desktop and are going right to the phone. There’s all these interesting things happening with technology.
Maybe in another episode we can get more into the lifecycle of exponential technology and talk about where learning management systems are, and eLearning, and educational technology in greater detail.
That opportunity is here. We have the tools. WordPress power is like 25% of the internet or whatever. It didn’t exist seven years ago. I’m not sure of the exact start date. That is a very fast growing exponential technology that we’re tied into.
I think the other cool things to look at outside of the technology are what these guys would call the flow dynamics or the flow states of the leaders behind it, also the crowd. To talk about flow first, a flow state …. There’s a great book called Flow. I have a hard time pronouncing the guy’s name. His name is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or something. He writes about exactly what flow is and what’s going on in your brain and in your psychology.
We’ve all experienced flow at some point in our life where we’re being challenged, but we’re in the zone. That could be in an athletic endeavor, or it could be in an intellectual endeavor. It could be in a entrepreneurial or a relationship endeavor. When you match exponential technology with a flow state, you really unlock a lot of potential and power in entrepreneurship, or creating valuable courses in community and that kind of thing.
Joshua: Yeah, I like it. Really what we’re talking about today is a framework for thinking, a framework for thinking through ideas and thinking through really just course content.
I think the interesting part of this though is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make a living off of a niche that isn’t in this, too. Everyone is talking about, “The riches are in the niches.” and all that sort of thing. We forget about, oh, what are some of the things that we can do to interact with an exponential market and place ourselves to even capture a half percentage of that market is still a lot of cash if that’s our goal or impact.
There’s some people who are more open source minded. That’s fine, too. It’s still a great way to look for opportunities to impact people that way. Cool. Any final thoughts before we wrap this up?
Chris: The last thing you said, people, that’s the third part. It’s the power of the crowd. When you have the opportunity to do things like crowd funding, or crowd sourcing, or build a community in some way with your exponential technology tools, your flow state, and your ability to interact with people at scale, that’s the three-legged stool, if you will, of exponential education entrepreneurship right there.
Let’s say you have a course idea about, I’m just pulling this out of the air, how to make your own medicinal herbs for a homemade first aid kit, or something. You want to teach other people how to heal naturally with food, and herbs, and plants. You could pitch that idea, create a video, put it on Kickstarter. If you get validation, you can use your exponential technology, and the internet, and your learning management system. You can get in a flow state because you love it so much, and you’re so passionate about it, that’s an example of using the power of the crowd and how that fits into the greater context.
Joshua: I love it, I love it. Thanks for listening, Everyone. We will talk to you next week.
