Emerge talks EdTech with Tyler DeWitt
Dr Tyler DeWitt — founder of one of YouTube’s most successful education channels, high-school teacher and TED talk extraordinaire — talks to Emerge about his view on the future of education and learning.
Tell us about your YouTube channel ‘Science with Tyler DeWitt’ — how did it start and what problem does it solve?
I started making these YouTube videos when I was a full time high school teacher. I had this really frustrating problem. The textbooks that I was using were dry, boring, and written in incredibly complex language that was inaccessible to young learners. When I was standing in front of my students in class, they’d understand my explanations quite well. But then when they got home to do their homework, they only had their notes and the textbook, and they often couldn’t remember how I’d explained the concepts during class, in a way that made sense.
So I set out to “bottle” myself and my teaching, so that students could rely on my explanations—and not on the textbook—when they were trying to learn outside of class. That’s where the YouTube videos come in.
I never expected that people other than my students would start watching the videos. And as I write this, I’ve just hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers, which I never would have imagined when I started this project!
How do you think your teaching background has affected your approach to developing a successful EdTech product?
As a teacher, I like to think that I have a really really good sense of what works for education: what students need to in order to learn and what teachers need in order to teach. People often ask me, “Students really like your videos, and they learn so well from them! What’s your secret?” The secret is that I have taught this material over and over and over again in the classroom. I’ve seen students struggle to learn this material, and I’ve worked hard to figure out why they struggle, and how to explain the content in ways that they understand.
For the teachers who use my videos in their classroom, I have a really good sense of what they’re looking for. They want resources their students can learn from, simple stuff that they can fit into their existing lesson plans. They don’t want to have to completely rework their curriculum, or use some clunky software interface to take advantage of my content.
Maybe it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I feel that way too much ed tech is created by people who don’t have a teaching or education background. Often, a bunch of non-teachers have a cool idea, and they hire designers who’ve never taught, and they get their startup funded by people who’ve never taught, and then they release this product, and teachers and students look at it, and they’re like, “Why did you make this? I could never use this in my classroom. It doesn’t help at all.”
How have you monetized your digital learning content?
My YouTube videos have ads on them, and I’m looking to build a more robust platform that will use a freemium model, where students can pay to have access to courses that are not currently on YouTube.
How is tech enabling students to create more bespoke learning experiences?
Here’s really the big picture as I see it. Ed tech is allowing students to step out of their immediate educational ecosystem and create their own education experience that works for them.
Twenty years ago, if a student dreamed of being a veterinarian, but she had a terrible, inaccessible Chemistry professor in college, maybe she’d fail Chem or do poorly in it, and the whole dream of being a vet, it would be crushed. But today, that same student could simply tune out her terrible college professor and go onto YouTube and select a new teacher who works for her. Isn’t that crazy? I can’t overstate how important this is going to be. This is going to revolutionize education, and we’re just at the very beginning of it.
So here’s what’s happening. You’re getting students at Oxford or Harvard or Cambridge or MIT or wherever, and they’re totally ignoring the Nobel prize-winning professor lecturing at them, because he or she may be a brilliant researcher but is a really awful teacher. And instead, these students are heading home and watching YouTube videos made by some college drop-out who makes videos in his parents’ basement, but he’s a brilliant, incredible teacher, and is able to explain the content in a way that it makes sense. Now that is what’s gonna turn education—and traditional educational institutions—on their heads.
Do you think that the role of the teacher is changing?
Absolutely.
Teachers are going to have to realize that they need to be more than a mouth that explains content. Engaging students in discussions, teaching them how to think, motivating them to care, guiding them through their own exploration—these are things a YouTube video can’t do, and that’s what teachers need to do more and more of, if they want their jobs to remain relevant.
When you look into the future of EdTech, what are you most excited about?
I’m really excited by how EdTech will let students create their own learning environments that work for them.
Further into the future, I’m most excited about how games and simulations will change how students learn, particularly in the STEM fields. For example, if students could just see a massive simulation of cell—the same way they explore virtual worlds in video games—everything would just make sense.
That’s how we intuitively learn things: we explore, and video games and simulations allow us to do just that. You don’t need flashcards and a textbook to learn the ins-and-outs of a new city. You just get out there, wander around, learn which street go where, and what subways take you to what neighbors, and where the good Thai restaurants are. Video games and simulations could allow students to intuitively learn scientific principles the same way they learn stuff about a new city: simply by exploring, interacting, and watching what happens.
What one piece of advice would you give to teachers who are struggling to integrate tech into the classroom?
Just try it! Start playing around. It won’t be perfect the first time you try. But we all learn by doing, and integrating tech into the classroom is definitely an iterative process. Start small, but start somewhere.
Dr. DeWitt is a high-school teacher and founder of one of YouTube’s most popular education channels Science with Tyler DeWitt. His TED Talk has been viewed over 1 million times. For more information about Tyler and to contact him directly click here.
