Why Online Courses Must Go Beyond Information in the Age of AI

If you want information, you don’t need to take a course anymore. You can ask an AI system and get it in seconds. Frameworks, step-by-step guides, even entire lesson plans — all delivered on demand. So why would anyone still bother with an online training course?

That question cuts right to the heart of what education, coaching and leadership development are really about. Because if a course is nothing more than a container for information, it’s already obsolete.

Different Ways of Knowing

Philosophers call it epistemology — the study of how we know what we know. They draw a line between knowing-that (facts, theories, concepts) and knowing-how (skills, practice, application).

AI excels at knowing-that. It can deliver encyclopaedic recall, nuanced explanations, even creative ideas stitched together from endless data. What it cannot do is give you the lived, embodied sense of knowing-how.

Think about leadership. You can read all you like about active listening, but that doesn’t prepare you for the knot in your stomach when you’re holding silence in a tense meeting. You can absorb the theory of feedback, but that doesn’t tell you how your voice will tremble when you sit across from someone and deliver words that matter. That is tacit knowledge — the kind of knowing that can’t simply be told.

What AI Can (and Can’t) Deliver

AI will keep getting better at packaging knowledge into neat answers. It can analyse, summarise, compare and contrast. It can even play the role of sparring partner in thought experiments.

But it cannot stand in your shoes. It cannot know what it’s like to face the politics of your team, the quirks of your personality, or the cultural subtleties of your organisation. Knowledge is always situated — grounded in real people, contexts and relationships.

And it cannot provide presence. The sense that someone is paying attention to you, noticing what you’re not saying, reflecting back the truths you’re half-avoiding.

The Human Edge

This is why online courses, if they’re to survive and thrive, must offer what AI cannot:

• Experience. Real-time role-plays, messy case studies, challenges where things don’t go according to script.

• Community. Conversations with peers who test your thinking, hold you accountable, and remind you you’re not alone.

• Transformation. Not just “more knowledge” but the reframing of how you see yourself and your world.

• Feedback and presence. A facilitator who recognises patterns in your behaviour, helps you confront your blind spots, and celebrates your growth.

This is the true currency of learning in an AI-saturated age.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Leaders don’t need more information. They’re drowning in it already. What they need is the capacity to navigate ambiguity, to make ethical decisions when every option feels flawed, and to develop the personal presence that makes others want to follow them.

That doesn’t come from downloading data. It comes from dialogue, reflection, experimentation and courage.

A Question Worth Sitting With

So perhaps AI is a gift. By taking away the scarcity of information, it forces us to ask what learning is really for. If knowledge is always at our fingertips, maybe education’s highest purpose is to help us become the kind of people who know how to use it wisely.

If information is no longer scarce, what does that free you to learn instead?