What Clickbait and Coursera have in Common

Getting people to buy stuff requires buy in. Which doesn't happen from twisting their arm (regaling them with all the amazing features of something) but solving some problem or pain point. I have X solution to your problem of Y...is what gets people to willingly give you their money.

Or time.

Time is the main form of money most of us traffic in. And who doesn't hate wasting in on stupid training?

Especially trainings that could be replaced by a simple checklist. In THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande talks about when the B17 bomber – aka the “Flying Fortress” – crashed during an important test flight.

“The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoothly, and climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members died, including the pilot. An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash had been due to “pilot error,” the report said." - The Checklist Manifesto

Pilot error. Consider what the pilot was required to attend to during pre-flight prep:

• four engines, rather than the normal two, each of which had its own oil-fuel mix

• retractable landing gear

• wing flaps

• in-flight stabilizing gadgetry

• propellers regulated with hydraulic controls

• a new mechanism on the rudder controls that needed to be unlocked

It was the last one the pilot didn't do. As one newspaper article observed: it was just “too much airplane for one man to fly.”

Obviously the pilot didn't need more training. Instead, a group of test pilots then created a checklist that covered everything important, from the detailed…to the dumb: check that the brakes are released, the instruments set, and the door and windows locked. And they made the whole checklist fluff-free enough to fit onto a single index card. “You wouldn’t think it would make that much difference," says Gawande. "But with the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly it a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident.”

This type of learning, when people go hunting for solution, is what learning expert Nick Shackleton-Jones dubs "pull" learning. When forgetting to release a brake can get you killed, your motivation to prevent that from happening is pretty high. People pull resources that interest them.

Which is why sales hooks work so well. They pull you in. Compel you to click on ridiculous Buzzfeed headlines:

• Can You Make It Through This Post Without Feeling Sexually Attracted to Food?

• Disney Princesses Twerking Will Shatter Your Childhood

• 28 Ingenious Things For Your Dog You Had No Idea You Needed

• 11 Delightful Poems Found in Pornhub Comments

• Holy Crap, Clint Eastwood’s Son is Super Hot

• Drunk Person Accidentally Steals Cat, Posts Hilarious Craigslist Ad to Find Owner

• 17 Parenting Tips From Professor Utonium of “The Powerpuff Girls”

• 23 Kids Who Are Totally Nailing This Halloween Thing

• Creepy New Political Ad Is Easily One of the Creepiest Political Ads of All Time

• The Best Condom Ads From Around the World

• 10 Villain Affirmation Posters To Help You Get Through The Day

• 26 Truths of Growing Up Without Cable

Hooks also get us to take classes, and Coursera is particularly good at them. Hooks are probably the real reason I’ve taken so many of their courses...they always manage to hook me right in.

<rant> Once I’m in, however, my completion rate often plummets, generally for two reasons: (1) The knowledge-dump that follows is boring. (2) The Instructor sucks on camera and reads their teaching script from a teleprompter - usually in a janky, amateurish way. tl;dr: the content often fails to live up to the hook - landing it squarely in Clickbait territory.</rant>

Hooks that gain learners’ attention – one of the key ingredients in effective learning design – don’t say stuff like “in this class you will be taught blahblahblah.” Rather, they solve a pain-point. And their design is surprisingly similar to that of learning design which is effective: it starts with the end in mind. Backward design of a course starts with the final assessment, and backward design of an effective hook starts with the emotion you want to elicit. Essentially, a more lofty, learning-centric version of...

If you’re looking to increase the amount of dates you get with attractive, high-quality, smart women/men who have it together, then this is going to be the most important thing you’ll ever read.

"Choose your Hook Point knowing the effect you want to have on your viewers. Once you know the gut reaction you want to produce in your viewers, be sure all of your other decisions related to messaging, visual style, pacing, music, and so on, support that choice.” - Brendon Kane, HOOK POINT: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World (Waterside Productions; 2020)

It's like classic learning design and Tik Tok had a baby.

Which is a good argument for birth control if ever there was one.