And somebody opened the Trapdoor ..
Math has always been a wonder to me. Growing up in an Asian classroom I was expected to take so many things at face value, unquestionably, such as the letter ‘e’ in Mathematics. “Now what the hell is e”? .. on one of the footnotes I found my answer — Euler’s number. Who is Euler I had once asked my class topper? “Who asks such questions!! Just open your book of logarithms, lookup the digits and write the answer on your exercise book, this is how you score !!”.
Oh!! You can forget about asking where the logarithm tables came from. In fact there’s a high possibility that your instructor too would be quite clueless.
So when I stumbled upon ‘Euler’s Number’ the other day after decades of ignorance I was surprised to see not only one, but at least a dozen attempts at answering the question. The actual treasure trove on the world wide web that led me to this answer is this trap-door called YouTube. Just like a trap door that takes you down into a basement or through a maze of hidden tunnels, youtube leads you down into a wonderland of countless self broadcasts and channels that snake their way into your browser’s history list.
You-tube was conceived as a way to encourage online users to share video’s (from whence came the v-log revolution). Today however, it has morphed into a platform where people post video’s on how to handle everything from anger management mood swings to the drab IT person who creates an entire 15 minute video patiently instructing novices on how to install patches on the latest Windows O.S.
When I first started writing blogs, I did so out of the need to rant!! Thankfully, the blog revolution shared no such similarities and instead spawned into 2 separate tributaries, one stream was called vlogs and the other, podcasts. While these offerings may make you feel that cyberspace is packed to the brim with half-baked charlatans trying to opine on everything under the sun, every now and then you would find a profound podcast or 2 that just makes you sit up and take notice.
Ever since lockdown x.o was imposed on the majority of us, I wondered down this trapdoor like Alice in wonderland for hours, watching professors from eminent universities slice up Math to me and spread it out like it really should have been done decades ago, listening to podcasts about events happening all around the world in cultures and communities I would have never heard of from the mainstream media. There were times I found a hidden blog in a rusty corner and began pouring over it just like an old book only to wake up a few minutes later and discover that it was 2:00.a.m.
This made me wonder. What if children from countries where the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (S.D.G.) are still a distant dream (Africa mostly), were able to get access to this treasure trove? Would’t it be a game changer of sorts? Wait a sec, isn’t this free already?
When coursera (one of the first MOOC’s on the internet) first went online in 2012, there were just a handful of students from the African subcontinent. Back then, they were plagued by infrastructural issues and unfamiliarity with what e-learning could do. Then along came udacity, udemy, edx and a whole new industry with countless instructors broadcasting everything from arts to science, albeit with a small fee.
Today for instance, if I wish to learn about the middle ages, I have the option of enrolling for a free course(sans certificate) on some of the learning platforms mentioned above. I could also check out a few you-tube channels or even read carefully curated blogs around these topics. The question is then — do I really need a formal education for this? Better still — How much of formal education is needed going forward? Isn’t tuition fee at stratospheric levels historically for the last decade or so, thereby driving student debt to all time highs? Strangely though, Wall-Street hasn’t gone bonkers over “Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities” like they did over Collateralized Debt Obligations in 2008 !!
In fact a recent study by Pew Research among many other findings showed that up to 35% of adults in the U.S. use youtube to learn new things or figure out things that they’ve never done before (see figure below).
What if, a peasant from an African country wants his kids to have the same educational experience as kids in the developed world. Today he just needs to invest in a phone and a network (with a good data plan). The Digital Trapdoor after all happily exposes all netizens equally without any discrimination to the wealth of knowledge which was till now housed in public libraries or rotting away in bookshelves in houses of the rich and famous. This refreshingly liberating revolution has largely gone unnoticed.
The unbanked or underprivileged may never be able to afford a good college education nor the celebrated graduation gown that comes with the ceremony. The question is whether digital certificates from online universities or even Educational Academy’s would fit the bill? They cost a fraction of what brick and mortar universities charge in almost all cases. Moreover with online educational platforms now doubling down to provide a blend of streaming video’s as well as interactions using break-out rooms and quizzes, the tide may finally start to turn.
While the Harvards and the Kellogs of the world would still continue to co-exist they may need to rationalize their tuition fee structure so that it does not weigh down too heavily on an incoming generation who are more uncertain than ever about their future and ever more wary about the 5%.
With an entire buffet of learning options now being made available for any learner in the world and with languages such as Spanish and French becoming commonplace, the shape of the new virtual classroom could be even closer than you think. So just maybe, the child of that Rwandan peasant would finally be able to exchange assignments/notes in the same virtual classroom with a Taiwanese Activist using a common language which the platform could help translate. So it does seem, at the outset, that the baton is finally passed to one of the oldest professions in the planet, the one they call “Teaching”: to herald in the much awaited Global Village, where ideas can flow freely and unrestrained across great oceans and land masses. After all, its right about now that humanity badly needs a force that unites us amidst the din of voices that divides us!!
And so somebody opened the trapdoor .. and let the whole world in ..
