Hey there,

Last spring, I took a course from the Warman School called simply, “DEATH.” It was a five-week online writing class that met every Sunday for a couple of hours and centered around how cute baby beluga whales are. Just kidding, it was about death. My fellow classmates and I each had our reasons for taking the class, all of us some kind of writer or other. Some of us were more comfortable with the concept of death, some less so, and all of us carried some kind of grief, some fresh and some long-carried.

We read across many cultures, across time, and across genres to learn about different perspectives on death, dying, funeral arrangements, and the afterlife, all in service to our writing craft.

I’m a copywriter for The Content Atelier, but I’m also a poet and romance novelist. When I think of the evolution of online education, what comes to mind is Death Class because we live in an era when you can take a course on anything under the sun. 

Right now, I’m partway through a course all about self-publishing. I just enrolled in another course about selling products on Amazon and trying not to think about how much I’m slacking on my Persian language online class. I’m not sponsored to tell you about any of these, I’m just passionate about learning. 

I have always loved learning, loved school, loved being a good student— yes, I even loved being a teacher’s pet. After I earned my MFA in creative writing, I moved to a city knowing no one but my now-husband and found myself (a notorious social butterfly) struggling to make friends in this new place without the structure of school. I made a few friends at my 9 to 5, but it was a far cry from a real community I felt I could call my own. 

It was my love of learning that helped me make friends and find community in my new city. I started taking improv classes at a local improv theater and made new friends, I joined a book club (which didn’t last, but my one friend’s contact info is still saved as “Kaitlyn Book Club” in my phone). These were both in-person, of course, but my point stands: Making friends as an adult is difficult, but doing so while learning new skills or deepening one’s knowledge on special interests makes it a bit easier or at least gives us a starting point.

I see the evolution of online education as tied to the evolution of socialization. Even self-led online courses, like some of the ones I mentioned before, often come with an online community component. Taking a class in a subject you’re interested in as an adult is a great way to make friends because hey, you’ve already got that one special interest in common, right? At the very least, you’ve got something interesting to talk about at your next party or in your next blog post. Online classes for everything under the sun means friends in every niche imaginable, in every corner of the world the light touches. It just warms my nerdy heart.