<h2 id="conservation-training-and-experience">Conservation training and experience</h2>
A relatively recent comment I saw online is that aspiring conservators-to-be are still finding very high bars when it comes to entering the profession. I began my journey into conservation 10 years ago, and it still seems the same. The very strange expectation that “to become a conservator, you need to have had experience as a conservator,” while defensible from a standards perspective, is also completely illogical from a reality perspective.
<blockquote>
It felt like a cut-throat competitive approach to getting those few, coveted places in conservation programmes around the world and because I didn’t decide to be a conservator when I was 13 years old and got internships in local museums because that’s not how my country works, I might have missed that boat.
</blockquote>
And the worst thing is that for all that competition, if/when you get out, there is always the chance you might not even get a job that pays you back for your sacrifices - and some of us have to make more sacrifices than others.
My personal journey to become a conservator was, luckily, not entirely like that. I chose to go into conservation after I had already finished a BA in anthropology. I had never considered conservation before that. I had never volunteered in a museum. I just happened to have had several courses in chemistry and anthropology to be able to fill the requirements for an MA application. I applied to a program abroad and I was able to get in. In fact, I actually had to get in twice because I was waitlisted the first time around, and by the time I was happily accepted, the visa situation would have taken too long for me to get there in time for the start of the school year, so, with a lot of sadness, I had to withdraw and just try again the next year and hope for the best.
Luckily for me, it worked the second time around without a waitlist, and I was able to get my degree. However, until I was accepted the second time, that feeling that maybe I was too late was constant. Years later, I still get butterflies in my stomach thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t got in.
<blockquote>
There were a number of programmes I didn’t even bother applying for because I knew I wouldn’t be able to compete (or afford them).
</blockquote>
My applicant peers, who by this time were a few years younger than me, already seemed to have museum internship experiences that amounted to a number of years! I wondered how this was even possible? The idea that in order to get into a programme that taught me something, I already had to be well-steeped into that something (and even have a portfolio in some cases!) struck me as absurd. Were they mainly there to rubber stamp us and give out a certification?
When I finally got to my programme and met the cohort who have now become a group of very good friends, I noticed that, just like me, they were mostly new to conservation, and this was a relief. I had a fantastic two years of learning things I’d never even heard of before, sharing knowledge with fellow students and even had my very first ever serious internship experience in conservation. This allowed me to move on after my degree and get a conservation job in my own country where I have managed to apply all things learned and even teach some conservation basics to colleagues from other fields. I am happy to say that I was able to overcome the barriers I saw looming ahead - in great part because I am lucky in my family and situation.
That’s my story, and I wonder if yours is similar or completely different. I am very grateful that I was able to join a programme and that I got that official degree from a recognised university - which was absolutely necessary for me to be where I am today.
However, I still wonder about those of us who can’t do that. Either because of money, geography, personal reasons, etc., there are significant barriers to overcome. I can’t advocate for an online conservation degree by anything other than a recognised institution. I also won’t presume to tell programmes how to run their application processes.
<blockquote>
What I can do myself is address one of the issues that stuck with me while I waited to see if I would be able to get a degree: the knowledge and experience gap between applicants.
</blockquote>
<h2 id="conservation-public-outreach-offer-and-possibilities">Conservation public outreach, offer and possibilities</h2>
Various institutions and individuals are doing fantastic work with conservation outreach for the general public. There are YouTube channels, social media accounts, free webinars, etc. These are all great and serve as a good way for interested people at various levels to dip their feet into conservation. Here are some examples of this:
<ul>
<li><a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4r66EnLu8RyDfrA0kaxgrQ" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conservation Starter on YouTube</a></li>
<li><a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/user/aiconservation" rel="noopener noreferrer">The YouTube page of the American Institute of Conservation</a></li>
<li><a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/user/gettyconservation" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Getty Conservation Institute YouTube channel</a></li>
<li><a title="" href="https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes.html" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Canadian Conservation Institute’s Notes series</a></li>
<li><a title="" href="https://thecword.show/" rel="noopener noreferrer">The C Word podcast</a></li>
<li><a title="" href="https://twitter.com/MarianaDGiacomo" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dr. Mariana di Giacomo’s Twitter account</a></li>
<li><a title="" href="https://www.si.edu/MCI/english/learn_more/taking_care/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute “Taking Care” series</a></li>
</ul>
However, if you are a person interested in going into conservation and realise you just don’t seem to have the basics to even apply to a programme in the first place, where could you start? There are scholarships and things for pre-programme individuals, but again, these will likely be just as competitive as the programmes themselves, so where does that leave you?
Sometimes we might think that we can’t make a difference, that we need to wait for our professional bodies or organisations to do something about things we need to improve - and they’re definitely trying, but we can still help out - and be rewarded fairly for our efforts.
<h2 id="experimentation">Experimentation</h2>
I should be explicitly clear that I am not trying to encourage the independent, online training of full conservators - this would be dangerous and probably outright unethical. Conservation training, as we all know, requires a lot of hands-on experience guided by the watchful eye of an experienced tutor in a laboratory setting. I personally believe we do still need institutional credibility, education, accreditations, internships, apprenticeships, laboratory experience, etc.
That said, there are many aspects of conservation that can be imparted online without any expectation that students or people interested in pre-programme preparation would attempt anything crazy on their own: ethics, preventive conservation basics, risk assessment, documentation management, community engagement, chemistry, software use, sustainability, budget planning, data science, pest management, etc.
Many of these great courses, however, can be expensive for students - especially for those of us who have to deal with currency conversion rates. So what now?
I would like to encourage you, if you are a trained conservator, to share your knowledge in a freelance setting at a price you consider acceptable for your geographical location and based on your own resources and time - unless, of course, you are contractually bound not to. I specifically co-founded Altminster so that we would have a space to do this. It is all running 100% free for now because our costs are very very low, so it’s possible to do.
Soon, I intend to try to make a loosely structured, low fees, pre-programme style curriculum of courses that someone could study independently and mostly asynchronously in order to prepare themselves for the dive - so that they don’t feel so separated from or disadvantaged in the face of their seemingly already professional peers. You can look at a starting example for <a title="" href="/instructors/colin-gorrie" rel="noopener noreferrer">Linguistics</a> that already exists on Altminster.
Interested? <a title="" href="/instructors/angelica-isa/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Send me a message</a> if this is something you would like to do and let’s build something together.
 
 
 
 

If you liked this post, you can follow me on <a title="" href="https://twitter.com/ConservaLlama" rel="noopener noreferrer">Twitter</a> where I'll be posting more content on conservation tidbits and how to improve your collections at home.

Training Accessibility in Conservation

The COVID pandemic has given new life to teaching online. Many university instructors have of course had to scramble to figure out how to adapt their courses to an online format. The private sector too, has seen a renaissance in online courses, with the newest trend being the rise of <a title="" href="https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-rise-of-cohort-based-courses/" rel="noopener noreferrer">cohort-based courses</a>, which look a lot more like the courses traditionally offered in universities than the previous generation of online courses did. The older generation of online teaching and learning is exemplified by the courses on platforms like <a title="" href="https://udemy.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Udemy</a> and <a title="" href="https://skillshare.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Skillshare</a>: they're self-paced, they're cheap, and, by all accounts, most people don't actually sit through the whole thing. Cohort-based courses, by contrast, have start and end dates, often have live instruction, and require a much greater commitment from their students than the previous wave of online courses had. And, like the courses offered by universities, these private-sector cohort-based courses often very expensive: <a title="" href="https://writeofpassage.school/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Write of Passage</a>, one of the best-known of this new generation, costs (as of the time of writing) between $4000 and $7000 for a seat.
In the earlier stages of the pandemic, some of us perceived a gap: why could the cohort-based model not work for more traditional academic subjects? We'd give students everything they loved about university but without the bad bits: admissions, grades, or bureaucracy of any kind. Of course, we couldn't give them credit, but we could give them what they wanted: learning. Yes, we wouldn't have been able to justify charging $7000 for a six-week course in, say, <a title="" href="/courses/language-and-thought" rel="noopener noreferrer">Language and Thought</a>, but at $200, it seemed to work well for everyone involved. As I developed more and more courses in this format – to date, I've successfully run – I began to see how the process of developing, marketing, and running these courses works. I've written this article as a guide so that you can repeat the process yourself. So if you're an independent academic who misses teaching, read on.
I've broken this guide into three parts, each of which presents a distinct challenge in the process of course creation:
<ol>
<li>Creating and validating a course idea</li>
<li>Making a course that works online</li>
<li>Finding students</li>
</ol>
I'm assuming that you've taught before and that the running of the course won't present you with too much trouble.
<h2 id="creating-and-validating-a-course-idea">Creating and validating a course idea</h2>
Coming up with a course idea in the first place is probably the easiest part. If you're like me, you may have dozens of ideas for courses you want to teach. If not, you can always look to courses you have taught before. Introductory courses will almost always be the thing to start with, because the market of beginners will always be larger than the market of intermediate and advanced students. But don't feel tied to the traditional "introductory course" curriculum. Outside of academia, people are more receptive to ways of introducing topics in ways that tie in with other, perhaps non-academic interests. For example, I teach a class called the <a title="" href="/courses/language-construction-workshop" rel="noopener noreferrer">Language Construction Workshop</a>, which, on the surface, is a class about making constructed languages. But under that surface layer, it also serves as an effective introduction to the major areas of general linguistics.
At any rate, the danger is likely not that you will be starved for ideas for courses. The biggest danger in this whole enterprise is that you might spend a lot of time and effort making something that no one is willing to pay for. No one wants to throw a party and have no one show up! For this reason, validating your course idea before you do much work is crucial. There are many ways of doing this, but almost none will give you complete certainty that people will pay for your course.
The one way to get certainty that people will pay for your course, by the way, is to charge them for the course in advance. You may be able to do this if you have a large audience that is already in love with what you do. If you can manage to do this, then you probably should, provided you understand how to handle giving refunds if you don't end up running the course.
If you don't have the luxury of an audience that would give you pre-sales – and I didn't – you will have to satisfy yourself with getting a reasonable level of confidence that you won't be wasting your time. A good way to do this is by using social media. My platform of choice has been Twitter, since that is where I am most active. You may find a different platform works better for you.
What I have done to start validating an idea is to start to tweet about the topic for a course I'm considering. I don't mention anything about a course at first – instead, I start talking about the topic in general. As I do this, I check what sort of response the tweets are getting. Are lots of people liking them? That's encouraging. Are lots of people replying? That's very encouraging. Are people retweeting? That's the highest form of encouragement Twitter can give an idea.
Once I've noticed that a topic seems to be of interest to my audience, I ask them what they'd think of a course on the topic. I only do this with topics that people have been engaging with already. This way, they are "warmed up", so to speak. These tweets look something like this:
<blockquote>
I know there are some fans of Old English out there. I'm considering running a 6-week course introducing the basics of Old English grammar by reading texts like Beowulf. Probably around $200. Leave a like if this is something that would interest you!
</blockquote>
If this tweet does well, I move on to the next step. The bar for "doing well" is pretty high at this point. I'd want to see some evidence that people are excited by the idea. This can come in several forms – replies saying "Yes!!! Take my money!" are a good sign – but, failing that, something like 10+ retweets and 100+ likes would make me feel comfortable moving forward.
Obviously, this strategy for validating an idea does require a social media presence. But it doesn't require a particularly big one. When I started selling courses online, I had around 700 followers on Twitter. I've seen people with 200–300 followers launch courses successful as well.
<h2 id="making-a-course-that-works-online">Making a course that works online</h2>
The next step is to design the course itself. This, as usual, grows out of a syllabus. But you should think of the syllabus for this kind of course not primarily as a document that gives logistical information. This kind of syllabus is first and foremost an advertisement. I've found success with the following format:
<ul>
<li>Advertising copy</li>
<li>Goal of the course</li>
<li>Week-by-week breakdown of course content</li>
<li>Logistics and workload</li>
<li>Who should/shouldn't take this course</li>
</ul>
Let's look at each of these in turn.
<h3 id="advertising-copy">Advertising copy</h3>
Now is your chance to unleash your inner Don Draper and hook the reader. I often like starting with a question. Here are some examples from my courses:
<blockquote>
What is the nature of the relationship between language and thought? Or, put another way, does language constrain, influence, or merely express thought? Sometimes known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the idea that we might be limited in what we can think by the languages we speak has provided fertile ground for scientists and philosophers, not to mention authors of science fiction. Whether and how language influences thought has been one of the most controversial questions of modern linguistics. And it remains unresolved to this day, as new evidence continues to amass from experimental work in the cognitive sciences.
<a title="" href="/courses/language-and-thought" rel="noopener noreferrer">Language and Thought</a>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Wouldn't it be cool to invent your own alphabet? A unique form of calligraphy all your own? A script for one of the cultures in a world that you're building? Do you have a conlang that is crying out for a way to be written? If you've ever asked yourself questions like these, Inventing Alphabets is for you. This course is a guided introduction to the practice of creating original writing systems as well as a grand tour of the anthropology, history, and linguistics of the world's writing systems.
<a title="" href="/courses/inventing-alphabets" rel="noopener noreferrer">Inventing Alphabets</a>
</blockquote>
The idea here is to get people excited about the basic idea of the course. I try not to assume any technical background here, and pitch the description so that someone who has never heard of the topic before would be able to say "Oh, that actually does sound interesting." after reading it.
<h3 id="goal-of-the-course">Goal of the course</h3>
Next, I frame the overall goal of the course as a paragraph outlining what students will have learned or accomplished by the end of the course. This is a kind of promise to your students: take this course, keep up with the readings, discussions, assignments, or whatever, and you'll know/do/have XYZ by the end. Here are some examples from my own courses:
<blockquote>
This course is a hands-on introduction to making constructed languages (or conlangs) as a creative pursuit, taught by a linguist and experienced conlanger. The course also serves as an introduction to linguistics, but instead of learning the material in a dry, lecture style, you'll learn it all by doing. By the end of the course, you'll not only have created a language of your own, but you'll also have the ability to repeat the process and create whole worlds full of languages.
<a title="" href="/courses/language-construction-workshop" rel="noopener noreferrer">Language Construction Workshop</a>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Learning a second language is something that many people attempt but few accomplish. Despite the wide variety of books, apps, and courses promising fluency with little effort ("in only 15 minutes a day"), most language learners do not achieve their goals. But there is lots of research studying how language learning works and how to do it effectively. Unfortunately, few language learners are aware of it. This course aims to remedy that situation, offering an accessible and applicable introduction to the science and practice of language learning.
<a title="" href="/courses/meta-skills-for-language-learning" rel="noopener noreferrer">Meta-Skills for Language Learning</a>
</blockquote>
As you design the course, keep this goal foremost in mind: anything that does not serve the goal should be cut from the course. Most of your students will be working professionals and will likely not be able to commit to long courses – more on this below. One way of keeping things short is by ruthlessly cutting anything that doesn't help to fulfill the promise made at the outset of the course.
<h3 id="week-by-week-breakdown-of-course-content">Week-by-week breakdown of course content</h3>
This section is similar to its equivalent on a normal syllabus. But you can get more creative if you want. One thing I've started to do is to treat each week as a mini-course of its own, giving it an appealing hook, as well as a clear goal.
<blockquote>
This class introduces the results of the last few decades of research in second language acquisition. We now know a lot about how language learning works. And it turns out that it's not much like the way most people go about learning languages. We're going to bust language learning myths, and replace these myths with science-backed knowledge. For example, we'll learn why the best apps for language learning aren't language-learning apps at all. We'll use this knowledge to examine and revise the techniques and resources we're using in our current language learning practice.
<a title="" href="/courses/meta-skills-for-language-learning" rel="noopener noreferrer">Meta-Skills for Language Learning</a>, Week 3
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis did not emerge from a vacuum. It comes out of a larger anthropological tradition. In this class, we'll trace the genealogy of the concept of linguistic relativity from Humboldt, through Boas, and finally to Sapir and Whorf. We'll also look at what Whorf actually believed – does it match the pop-science version of the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"? Along the way, we'll see where the "22 words for snow" meme comes from and examine what a Hopi physics might have looked like. Reading: Excerpt from Whorf (1956), Language, Thought, and Reality.
<a title="" href="/courses/language-and-thought" rel="noopener noreferrer">Language and Thought</a>, Week 2
</blockquote>
<h3 id="logistics-and-workload">Logistics and workload</h3>
When we consider the logistics of the course: how many sessions there are, whether they are live or recoded, how often you meet, there are factors that come into play to make independent academic courses quite different from those taught in universities.
As I mentioned earlier, most of your students will have things like jobs and family obligations to contend with. This is why it is important to let prospective students know what they're signing up for. Letting them know approximately how many hours a week they'll need to spend on your course – and sticking to that – is crucial.
Here are some factors your course design should take into account:
<ul>
<li>Any more than 2–3 hours of homework per week will likely be a non-starter.</li>
<li>Students will procrastinate on doing homework as much as they can. Don't depend on them working steadily throughout the week.</li>
<li>Some students will not get their homework done, despite being engaged and motivated.</li>
<li>Some students will miss live sessions because they have to travel, get sick, take care of children, etc.</li>
</ul>
If your course design relies on any of these things not being true, consider changing the design.
My favourite design is this:
<ul>
<li>6-week courses</li>
<li>2-hour live sessions once per week, at a time that captures as many timezones as possible. I find it works best to hold live sessions on a weekend around noon (Eastern time).</li>
<li>All class sessions recorded and hosted on an unlisted Youtube playlist so that people can catch up on missed classes</li>
<li>Short readings or homework assignments every week (1–2 hours, maximum)</li>
</ul>
I encourage you to start with something that you've seen work – feel free to steal my format! – and then tweak it from there.
<h3 id="who-shouldshouldnt-take-this-course">Who should/shouldn't take this course</h3>
This is a great section because you ensure that no one is disappointed. Think of all the ways someone might misunderstand what your course is about and address them here. You don't want someone asking for a refund because they thought your Old English class was going to teach them how to read Macbeth rather than Beowulf.
<h2 id="finding-students">Finding students</h2>
The next challenge is finding enough people to sign up to make it worth your time to hold the course. As much as we all love our subjects, bills can't be paid in enthusiasm for, say, mediaeval courtly literature. The more students you sign up, obviously, the more you'll make. But there is also a danger in signing up too many students, especially for your first course. I recommend keeping the number of students relatively low, at least until you get comfortable with this kind of course and this kind of student. My first cohort had five students, and my courses now accommodate up to 15 in a cohort.
Of course, setting a target number of students and reaching that target are different things. How do you find students? In my experience, it's more about students finding you. Remember all that posting on social media you were doing to validate your idea? If you'e done that right, it probably attracted some people to you who are interested in this topic. They may even become your students. So keep posting about your course's topic, but every so often mention your course. The frequency with which you can get away with doing this varies widely from platform to platform. You can also offer discounts to your followers, although don't let the disparity between the regular price and the discount get too big, to avoid the sleazy effect where the price is artificially inflated to make the discount look more appealing.
Another argument in favour of a smaller initial cohort is that you can work out the kinks with a small group and then get testimonials from that first batch of students, which will make selling later cohorts much easier. You will probably also find students through referrals from past students, provided of course that your students had a good time and your course fulfilled its promise.
<h2 id="parting-words">Parting words</h2>
Once you've got a validated course idea, a syllabus, and a marketing plan, you could go around to a place like <a title="" href="https://hyperlink.academy" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hyperlink Academy</a> or <a title="" href="https://speakeasy.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Speakeasy</a> and get some logistical help with things like payments. Or, you could sign up for <a title="" href="https://stripe.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Stripe</a> or <a title="" href="https://gumroad.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">Gumroad</a> and do it all yourself! Beyond that, all you need is a premium Zoom account and an email address.
If you do make a course, <a title="" href="/list-course" rel="noopener noreferrer">let us know</a>! We'd be happy to list it for you in our <a title="" href="/courses" rel="noopener noreferrer">course directory</a> – and we're not charging anything while Altminster is in its beta phase.

How to Teach Online: A Guide for Independent Academics

This article, which was an early attempt at articulating what would become <a title="" href="/about" rel="noopener noreferrer">Altminster's mission</a>, originally appeared at <a title="" href="https://www.colingorrie.com/essays/teacher-teach" rel="noopener noreferrer">Colin Gorrie's personal website</a> and is reproduced here with permission.
One of the most encouraging developments of the past few years is the growth in popularity of long-form educational content, delivered by podcast or video. In the early days of YouTube, the days of <a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqSTXuJeTks" rel="noopener noreferrer">"Leave Britney Alone"</a>, who would have imagined that a lengthy video on, say, <a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnu_Ws7Llo4" rel="noopener noreferrer">graph theory</a> or <a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93ibC1wasGk" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nietzsche (in Spanish)</a>, would ever approach millions of views?
<h2 id="the-problem-of-credibility">The problem of credibility</h2>
But how do we know that what we're reading and listening to is any good? All it takes is a microphone to make a podcast, after all. And the material I'm talking about is not basic stuff: it's higher education, the kind you'd normally get in a university classroom.
I can think of two ways to get around this problem, both imperfect. One way is the doctorate. A doctor, etymologically anyway, is a teacher, nothing more, nothing less. Someone who has a doctorate is someone who has passed a rigorous process of qualification to teach a particular subject at a high level.
Or at least in theory. Sadly, not everyone with a doctorate is good at teaching. In fact, some are downright awful. And of course, so many people without a doctorate can also teach advanced subjects, often very well! So we need another way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
This other way, I propose, is the old-fashioned one: reputation. Reputation isn't just popularity. Popularity alone cannot tell us whose information is trustworthy, although a teacher whose classes are standing room-only is sending a good signal of teaching ability. It's a teacher's reputation among peers that signals the quality of that teacher's information.
But this is hard to ascertain without knowing who these peers are, and how do we judge this? It becomes a chicken-and-egg problem. The solution we relied on was to outsource this whole mess to the university. They could handle these issues of trust for us: they would only employ qualified teachers, and they would evaluate teachers in part based on their skill at teaching and in part based on their output as researchers. All the student needed to do was pay tuition, show up, and work hard. A sound system!
<h2 id="the-strange-death-of-the-university">The strange death of the university</h2>
Unfortunately, if that system ever truly worked, it doesn't anymore.
What happened to universities? The ideal of the postwar research university, where "advancing the frontiers of knowledge" was married to "educating ordinary people" has vanished like a dream upon waking. The problems with the contemporary university are <a title="" href="https://aeon.co/essays/have-elite-us-colleges-lost-their-moral-purpose-altogether" rel="noopener noreferrer">well known</a>, so I won't dwell on them here. I'll merely ask the rhetorical question: If what you want isn't a debt-financed education-flavoured vacation – if what you want is an education, why shouldn't you simply put on a podcast or a YouTube video?
The university of 2020 is a bad deal for students. But it's bad for teachers too:
<ul>
<li>The end of tenure as a realistic prospect for most PhDs</li>
<li>Precarious, low-paid employment as the new normal</li>
<li>Constant need to apply for scarce jobs, a tax on your productive time</li>
<li>Uprooting one's family to chase postdocs or adjunct positions</li>
</ul>
A newly minted PhD in the humanities or social sciences has a grim employment future ahead. The few jobs that are available pay poorly and offer no prospect for advancement. What is a PhD to do?
<h2 id="the-solution-teacher-teach">The solution? Teacher, teach!</h2>
At some point, a precariously employed PhD in philosophy is going to realize that, if a <a title="" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgNt1C72B_4" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hegel video</a> on YouTube can get half a million views, there's hope for them too.
Supply, meet demand! We can solve the problem of the disillusioned academic (how to put food on the table) and the idea-hungry student's problem at once.
<h2 id="a-living-wage-for-teachers-a-fair-price-for-students">A living wage for teachers, a fair price for students</h2>
If an academic is going to work a precarious job, it may as well be a precarious job with some prospect of advancement. The better a teacher is at marketing, the more students that teacher can reach. And the best kind of marketing is a kind of teaching, so it should come fairly naturally.
And which is truly more precarious: a single employer who may or may not renew your contract next year, or 100 students, each of whom chooses to pay you to teach them something? In the first case, if you lose one source of income, you have none left. In the second, if you lose one source of income, you still have 99 left.
And, unlike the traditional university, the PhD solo practitioner doesn't have a horde of bureaucrats or a new football stadium to pay for. So, at the risk of sounding like a TV furniture salesman, that teacher can pass the savings on to the student.
How does this work for students? For one, it's orders of magnitude cheaper. And, if the teachers are marketing themselves well, the student will likely have "sampled the wares" by reading the teacher's public writing (much like you're doing now, how meta!), listening to the teacher's appearances on podcasts, following the teacher on social media, etc. Since these courses are generally not bundled into programmes (although one day they may be), competition can work in students' favour. One thing the new indie model lacks is credentials. I'm still agnostic as to whether this is a benefit or a drawback.
<h2 id="this-is-actually-a-real-thing-that-is-happening">This is actually a real thing that is happening</h2>
The most exciting part of this personally is that I've started to put this into practice. In the fall, I taught <a title="" href="https://hyperlink.academy/courses/language-construction-workshop/26" rel="noopener noreferrer">my first online course</a>, guiding a small cohort of students in creating their first constructed language. Along the way, I sneaked in a nice helping of good old-fashioned descriptive linguistics. Call it the Mary Poppins Principle: A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down.
It was an exhilarating experience for me, despite the learning curve presented by teaching via Zoom. I'm very grateful to collaborate with <a title="" href="https://hyperlink.academy" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hyperlink Academy</a>, a company whose <a title="" href="https://hyperlink.academy/library/hyperlink-vision-for-learning-futures" rel="noopener noreferrer">mission</a> aligns with much of what I've described here. They aren't focused specifically on hosting courses taught by disillusioned academics, but their indie model of online education is one that teachers seeking refuge from traditional academia can use.
I've got another course hosted on Hyperlink coming up in January 2021 as well, called <a title="" href="https://hyperlink.academy/courses/meta-skills-for-language-learning/70" rel="noopener noreferrer">Meta-Skills for Language Learning</a>, which provides language learners with a toolkit of knowledge, techniques, and mindsets to make them more confident and effective in their language learning practice. Or, put another way, it's "linguistics for language learners".
And more courses will follow that one. The year 2021 will be all about taking this manifesto and putting it into practice. If you're interested in seeing how this develops, <a title="" href="https://twitter.com/colingorrie" rel="noopener noreferrer">follow me on Twitter</a>.
<h2 id="postscript-august-2021">Postscript, August 2021</h2>
Nine months after Colin first wrote this, he and Angélica Isa launched Altminster to try to put some of these ideas into practice. If these ideas resonate with you, follow our progress by signing up for our newsletter below!

Training Accessibility in Conservation

How to Teach Online: A Guide for Independent Academics

Teacher, teach!

Stay in touch?