The value of online courses
All the knowledge is out there for free.
You could search for it yourself, access it for free, and avoid paying for the course.
But that takes time.
You pay either way: with your money or with your time.
The value of an online course is that it saves you the time needed to find the best information.
Not always, but often, the cost of the course is much cheaper than the cost of the time you’ll spend doing the knowledge gathering on your own.
The hidden cost of free
While the internet offers a sea of free information, the true cost lies in the time it takes to navigate and make sense of it.
The process of sifting through countless sources, discerning credible from dubious information, and structuring it into a coherent learning path is a time-consuming endeavor.
Time, as the saying goes, is money.
The value proposition of online courses
Online courses save you the time needed for independent research.
The creators of these courses have already spent hours curating, organizing, and presenting the information as an efficient learning experience.
Rather than wandering through the vast landscape of the internet, learners can follow a well-defined path, building knowledge in a logical and progressive manner.
Conclusion
The content is online. And most of it is free.
But it takes time and energy to find what you need and organize it.
Courses are valuable because they do the work of finding and organizing for you.
Courses are useful insofar as they curate the wheat from the chaff of all the content swirling around online.