Why Students Pay You When AI Is Free

According to Chris Badgett, artificial intelligence is changing online education, but this does not negate the value of coaches, course designers, and education companies. Since students can now readily obtain material using ChatGPT, Claude, Google, YouTube, and other AI technologies, the value of merely packing content into a course is diminishing.

The true value, according to Chris, is in the human element: personal experience, professional advice, curation, feedback, accountability, community, and the capacity to assist students in truly achieving the desired outcomes. Course designers should concentrate on developing a learning experience that incorporates their own expertise, narratives, tried-and-true techniques, and viewpoint rather than attempting to compete with AI by offering more material. Chris also stresses that rather than entirely replacing educators, AI should be utilized to supplement and improve their work. He presents the 10-80-10 concept, according to which humans first supply context and expertise, AI takes care of most of the job, and humans then evaluate, modify, and contribute the last layer of knowledge and experience. In his opinion, human engagement is particularly crucial for community interactions, coaching, grading, and feedback.

While AI may help with certain activities, humans still need to be involved to give context, emotional intelligence, and intuition. Because students want to engage with real people and gain knowledge from shared experiences, Chris also emphasizes the increasing significance of cohort-based learning, live events, coaching, and communities. In the end, his message is that information by itself is no longer the product; rather, it is the human experience that surrounds that knowledge. Instead of taking the human element out of education, AI and automation could help businesses grow that experience.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript:

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and in this episode, we’re gonna talk about why students pay you when AI is free. So essentially, what we’re gonna get into here today is how to use AI correctly in your business and why you, the human, is super important, and the parts of what you do as a human being is not disruptable by AI as a course creator, as a coach, as somebody running an education company.

So one thing that’s important to get in your mindset is that students or your learners have the same AI tools that you do. So they could have gotten the information for free, but why would somebody sign up with you? We’ve heard this argument before “Why would I create a course about X if that information is free on YouTube?”

But AI has increased the challenge with this problem. So what is it that is actually happening so that you as a human provide value on top of just knowledge and information? We’re gonna dive deep into that in this episode. By the way, I am not anti-AI. I think AI is a powerful tool to augment and help you, but there are certain things that just cannot be handed off to AI, and if you do, you’re making a critical mistake So where we’re at in the timeline of things, if you’ve heard of the book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek, that came out about 17 years ago or something like that, and it was basically about automating and outsourcing your life so that you as a human only have to work four hours a week.

That’s cool. I’m a big fan of automation and delegation and, building a business that’s not dependent on you, the human. But this… the point of this episode is all about the value that you as a human, as a course creator, as a coach, as an education company entrepreneur bring to the table. The challenge is that AI tempts you to hand off the teaching itself and that’s not what you wanna do.

You can do a lot with AI, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but it’s not oh, I have a perfect PhD-level employee that can just do my job as a course creator or as a coach for me. So again, this is not against AI. It’s just how to think about the position of the human as a teacher, a coach, as a education entrepreneur, and what you should not give to AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

So the reality is with a lot of online courses information products as they’re known, like courses as an example, if it’s just pure information, that model is dying, and the demand is essentially done for that because, at first it was hard to find the information, then search engines made it easier, and then you can find stuff on YouTube.

But even when YouTube came out, why did so many course creators and coach-type professionals remain successful? And we’ll get into that in a little bit, but these services are super helpful, but they’re not a replacement for you as a human being, and you have to use the tools correctly in order to maintain your value in the market.

So let’s talk about the value stack. There’s many layers to the value stack. We have information, like if your course is just informational, that kind of course business is dying because we can find it in a Google search, we can find it on YouTube, we can ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, whatever tool we’re using, and just get information.

So information, i.e. information products, is not what we’re selling today if we want to be successful. Of course, you need to include information in the stack, but that’s not the whole story. So the next piece is what I call curation. So in a world of infinite information, ChatGPT never sleeps, YouTube never sleeps, Google Search never sleeps, the value comes from curating and finding the most effective, important content, helpful information, and so on.

So that curation is a very human thing that you can do to add more value to your information product, your course, your membership, your coaching program. ‘Cause it’s not about knowing everything you can about a car problem as an example. It’s about which bolt to turn at the right time, how, and as, in as few steps as possible.

We mentioned the four-hour workweek earlier. I just wanna give a highlight to Tim Ferriss. He’s a great guy, great thinker, love the book, and he has this concept called minimum effective dose. So the minimum effective dose is when it comes to information- What’s the minimum amount of information I can give in my course, my coaching program, or my membership to deliver the result to the learner as quickly as possible?

And that minimum effective dose, we have to look behind that and look at the m- mechanisms and mechanics behind that. What makes minimum effective dose possible is high-quality curation. So one of the things as a subject matter expert that you have to get good at is knowing your space, curating, looking at all the information, and distilling it down to the minimum effective information that achieves the result that you promise in your marketing.

So the other thing that’s really valuable that AI can’t do as well as a human is provide feedback. So if you’re running a course and you have quizzes and assessments, or you’re running a coaching program and you send your client out to do some actions and do something that you recommend They’re gonna need feedback on the performance of whatever it is they do.

Now, it’s true you can use tool, tools like WP Vibe to help grade your quizzes and assignments and things like that, but I always recommend a human in the loop to r- if AI’s helping with the feedback, the human needs to come in with the human emotional living brain and pro- edit that stuff and provide valuable feedback from intuition and experience and context that creator has as a human being in the space.

So the other thing is accountability and, belonging. If you build a community, if community is part of what you do in your educational product the idea of just having an AI agent drop in and, moderate your community and answer questions, that’s cool, that’s interesting, but that’s not what people are signing up for.

They don’t wanna just join a community of robots. They wanna interact with real human beings, other people in the cohort or in the community, and just hear their lived experience and ideas. ‘Cause if they just wanted AI input, the thing that people aren’t thinking about is they can get that now. They can just go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and get feedback.

They’re paying you for human feedback. So that’s what it’s all about in terms of some of the high-level concepts. But let’s dig in a little deeper. So AI has no stake in the results of your learners. AI and the way AI works is it’s pr- processing information, it’s trying to be helpful, it’s predicting the next word or trying to answer a question to the best of its ability based on the training, but it does not understand the emotional value of humans interacting with other humans, trying to help other humans.

An AI cannot be disappointed. It cannot be proud. It loses nothing if the learner quits. It’s just there in the system trying to pr- provide in- helpful information given the context that it has access to. So the way I think about this is you have what’s known as a customer avatar or your ideal learner profile, and when they are In your course or in your membership or in your coaching program they need you.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful and trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or building a membership site, Popup Maker helps you grow your email list, boost conversions, and engage your visitors with highly targeted customizable popups.

You can create smart popups for things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce, cart abandonment recovery, upsells, course engagement, activation, targeted offers based on exactly what your students are doing inside LifterLMS. I personally use Popup Maker on all of our websites at LifterLMS for lead magnet opt-ins, cart abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to the right next step.

Popup Maker is essential for growing my email list and making more money through my website. Are you ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast to save 15% off on your order. The discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has a free version, so you can start with that too.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the show.

They need you, the human. They’re not signing up to get advice from AI. In fact, they already have probably tried that before they came to you. So they want you, the human. It doesn’t mean that you- the AI is not helpful to your ideal customer avatar or profile. It just means that the reason they’re joining your course or your coaching program or your training-based membership site is that they want some real human lived experience, feedback, and input The other thing that’s really foundational to all of this is what I call the human knowledge dump, which we go over in how to create an online course with AI.

It’s a free course we have on the LifterLMS Academy. You should check it out. But that’s a very intentional step, and just to describe what it is, if you try to create a course outline with AI, or you try to create course content with AI, even if it’s as simple as text-based lessons, it will do a good job.

But if you don’t inject your human knowledge as an individual, I call that the human knowledge dump, you’re just getting the mass market large language model, or LLM, output to that area of content, whether that’s a lesson or whatever. So the human knowledge dump, when you’re creating a course as an example, or you’re training an AI to help you with your coaching, is you have to inject your own life experience, your own stories, your own favorite resources, even if they’re not your own, that you look to for guidance when you’re trying to help another human being.

That human knowledge dump step is really the most time-consuming part of working with AI. So if you’re working with AI and you’re trying to get something done, if you just say, “Create me a course about X,” or, “Create me saved responses for these types of challenges my coaching clients have,” and you don’t interject all of your existing experience and references and stories and whatnot, the AI is just gonna give generic examples, which may be helpful to a level.

But remember, there’s only one you. People are signing up for not just information, but access to you. Now, it’s true, you can train AI to be a little more helpful and have more context on your proven playbooks, methodologies, resources, and all of that But this kind of tacit knowledge is something that AI just does not have.

So the human should, build the course outline, should build the playbooks for working with coaching clients. And AI can draft and be helpful and fill in holes, I call it gaps, but what you wanna do is actually, put a lot of yourself in the product. Now, you can do some of that by getting yourself and providing more context into AI, but when you’re working an actual living, breathing online course, coaching program, internal training program, the human has to stay in the loop and be involved.

So the AI drafts, the human decides, the human edits, the human adds more context. That’s the signature before the response ships, whether that’s a course outline, course content, a response to a coaching client’s question conversations in the online community, and so on. If you’re doing grading and things like that with a learning management system like LifterLMS, you can bring AI in to do a first pass on the grading, but I’m a huge believer in the human in the loop.

This is like the four-hour workweek, and I think Tim got it right. He did not say the zero-hour workweek. And that’s what a lot of folks are trying to do, to their own detriment, is they’re trying to delegate everything to the artificial intelligence, which is a big mistake. In my opinion, the human should always be in the loop and be very much involved on the front end and the back end of whatever you’re doing with AI.

This is like the 10-80-10 principle, which is if you’re gonna work with AI, don’t give it 100%. You as a human, whatever you’re doing, put your 10% human magic on the front end, crafting good prompts and doing everything to provide context. Let AI go to work and do the 80% of the work.

But then when it’s done, don’t just say, “Sounds great, thumbs up,” and pass that information along to the finished product of whatever it is you’re doing. Add another 10% on the end to review, to be helpful, and, provide more context, provide more human stories. Write with your hands and, just create an exceptional product.

So don’t do the zero-hour workweek with AI. So the hidden cost is when you automate feedback and go blind to your own curriculum, you’re just removing yourself from the product you sold and you promised in the first place. So don’t do that. Again, this is not anti-AI. It can be super helpful. But your students, your coaching clients, your members are already running these tools too, so inject yourself in the process and understand the value of your own unique perspective, ideas, and the things that you bring to the table, and put that into your product.

So let’s talk about where the durable money is. So- I’m just gonna give you some examples from the LifterLMS community. So I wanna mention Michael Wolfe, who’s a course creator and coach. He’s an amazing human being. He’s been on this podcast before. You can find it. I honestly don’t know how much or how little Michael uses AI, but he has 33 courses, 3,000 lessons, and one of the cool things that Michael does that I’ve seen him do is coaching is a huge part of what they do.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plug-ins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

We use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce for selling software subscriptions. But we also use WP Fusion on the LifterLMS Academy, where we are selling access to courses and memberships powered, of course, by LifterLMS. WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow-up based on user behavior.

If you wanna sell more, personalize the learning experience, and build a more connected, automated online business, check out WP Fusion today. Go to wpfusion.com and use the coupon code LifterLMS to save 15%. Now back to the show.

So they’re not just buying access to content, they’re buying access to group and sometimes private one-on-one coaching calls. Michael has run virtual and in-person events, so it’s very human what he does. So 3,000 lessons is a lot. If you have a huge corpus of work AI may be able to help you do some of the lessons, but in Michael’s cake- case, he does a lot of stuff with language coming from the Hebrew and Greek language, and AI translates it for free, but the business still stands because of all the coaching, community, event-based work, and real human work that Michael does.

I also wanna mention Tim McIvor, who does continuing education in the school psychologist niche. So this is where school psychologists have to earn continuing education credits to maintain their license and keep their jobs and get smarter and stay up to speed on what’s going on in their industry.

So Michael… or Tim McIvor has a lot of one-lesson mini courses, which are actually webinars that are delivered by humans delivering continuing education content. So if you think about the continuing education industry all those people can go to AI and type in chats about, “Hey, what’s new in our industry?”

“Give me information about my industry,” and so on. But what Tim MacGiver has done is digitize the human teaching so that it goes from conference rooms and hotels and conference centers to a, a more digital, infinitely scalable format. But there’s so much humanity involved in his continuing education.

He’s not just cranking out continuing education courses that a ChatGPT or Claude invented to provide the contin- continuing education credits. So events are becoming more and more valuable in the age of AI in the education concept. So if you’re not doing events, I would encourage you to do that. We’ve also looked at some of the statistics on course completion.

And when you do cohort-based courses according to a study by Rizuku, which is another LMS, a S- a SaaS LMS, they found that cohort-based courses have 64% completion rates, whereas self-paced courses have around 45% completion rates. So just that one data point right there shows you the power of a cohort, i.e.

community, moving through a course together as a community, taking lessons at the same time, asking questions in the community at the same time. It’s that human element of a cohort that makes community-based courses and cohort-based courses more effective in terms of completion rates. So if you’re using LifterLMS, we have a cohorts add-on so that you can do, easily do cohort-based courses, and I highly recommend that.

So when you think about the humans, not just using AI to pass information across inside of an online course, but if you think about humans in a cohort learning and growing together at the same time, that’s a really powerful thing to increase learning effectiveness and getting the results basically and whatever was promised in the course.

So The, the key thing here with AI is just to remember human in the loop, and we’re not going for a zero-hour work week. Everybody I know that works heavily with AI has never been more busy productive. They’re even having challenges in their personal life in terms of they’re just so overwhelmed by all the opportunity and all the things they can automate and all those, all the things they can do with AI, but they’re becoming more productive.

There’s something called Jevons paradox, which means that as a system comes into society that heavily incr- increases efficiency, the paradox is that system was supposed to give us a zero-hour work week, but we actually start working a lot more because of the efficiency and the increase in our productivity.

So Jevons paradox comes from when we introduced the steam engine in the industrial age. People didn’t work less after that came. They actually started working more, and I see that going on with AI, and that whole thing can be really overwhelming when you start getting really productive with AI. There’s just more stuff you can do.

But should you prioritize that? Should you be working on that? That’s just a challenge you need to introspect on. And also, the idea of unplugging from automation and AI and just being a human, helping other humans, has never been more important. So- Your expertise is not just knowledge. That’s what I want you to really take away from this episode.

Again, Google search, YouTube videos, and now AI. Knowledge is infinite. People can go find stuff on their own. So when you’re just selling information, those are the course businesses that are dying because you’re just basically repackaging what’s already available. But what can’t be repackaged is your unique human experience, the way that you provide additional context, stories, curation, and just the human element to an experience.

So we’re not just selling information, we’re creating learning experiences. Knowledge, what AI is literally intelligence, which is knowledge, is just a fraction of the pie chart. So all those other things you can do by creating community through cohorts or other means, in person or virtually, providing coaching and feedback in a one-on-one or group context.

These are part of what only a human can do. And remember, when people buy from you, especially if you’re trying to charge at higher price points, they’re not just paying for information, they’re also paying for access to you and others on the journey like them in terms of community. So if you’re digging what we’re talking about here, and you’re using AI heavily in your courses and coaching programs and training-based membership sites, I would encourage you to reach out to your learners and ask them why they bought from you instead of asking Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT or Claude.

What is the reason? ‘Cause you may not realize how valuable you really are as a human being in your space. So whatever those people say is your actual product. The knowledge, the information, the intelligence is, of course, important. It’s a part of what you offer. It is your information product, if you will.

But people don’t just want information. There’s more they want, and the, the more that they want is really related to the human element that you provide as a course creator, as a coach, as a education entrepreneur. So from the beginning of LifterLMS, we always had this saying, and I wanna give credit where credit is due to my original LifterLMS co-founder.

His name is Joshua Milich. And Joshua said in the early days of LifterLMS is that what we’re doing is we’re scaling the human touch with robotics. So we’re creating tons of automation. You can build a course or membership or school without needing the infrastructure that was previously required for example, an actual brick-and-mortar school or a stage to speak on.

There’s so much automation that happens in LifterLMS. It’s why people buy the software to, be more effective through high-powered automation in terms of things like e-commerce, engagement, membership- LMS things like reporting, progress tracking, grading, and so on. So we’ve always been inside this story, which is, scaling the human touch with robotics.

But our goal was never to make the human completely disappear. And going back to where we started in this episode, I think Tim Ferriss nailed it with the title of his popular book called The 4-Hour Workweek. And what I mean by that is, again, it’s not the zero-hour workweek, it’s four hours. So in that context, that’s 10% of the time, four out of a 40-hour workweek.

What does the human need to do? Like, why does the human still have four hours in the workweek if we have all this awesome automation and outsourcing and delegation? So I would encourage you to think about your most important four hours. And what I find is a lot of the best education entrepreneurs, they don’t work four hours a week.

They work like 40 hours a week or 30 hours a week or even 60, 70 hours a week because they love what they do. So use AI, use automation, use YouTube, get your information so it shows up in Google and all that stuff, but optimize the human element so that your courses, memberships, and coaching programs are not just information.

So put you and your team, if you have one, inside the product and don’t try to automate or give everything to AI to the point where you’re not needed because that’s not what the market wants. The market wants you. They’re signing up for you. They’re signing up for a human experience.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.