Last week turned out to be far more hectic than most, with
the simultaneous launch of two startups I have been involved in for the past few
years.
When I went into the life of academic mathematics some 42
years ago, I could never have imagined ever writing such a sentence. Nor, for
that matter, would I have had the faintest idea what a “startup” was. It’s a
measure of how much society has changed since 1971, when I transitioned from
being a “graduate student” to a “postdoc,” that today everyone knows what a
startup is, and many of my doctorate-bearing academic colleagues have, as a
sideline to their academic work, started up labs, centers, or companies. What
was once exceptional is now commonplace.
Massive changes in technology have made it, while not
exactly easy, at least possible for
anyone in academia to become an “edupreneur,” to use (just once, I promise) one
of the more egregious recent manufactured words. This means that, when our
academic work leads to a good idea or a product we think could be useful to
many of our fellow humans, we don’t have to sit back and hope that one day
someone will come along and turn it into something people can access or use. We
can make it available to them ourselves.
MOOCs are one of the most recent examples. If any of us in
the teaching business finds we have developed a course that students seemed to
have benefited from and we are proud of, we can (at least to some extent)
bottle it and make it available to a much wider audience.
Of course, we have had versions of that ability since the invention
of the printing press. Today, millions of people, academics and non-academics
alike, use those printing press descendants, websites and blogs, to achieve a
much wider audience for their written word.
A somewhat smaller (but growing) number have used platforms
such as YouTube and Vimeo to make video-recordings of their lectures widely
available.
To some extent, MOOCs can be viewed as an extension of both
of those Internet media developments. A MOOC sets out to achieve the very
ambitious goal of bottling an entire
college course and making it available to the entire world—or at least,
that part of the world with broadband access.
The launch this past weekend of the third iteration of my
constantly-evolving MOOC on Mathematical
Thinking was one of the two startups that gobbled up massive amounts of my
time over the past few weeks. Even though, having given essentially the same
course twice before, the bulk of the preparatory work was done, implementing
the changes I wanted to make and re-setting all the item release dates/times and
the various student submission deadlines was still a huge undertaking. For with
a MOOC, pretty well everything for the entire course needs to be safely deposited on (in my case, with my MOOC on Coursera) Amazon’s servers before the first of
my 41,000 registered students logged on over the weekend.
When you think about it, the very fact that a single
academic can do something like this, is pretty remarkable. What makes it
possible is that all the components are readily available. To go into the MOOC
business, all you need is a laptop, a word processor (and LaTeX, if you are
giving a math course), possibly a slide package such as PowerPoint, some kind
of video recording device (I use a standard, $900 consumer camcorder, others
use a digital writing tablet), a small microphone (possibly the one already
built in to your laptop), and a cheap consumer video editing package (I use
Premiere Elements, which comes in at around $90). Assuming you already have the
laptop and a standard office software package, you can set up in the MOOC
business for about $1500.
Sure, it helps if your college or university gives you
access to the open source MOOC platform edX, or is willing to enter an
agreement with, say, the MOOC platform provider Coursera. But if not, there are options such as YouTube, websites, Wikis, and blogs, all freely available.
My second startup was supposed to launch at least a month
before my MOOC, but a major hacking event at Apple’s Developer Site delayed their release of the first (free) mathematical thinking mobile game designed by
my small educational software company, InnerTube
Games. Both launches falling in the same week is not something I’d want to
do again!
Why form a company to create and distribute mathematics
education video games that incorporate some of the findings and insights I’d
developed over several years of research? The brutal answer is, I had no other viable
option. Though several years of research had convinced me that it was possible
to design and build “instruments” on which you can “play” parts of mathematics,
in the same way a musical instrument such as a piano can be used to play music
(in both cases by passing the need for static symbolic representations on a
page, which are known to be a huge barrier to learning for many people), I
simply was not successful in convincing funders it was a viable approach.
Clearly then, I had to build at least one such instrument. More
precisely, I had to team up with a small number of friends who brought the
necessary expertise I did not have. Again, a few years ago, it would have been
impossible for an academic to found and build a small company and create and
launch a product in my spare time. But today, anyone can.
Sure, even more so than with MOOCs, to form and operate an
educational software company, you need to work with other people—three in my
case. (That, at least, has been my experience.) But the key point is, the
technology and the resources infrastructure make it possible. You don’t have
to give up your day job as an academic to do it! And just as a MOOC provider
(or a YouTube, website, blogging platform combo) takes care of the distribution
of your course, so too the Web (in my case, in the form of Apple’s App Store)
can make your creation available to the world. At no cost.
We are not talking about enterprises designed with the
purpose of making money here—I am essentially in the same game as the
writing of academic works or textbooks, and in my case less so, since my books
cost money but my MOOC and my game are free. Rather we are making use of a
global infrastructure to make our work widely accessible. If that
infrastructure involves for-profit MOOC platforms or software companies, so be
it.
The fact is, it has never been as easy as it is today for
each one of us to take an idea or something we have created and make it
available to a wide audience. Sure, for both my examples, I have left a lot
unsaid, focusing on one particular aspect. (Take a glance at my video game
website to see who else was involved in that particular enterprise and the
experience they brought to the project. That was a team effort if ever there
was!) But the key fact is, it is now possible!
For more about my MOOC, and MOOCs in general, see my blog MOOCtalk.org. For my findings and thoughts on
mathematics education, see many of the posts on my other blog profkeithdevlin.org together with some
of the articles and videos linked to on the InnerTube
Games website.
And for another (dramatic) example of how one person with a
good idea can quickly reach a global audience, see Derek Muller’s superb STEM
education resource Veritasium.