Online learning could change academia for good Tyler Dewitt
Transcriber:
It’s graduation day
at the small New England college
where my dad taught.
It’s a burst of color and excitement.
When I was little,
he’d carry me up on his shoulders
and I’d marvel at the pageantry.
I loved the wizard-like academic robes
that all the professors wore.
My father explained how you could tell
what degree someone had
and the school they’d gone to,
based on the color and design
of their gown and hood.
It was like a diploma,
a credential that you could wear.
I couldn’t wait to have one of my own.
My dad taught biochemistry for decades
and was one of those beloved professors.
Graduation, for him, was a frenzy
of thankful hugs and handshakes,
eager introductions to parents.
Countless careers in science and medicine
were launched in his Bio 101 class,
and it was clear he made a difference.
I suppose I inherited
a love of teaching from my dad,
and I planned to be a professor,
just like him.
I headed to grad school to do a PhD,
studying microbiology and microchemistry.
But along the way, my dad’s path
and mine started to diverge.
During long days in lab, I got impatient.
I wanted to teach.
I didn’t want to wait to graduate
and do a postdoc,
spend years navigating
a treacherous job market.
So I turned to the internet,
which was breaking down
the barriers to entry
and removing the traditional gatekeepers
in many established fields.
From my kitchen table,
I started recording tutorial videos,
teaching the basics of chemistry
using simple, hand-drawn diagrams.
I put the videos on YouTube …
and people actually started watching them.
First, a few folks, and then more,
and then more.
Thank-you emails poured into my inbox.
I wasn’t a professor yet,
I hadn’t even finished my PhD,
but I was helping students
all over the world
get through their chemistry classes.
I got the sense that something big
was brewing here.
But my dad would hear none of it.
When I explained
that I was thinking about abandoning
the traditional professorship route
to explore this new world
of online education,
he exploded in anger.
“Oh, Tyler, you’d have to be an idiot
to think that anyone would care
about this stupid YouTube thing.”
I shot back with a dig.
I said, “Every single day,
my videos teach 10 times as many students
as you’ll teach in your whole career.”
It would have really hurt,
if he’d had any conception
of what I was trying to describe.
But maybe he was afraid
to think about the way his world,
steeped in tradition,
was on the brink of change.
It used to be that students
had one professor,
the one standing
at the front of the lecture hall.
But increasingly,
if that professor wasn’t a good fit,
students could go online
and seek out videos from other educators
to help them learn.
It was like an online marketplace
where students could essentially
choose their own professor.
And it was free.
Some of these video creators
were instructors from institutions,
but others could be brilliant teachers
who didn’t even have a college degree.
Students chose the teachers
that help them learn best,
and the most popular teachers
rose to the top.
I wanted to bring my dad
into this new world.
I suggested we create a video series
for intro biology.
His lectures, crafted
and perfected over decades,
took terrifying subjects
like the Krebs cycle and transcription
and made them crystal clear and beautiful.
They could help
millions of students a day.
“Why would any other college
need a Bio 101 professor?” I joked.
But it was something
I’d seriously thought about a lot.
What if you identified a few
incredibly talented educators like my dad
and gave them essentially
limitless resources, content editors,
and animators and production teams,
and they were able to devote
all day, every day,
to making incredible,
beautiful educational content.
It seemed like this could
fundamentally change a field
where many professors all around the world
were teaching essentially similar courses,
particularly at the introductory level.
But each professor
rarely had the time and resources
to go all in.
Incredible education content
felt like something that could scale,
a key concept driving so many
of the new revolutions in tech.
“You could be the world’s
biology teacher,” I said.
“Oh, you have to be an idiot
to think that I’d want to be
some kind of YouTube star.”
Ugh.
I was furious.
And then, shortly thereafter,
unexpectedly, he died …
right before I graduated from MIT.
It upended my life.
But there was a silver lining
that felt slightly cosmic.
He left me a little bit of money
that allowed me to step off
the academic path
and try my own thing.
I poured myself into work,
churning out videos day and night.
And I also started
to interact more with my viewers.
And I learned that they were
almost all folks who weren’t served well
by the rigid structure
of traditional academia.
Countless college students
told me how they did
all their learning from videos like mine.
They attended class only three
or four times during a semester,
just to take the tests.
Others were trying
to switch careers in middle age,
and they needed to take courses piecemeal.
They needed half of this degree
and a quarter of this one.
A single dad writes me and says
how he’s trying to go to nursing school,
to show his young daughters
he can be something.
He can’t understand
a word his professor says,
but my videos get him
through a critical class.
Comments like his
are often followed by an ominous …
“So why am I paying
the school, and not paying you?”
I wonder why these people
have to go through the motions
of attending a class,
when they are learning
all the material on their own.
Why can’t they get
course credit in other ways?
Why isn’t anyone paying attention
to what these people need?
I can’t offer diplomas
from my YouTube channel,
but once there is a way for students
to earn course credit
no matter how they learned the material,
in class or on their own,
the online marketplace of different
teachers and different learning approaches
will explode.
There will be serious competition
for who could teach students the best.
Meanwhile, as I madly upload videos,
my views go through the roof.
Job offers start to come in.
Random people start
recognizing me on the street,
an awkward “Hey, um ….
Do you make YouTube videos?”
It’s followed by hugs
and handshakes, selfies,
and even occasional tears.
Around this time,
my career moves from the lecture hall
to the laboratory.
I joined a company focused on education
for pharmaceutical
and life-sciences companies.
The CEO is bold and eccentric,
and she wants to push the envelope
and teach complex lab methods
entirely in virtual reality.
Outside of academia, things move fast,
and the stakes are different.
The goal for me used to be
a final exam grade.
Now, it’s a patient’s health,
a life-saving therapy.
For the team I joined,
it was a rare chance to think deeply
about lab instruction.
In undergrad, I rarely knew
what I was doing in labs.
A couple of drops of this
and a couple of drops of that,
and poof –
it would turn red.
Test tubes would break,
a frazzled TA tried to guide
30 students at the same time.
But VR can be a consistent,
constantly vigilant one-on-one coach.
A learner can practice
activities over and over,
until they truly understand
what they’re doing
and why they’re doing it.
And students don’t need
an instructor or a TA –
the software does the teaching.
Put on a VR headset,
and you don’t need a multi-million-dollar
microbiology laboratory
to teach microbiology.
And it’s clear that academia
isn’t the only player
that can provide high-quality learning
even in advanced technical fields.
Coding boot camps
have received a lot of attention
giving credentials that allow folks
to transition into programming roles.
But with VR,
you could imagine companies
offering biotech credentials
and teaching lab skills
needed to, say, manufacture cutting-edge
cell and gene therapies.
When you look at all of these
forces together,
it’s clear that real change
is going to come in higher education.
When I was up there
on my father’s shoulders,
those colored robes at graduation
represented discrete credentials,
earned from classroom and research time
at specific schools.
Maybe the metaphorical
academic robe of the future
is more of a patchwork cape?
A discussion class taken in person at MIT,
an introductory content certification
passed with the help of YouTube videos.
A VR laboratory course
from a company outside of academia.
Graduation is unlikely
to be a single, defined event.
And learners, instead of institutions,
will have the power to decide
what sort of credentials they need
and when and how they master
the prerequisites.
The impact of COVID
is likely to only accelerate this.
Even the most prestigious schools
are now giving credit
for courses completed online.
It’s going to be tough
to put that genie back into the bottle.
And hopefully,
the specter of these changes
will force colleges and universities
to double down on what they can
uniquely provide.
Maybe that’s getting students
to dive into research,
or providing valuable
one-on-one time with professors,
fostering discussions and mentorship.
MIT has always been
on the forefront of innovation,
and there’s a unique opportunity here
for it to lead academia
into this new future.
But look, I know how hard
this change is going to be.
My father, who was a brilliant educator,
couldn’t see it or didn’t want to see it.
You would have to be an idiot to think
that anything was going to change.
But at the same time,
he valued learning over all else,
like many other great teachers.
He used to say the focus of education
should be learning, not teaching.
These new paths
of teaching, of certification,
they’re not trivial shortcuts.
They’ll help students master
the same fundamental skills,
just more effectively, more efficiently.
You know …
I think back to the first time
I tried the virtual reality lab product
I’d helped to build.
A team of so many
brilliant, talented people
had worked on it for months.
I slipped on the VR headset,
and there I was,
a lab bench in front of me.
The focus was a fundamental
microbiology method.
It was probably one of the first things
my dad learned when he was in grad school,
and it was one of the first things
that I had learned.
I wondered, for a moment,
what he would have thought
if he could have seen this.
I imagined, somewhat hopefully, of course,
that he’d look around in the headset,
grab a petri dish,
sterilize his metal tools
in the Bunsen burner
until they glowed a bright orange,
and maybe he’d say,
with one of his trademark phrases,
“Whoa …
This is pretty nifty.
You would have to be an idiot
if you can’t tell …
this is the future of education.”
Thank you.