Academia never had to change now its dire
[Music]
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
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 plan to be a professor just like
him
i headed to grad school to do a phd
studying microbiology
and biochemistry 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 post-doc
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 for my
kitchen table
i started recording tutorial videos
teaching the basics of chemistry
using simple hand-drawn diagrams
and 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 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 you’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 helped
them learn
best and 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’d have to be an idiot to think
that i’d want to be some kind of youtube
star
oh 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’re 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
for my youtube channel but once there’s
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
different learning approaches will
explode
there would 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 drops of this and a couple
drops of that and poof
it would turn red test tubes would break
if
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 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
bootcamps 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 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 covet 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
they’re 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 to lead academia into this new
future
but look i i know how hard this change
is going to be
my father who is a brilliant educator
couldn’t see it or or didn’t want to see
it you’d 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 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