MasterClass Isn’t Really About Mastery (2020)
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Only when one realizes the actual effort that needs to be done to achieve Mastery, most people back out. This is crazy, they say. Who has the time to practice 4 hours a day.
Masterclass doesn't sell mastery. DuoLingo doesn't sell language learning. It sells an aspirational hope that this new skill or language is just one course away. And that's comforting to us somehow. We are simple creatures after all.
BTW, I like the word mastery too much that I decided to start a company around it. Primerlabs(https://primerlabs.io). The goal is to create self paced courses that will allow anyone to truly self-learn difficult subject such as physics, mathematics, economics. We are focusing on CS currently but we will get there (hopefully).
People don't have to want to be "masters" in order to be interested in this sort of content, but calling them "master classes" rather waters down the definition quite a bit when someone with an interest but no experience in cinematography now goes around saying with smug pride, "I took a master class with Martin Scorsese".
Language changes and the meaning of words & phrases change, sure. But I guess what I don't like is the deliberate manipulation of language to co-opt it for marketing & profiting contrary to what the current use of the language actually means.
Our society often discourages pursuits that aren’t correlated with income. Practically, how much time can I truly spend on a craft if I need to make a living too? Some people can make what are essentially two full time jobs work, but most people have other needs that fall higher in the hierarchy that don’t allow that sort of dedication.
Or maybe growing up their parents discouraged them from committing to, say, the arts, precisely because of their concern for the uncertain economic future associated with that lifestyle.
I think people who manage to find a job that provides a sense of mastery and pays well are seriously lucky.
Yes, they have. That's what their whole post is about.
A master class is supposed to involve personal interaction with the the master, not a videotaped lecture. So I would expect even less from it than from a proper master class.
Master classes can bring very advanced students up a notch, though it's not really intended to make them masters themselves all at a go. That's something you have to earn on your own. But master classes are often taught to the most advanced students to bring their performances to level where they're prepared to strike out on their own and truly master their craft.
That's the value of the masterclass. It's like asking a knowledgeable friend for advice. That won't turn you into a sage on the topic, but you'll come out all the better for it.
No, it's because no matter what the cost of school is, universities know their "customers" will just take out a loan to match whatever the price is. And one way to "disrupt" this is to make public universities free for in state students, similar to what California used to do with the UC system.
It was difficult to read the rest of the article given that it started on this false premise.
More specifically, this article should really define what MasterClass is right at the beginning. Because given the picture at the top, I thought it was referring to the generic masterclass [0]
It's not just the ability to borrow that's driving this, but the perception that you must absolutely have the product (college degree) - so you don't feel like you have a choice not to borrow to pay the exorbitant fee.
University is hard to "disrupt" but the fact that the cost comes out of your pocket, student debt and all, is one motivating factor for others to try.
If you entrench the university as something that's "free" (meaning, you still pay the exorbitant fee, just in the form of taxes) then you've basically established a monopoly because nothing can compete with something that's "free"
My take on the university is simple - the university originally existed because you needed a single physical location for books and smart people. Access to people and information was finite and location really mattered.
This is the opposite of the world we live in now - ability to access people and knowledge today is only hurt by the physical colocation aspect. So the university, which is still operating under the "books and smart people are scarce so you need to pay us to be near them" principle just no longer makes sense as the default way to educate the masses.
That doesn't make sense. Maybe for some fields, but certainly all the fields that actually require a lab to work in still benefit from the physical space a university provides.
I'm also not convinced that remote work/meetings == in person collaboration between colleagues.
Sure. But it doesn't have to be black and white. A degree costs the.same currently regardless of whether you are in a. Lab-heaby major or one where you mainly sit in a 200+ lecture hall passively listening. Either way you rack up tens lt hundreds of thousands of debt. Wouldn't it be at least nice to have am option to learn the same material in an acredited way while taking advantage of modern technology to drive costs majorly down.
Then for majors with labs etc maybe you do show up somewhere to work on it. You maybe even pay more for lab access since the cost of providing one is higher. I bet you still come out way ahead compared to today.
Bottom line if someone wants the classic education experience, sure. But that financial commitment shouldn't be everyone's default
But I'm not so sure that making them free accomplishes either one. It's possible that doing so would only push the problem to the master's programs as organizations and candidates look for differentiation.
It does, MasterClass is capitalised in the title showing that its a proper noun and the by-line is
> And other lessons from a 9-figure edtech startup
Not sure how the author could define MasterClass more “at the beginning” than in the title and by-line.
They do define properly, just after an unrelated blurb about public universities: "MasterClass is an online education portal"
> It does, MasterClass is capitalised in the title showing that its a proper noun and the by-line is
That's fair, although it wasn't capitalized on hackernews
Certainly doesn’t work that way in germany where college is free. But then again, the US have an odd relationship with tax funding, to say the least.
No, that's not how state budgets work. It's the other way around. Universities will get whatever the state appropriates to them and then have an obligation to take all comers.
Would that be like current pre-university public schools then? Shudder!
> Would that be like current pre-university public schools then? Shudder!
Why would that be the case? IE, what are the root causes of problems in public K12 education and why would changing the funding mechanism of universities cause those problems to propagate?
Many states have already done this with Community College systems and AFAICT the results have been mostly positive.
So, I imagine it would be exactly like current public universities (in CA quite good). It's not like changing the funding mechanism completely wipes out the faculty or curricula.
In practice, the major change would be that getting into certain programs at public universities (traditional 4 year bachelors programs) becomes more difficult. The university system takes all comers in the sense that there's no charge the point of use, not in the sense that they literally admit everyone who applies. And making college admissions more selective might be a good thing anyways.
I didn't know about MasterClass myself, but I have to admire the marketing genius they've shown here. Of course you can't make much money teaching people a real skill, because that's hard and most people don't want to put in the time.
However, aspiration and status-seeking are things that are much more universal, and they've figured out how to milk those. Good for them.
Sorry, I find this idea distasteful as it is very disrespectful to the "student".
The Masterclass courses are neither cheap nor short. Most of them don't seem to be very good, either. An actual teacher can provide some tailoring and motivation, as well.
Spending the same amount of time and money with a local voice coach instead of with Christina Aguilera's Masterclass (which isn't very good) is going to be far more productive for a singer.
I suspect the rest of the Masterclasses are the same.
Of course, none of this is new. The "Hot Licks" series of guitar videos did this like ... 30 years ago? And similarly, most of the videos are garbage, but a few are amazing (Jimmy Bruno and Emily Remler spring to mind--Emily Remler talking about all the stuff she did while spending an entire year to fix her "broken rhythm" (that any of us mortals would kill to have) was enlightening).
I didn't say they were any good. Christina Aguilera "teaches" a class?
"I'm not a singer, but I play one on MasterClass."
This is key, and price inflation happens when the entity receiving a service is not the entity paying for the service. It makes the customer price-insensitive. Witness healthcare in America.
Many amateur publishers outside of masterclass dot com have stolen this concept because it too gives them permission to not actually teach fundamentals, but give the feeling of learning.
And that's really what you get from masterclass. I've done a lot of courses on there including Deadmau5 and a lot of film stuff. Actual EDM production and actual filmmaking are incredibly technical and cover a LOT. I've gone deep on Ableton and gone deep on film (I'm a trained steadicam op, attended DP courses (and I know BMD cameras backwards), attended colorist courses (I know Resolve backwards) etc. And the actual learning of these crafts is something you will never even approach at masterclass dot com.
But the author is right. It's very inspirational. But there is very little usable knowledge in any 'masterclass' on how to practice the craft. I think it's critical to understand this because the 'feeling' of learning that MC provides is not the same as 'actual' learning. Actual learning is very time consuming which is why one of the prereqs is passion for the subject because of the volume of content one is required to consume.
So I think one negative effect that MC has is that it can give people the illusion of actual learning when it creates the feeling of learning and merely provides inspiration. But I do love MC and I do still use it, so I don't want it to go away and I'm glad it exists.
> Whether it be in business and leadership, photography, cooking, writing, acting, music, sports and more, MasterClass delivers a world class online learning experience.
At the highest echelon of competitive domains, mentorship by world-class performers is very common. Lin-Manuel Miranda was mentored by Stephen Sondheim. Seth Rogen was mentored by Judd Apatow. Steph Curry was mentored by Dell Curry.
The reason that this sort of mentorship is not standard in education isn't because it isn't effective; it's because these world-class creators outnumber interested students a million to one.
An argument could be made that this sort of online MOOC medium doesn't convey any of the educational benefits of direct mentorship, but that would require more concrete research that this article hasn't done.
Universities are a large set of classes focused on a particular domain of knowledge with subsets of a set of other knowledge domains bolted on that have a use for the student.
Watching Masterclass With Gordon Ramsey will give you a cookbook, and a few cooking tips for the things he prepares.
Watching 11 years of Emeril Live! won't prepare you for working as a chef, but you can probably watch them and summarize some dos and don'ts of cooking.
Attending the French Culinary Institute, taking their classes, and working in their student restaurant will prepare you for a career in the culinary field in some capacity.
Whether starting as a dishwasher and working your way up is better than spending $60K on 2 years of cooking classes is up to the individual.
It's interesting fodder, surely it has value. But it's not a 'Master Class'.
Yeah so, if OP did not realize the scheme before he bought I feel sorry for him. Way back when I first heard of Masterclass it too k me a minute of seeing the homepage to figure out the scheme. But I'm well versed in startup bs. "Of course a startup would focus on the mass market beginner level material" even if it says master class on the box.
YouTube? If reach is all that matters then 0 is better than 180.
As for MasterClass, most people agree that it's more IntroClass.
You know what else makes money? Any charity 'work' a mega celebrity does.
You mean you can make money when you get a mega celebrity to endorse your product for a tiny fee? It's as if you've leveraged celebrity worship to sell a random product and it worked!
Maybe the bigger the celeb the less thought/work they put into the course.
I strongly disagree. If you buy a MasterClass, you don't get any more credibility, so they haven't sold any to you. You might be more inspired, but I think that's debatable too.
I'm into game dev, writing, and music, and I hang out in various communities for all of them. Despite being very different domains, they are very similar in many ways:
* People who are successful at them have high prestige in our culture and often wealth. A hit can be experienced by millions, so there's very high visibility to success. Because of this, there are a large number of people clamoring to get in and do it too. There's a huge shiny pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and everyone wants it.
* The process of consuming the created work is very different from creating it. In fact, the process is really fucking hard. A game you spent three hours playing took a year to make. That little sparkle animation you saw once when you got that bonus item took an artist a week to draw. That page you read in five minutes while waiting in line took the author seven drafts and two editors to get in print. And for every one of those pages, another one got cut entirely. That catchy little guitar riff took the artist ten years of practice to find the rare melodic nugget that sounds familiar enough hook you but isn't actually ripped off from another song.
Because the products are so visible and widely consumed, the fact that the process is so different is not well understood. In plain words, people don't realize what they're getting into when they want to be a game developer, writer, or musician. And when they encounter the reality that it's way harder than it seems and that they are signing up for years of making shitty art before they get good enough to produce something of merit, a whole lot of psychological stuff kicks in.
There is a strong cognitive dissonance between the skilled creator they imagine themselves to be and the unskilled one they actually are today. They've hung some of their self esteem on the idea that they are a gamedev or a musician, but when they sit down to actually do that, they are forcibly confronted with the reality of their skill level.
One of the most common reactions to that is avoidance. People will do anything but make progress on their skill if it lets them avoid experiencing their current lack of it. So game developers go off and spend five years "making an engine" instead of making an actual game and shipping it. Writers obsess over the perfect writing routines and rituals. "Oh, I need to use a Montegrappa pen like Hemingway." Musicians buy and sell gear thinking this next guitar or synth will be the one that the music flows out of like water. (I am highly guilty of all of these.)
None of this ever helps them improve their skills and become a creator, but it feels good. It keeps the cognitive dissonance and fear of failure at bay.
Dropping $180 on a MasterClass from your favorite creative person seems like it will improve your skills, but it requires no actual effort on your part. You don't have to do anything. And, because of that, there is no risk of failure, no risk of seeing that you aren't who you imagine yourself to be.
That's what MasterClass sells: avoidance of fear of failure. Balm for the anxiety that we aren't who we aspire to be. They're in the same product category as "signature edition" guitars and distraction-free writing apps.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The reality is that most of us won't ever be successful Hollywood directors or celebrity chefs. The economics just don't work out that way. I'd rather someone entertain an idle fantasy of being creative even if it rarely bears fruit than give up hope on the idea of being creative at all. Surely the only thing sadder than a wannabe musician is a mindless consumer who doesn't want to be anything at all.
And, who knows, it probably does inspire a few. Personally, I'd rather watch a few hours of video from a creative person who has actually made things that impacted the world, then, you know, unboxing videos or Instragram influencers or something.
Maybe the success of MasterClass is a good sign. It says that many of us cherish the idea of mastering a creative art and making things for others.
Also anything even tangentially involving Gordon Ramsay is immediately at the top of my list