Imagining a Zoom Education in the 18th Century.
A Conversation with Nikhil Abraham: Former CFO of Udacity.
I’m back this week with a profile on Nikhil Abraham, former Chief Financial Officer at Udacity and current CFO of Resident. Nikhil was an early proponent and an OG of the modern MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) and bootcamp movements, through his roles at Codecademy and Udacity.
Our conversation helped me gain some valuable insight into the history and impact of distance learning and its applications including:
The development of the modern online alternative education industry and the rise of the MOOC;
Just how far back distance learning was first employed;
The opportunities available for distance learning in this space in a Covid-19 world; and
The impact of distance learning on the future of work.
It’s hard to know where we're going if we don’t know where we’ve been. So let’s start at the beginning!
Covid-19 may have helped popularize the term “distance learning,” but the education of students who aren’t located in the same physical location has been around in some form or another since the 18th century. The first reference of this kind of engagement is from the Boston Gazette in 1728 in an advertisement for a class taught through weekly mailed lessons. In 1840, Sir Isaac Pitman taught the first distance course by “mailing texts transcribed into shorthand on postcards and receiving transcriptions from his students in return for correction.” Fast forward to the students of the 20th century, who participated in their own version of distance learning through radio and eventually TV-based courses.
The origins of the modern version of alternative education we know today began in 2008 with a course developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens entitled Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge. But it wasn’t until the fall of 2011 when the viability of MOOCs was brought center stage. That year, Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastien Thrun offered their class Introduction to Artificial Intelligence free online and 160,000 students from around the world signed up. Thrun, compelled by his desire to reach more students than his two hundred seat Stanford classroom would allow, went on to found Udacity shortly after with the goal to develop and offer MOOCs for free. Around this same time, General Assembly was launching the modern day (coding) bootcamp to provide the first truly net-native education. GA’s launch quickly gave rise to coding bootcamps and the number of annual bootcamp graduates today is quickly catching up to the number of computer science graduates of traditional universities.
As Udacity and General Assembly were launching, Nikhil was simultaneously working on his own startup. His efforts earned him acceptance into YCombinator where he was introduced to the founders of Codecademy, who were members of the same 2011 class. Recognizing the importance of the moment and the advent of Web 2.0, he ended up ditching his own startup and job at BCG to join the team at Codecademy as one of their first 15 employees. Over the course of a few years at Codecademy, Nikhil taught himself how to code. Then he taught others how to code. And then wrote a book for dummies on how to code. No seriously, he authored both Coding for Dummies, and Getting a Coding Job for Dummies. He recognized that a lot of the coding for beginners books missed the main point which is that readers were coming in blind. All of the other books on the market at that time were designed to teach a specific programming language, forgetting that people starting out don’t even know which coding language to consider. This lack of appropriate information for newcomers is something that still exists in many of the modern day online training programs, according to Nikhil, as many potential students just don’t know where to start.
During his tenure at Codecademy and Udacity, Nikhil formed different ideas about what the modern education systems could mean for the future of work. Eschewing the outdated idea of workers typically having one inflexible job, he sees workers needing to be extremely flexible in order to have many jobs over the course of a career. The normalization of MOOCs and bootcamps as a replacement for a traditional degree means that signaling from employers has changed from where you’ve learned to what you’ve done, as in: “Don’t just tell me about the course or school you attended. Show me the project you built as a result of taking the course.” Nikhil says he is a firm believer in the idea that every industry has a platform to judge you on your existing work, not your education. He goes on, “In the creative space they’ve been doing this for years with portfolios. Law firms can look at the writing or work you did as an intern, and performance marketers can set up a campaign and show how many items they were able to sell.” When I ask him if anyone can learn these new skills, he says, “absolutely!” referencing the time he spent running workshops on Coding for Dummies. The only thing his students needed to be successful was a goal, desire, and the persistence to see their plan through.
Although he isn’t currently working in the online education space, I still wanted to get his perspective on how online education has been impacted due to COVID-19.
David Z: What has changed about online education over the last six months of our new normal?
Nikhil Abraham: I think it really splits out in different ways. For the adult learners, all of the online options have been great. Sites like Coursera and Udacity have seen big surges in enrollment because there's more time. Everyone's at home! All these excuses we used to have like, “I want to hang out with friends, I'm going to travel, I want to watch a new show...” All of that is out the window. So education for adult learners has been great.
I first thought that it would be true for K-12 as well. All these kids are learning from home... this will be the new model. It's been a disaster. Parents hate it. Kids hate it. It’s really hard to keep a five year-old engaged on Zoom for hours at a time. It's just really hard. And then, similarly for the older, silver, generation, they too are struggling. It's been hard for old people to use all of this remote technology. I mean, it’s hard for people in my generation to use some of this technology. I remember the first time a colleague showed up to a Zoom meeting with a different background -- it dominated the whole meeting! But with every problem comes an opportunity.
DZ: What are those opportunities?
NA: Zoom and Google Hangouts are communication tools. They're not education tools. When you think about the interactions that happen in the classroom, they don't happen naturally online. But there are a few things that will change. The product and infrastructure, the services and human-centric interactions, need to change for us to get closer to the offline experience we know.
The product(s) will get there. It is just a matter of time. For example, neither Zoom nor Google tell you ahead of time, “Hey, your connection right now is not going to be good for the video call,” or, “Hey, you're about to join a Zoom call with like 30 people you should probably dial in due to your poor connection.” And Zoom is trying to beef up its in-app messaging functionality because they realize that if they're truly trying to be the replacement for in-person, they've got a ways to go. And they're doing it, you know, slowly, which makes sense because there's hundreds of millions of people using the product for the first time.
In terms of services and replacing human (physical) interactions, I think there's definitely something around helping people navigate this new world that’s missing. My son is five years old, so he oftentimes has a question and just needs an adult, a trusted adult, to tell him what to do. Or you look at a site like YouTube where there's some kind of video for every topic. The problem is that you often need somebody to walk you through it. So I think there's a layer of services that you can build on top of all of this, all of this educational material. So that people who have expertise can help those who want to learn. What if you have questions? The interaction doesn't have to be for long, but I think an interaction, a human-powered interaction, is the next step here. Right now, we’re using the study-room concept, the library concept for learning. Everyone takes their book and goes to the library to learn by themselves. But we learn better in groups. I don't know of any product online providing a group learning environment. That’s a huge opportunity.
The future is bright for online education and distance learning. But it’s clear we’re only in the first quarter of a game that’s likely to go into overtime. I agree with Nikhil that the course material is easy to replicate but the social, human, connection that’s developed in a classroom is harder. Whether as a young child, a university student, or someone taking a training course several years into their career, human connection and building relationships are part of the process of learning. It may be an uphill battle to believe that we can ever fully replicate the offline environment online, but it’s clear that we have to keep trying. Maybe someone for me to take on :)
After School Activities
Watch Sebastian Thrun announcing the launch of Udacity.
Study Career Karma’s State of the Coding Bootcamp Market Report 2020
Tiger King Zoom Background