Why Are Online Courses Dead in 2026?

I'll say it straight: online courses are as outdated as 2D video games. Same thing that happened to black-and-white TV. It doesn't hold up anymore.

That doesn't mean the old model was bad. An online course used to be a great way to transfer knowledge, share insight, and package your intellectual property into something sellable. But we've moved on. We went from 2D games to 3D games, maybe even virtual reality. The graphics got better. And the same shift is happening with how experts transfer what they know.

Take a personal trainer. Say you're building a course to train people for Hyrox. You'd film yourself doing the exercises, explain what each one is for, demonstrate the movement, and then leave the execution up to the person watching. You'd give them timing, reps, form cues, maybe some data points like heart rate or calorie intake.

Here's what used to happen once your course was live: you'd need a community around it. Why? Because people ask questions. Other participants who took the same training would jump in and answer, sometimes correctly, sometimes not. And that's where you, as the person who built the training, would step in and give the right answer.

Those questions were actually a solid revenue model. You could turn them into a webinar, an extra video for the course, or even a brand new course. That was the whole game: record, package, sell, then patch the gaps with community and follow-up content.

Now we've got something new. It used to be called vibe-coding. It's already got a new name by the time you read this, but at its core, it's just building software. That's the real shift. You no longer need to just be a transmission machine, which is exactly what an online course was.

Courses are already getting more interactive. You've got video, you can assign exercises, people submit answers, and an AI model checks those answers and gives feedback. That's already a packaged piece of software. But in personal training specifically, you'd still tell people: also download this app to track your heart rate, also run a VO2 max test through this program, also log your weight and progress somewhere else. Before you know it, your course is pointing people to three extra platforms plus your own community.

Here's the strong part: today it can all live in one place. As a personal trainer, you can build your own piece of software, built entirely around what you do. Training people for Hyrox? You've got specific exercises for that. You can still record the videos, still transfer the knowledge around each exercise, still weave in the storytelling. And on top of that, you build your own software alongside it.

This isn't advanced mathematics. It's not complicated software. You can deliver it all in one to your clients, so you're not sending them off to three other platforms, fragmenting the information they need.

Once you've built that, your intellectual property, the thing you're actually best at and that genuinely helps people, lives in one place. I'd stop asking myself how to build an online course, how to run a webinar, or how to stand in front of a group and speak. I'd ask: how do I put this into software? And once you've built that, and people start using it, that's next level.