About Coleap
Why we should all care
Continuous reskilling is a massive challenge. In a world where an est. 85% of jobs that today's college students will have in 2030 haven't yet been invented, front-loading education to people's first 20-25 years of life under the assumption of a linear career no longer works. Current alternatives are either too slow to adapt (e.g. universities) or ineffective (e.g. traditional online courses or self-directed learning). That has massive repercussions for economic productivity as well as individual agency and wellbeing, at a time where engagement levels at work are at a historic low.
What a better future looks like
Lifelong learning needs to become simultaneously more engaging, accessible and effective. What we believe will get us there:
Making online education more social: most online education 1.0 providers delivered single-player learning (e.g. Coursera, EdX, Udemy). These platforms created unprecedented accessibility for learners, yet aren't always effective (think: MooC's 3-10% completion rates). Learning with like-minded peers (= what we call learning communities) can vastly improve outcomes. It provides accountability, opportunities for continuous practice and feedback, network expansion (key in a career transition), and makes the process much more fun. Peer-led learning also opens the path for the strengthening of peer-to-peer credentials, which under the rapid unbundling for work from employment could disrupt the traditional reliance on institutional degrees (which incentivizes institutions to maintain scarcity)
100x more learning communities, by involving experienced operators: so far there are too few learning communities out there. That's a problem because individual cohorts can't scale indefinitely and not every learner has the same time objective, budget, time availability, starting point and/or timezone. If those that have learnt valuable skills (= "experienced operators") could give back to 1000s learners around them, the story would be different.