“In the early part of my career, back in the l 90s, I was a teacher at a public school.  I love teaching; I always have, it’s something I really value.  But one of the challenges in teaching, I found, is that I could only teach about 100 students or so per year. That’s really limiting if you think about it, particularly because there is such diversity in the quality of teaching. We’ve all experienced that at school; some teachers are really effective and inspiring, while others aren’t.  The structure of schooling also plays a part obviously; when you teach a class of 30 kids you have to find a way to engage all 30 but that may end up being too fast or too slow for some in the class.  Brightstorm has its roots in the realisation that with technology we can share our knowledge and teaching with millions, as opposed to hundreds.  With current technology it is possible to make the very best teachers accessible to every person in the world.  That’s what we’re trying to do with Brightstorm.  We find the best teachers, film them teaching, and build online educational programmes around that. 

Over 250 teachers have applied for teaching work at Brightstorm. This means we can be very selective. We put all the applicants through a rigorous selection process, which includes a live interview and an interview via webcam.  The webcam interview is important, because we need to assess their ‘online’ presence.  In this way we can select the very best teachers, specifically for what we do: online teaching.  

At present we have two core solutions.  Our premium solutions are test preparation programmes for college admission, such as for the SAT and ACT tests. We charge for those services.  In addition we offer about 2,000 free videos that cover the high school math curriculum. Those are free. The math content is designed to be supplemental material to the programme that the student is already in. Most of us recognise the situation: you’re at home doing your homework or preparing for a test, but you’re confused. It happens to most students, and it happens frequently.  You can see it happen by looking at Google search queries; people are constantly looking for help. The problem is that it is really difficult to find effective content.  Rarely will you find a high quality video of a teacher explaining the issue. That’s where our content comes in.  And with math covered we’re now filming the science topics.  

 

In addition to the online instruction, we also provide a homework checker programme for which we’ll charge a small monthly fee.  Basically it allows you to enter a question in the interface and retrieve an instant answer.  There is no human intervention in this service; it’s all based on computer algorithms.  That’s why it’s instant.  For example, if you enter a quadratic equation the tool will offer a drop-down menu offering you a number of choices in how you want to address the problem; it’s a very logical, step-by-step approach. 

We’re doing well thus far.  The feedback to the test prep programmes has been great.  But we’re doing even better with the free services.  These are showing huge organic growth and really high engagement level.  To illustrate, we’re receiving about double to triple the time of site per visit that a typical Wikipedia session attracts.  Clearly the solution is perceived to be very valuable; people are clicking through to other videos and making use of the social features. You can post a question on math and science and any user in the community can respond.  In the process, we’re seeing a really active social community emerge. This is really exciting; and it just keeps growing thanks to the search engine traffic we’re receiving. At the moment we have about 128,000 registered users.  That’s pretty significant, considering we launched in late 2008.  

I think we’re in the first stages of a major disruption; at least, I hope it will be a major disruption. The internet has changed so much in our lives, but education hasn’t changed much at all—but I think it will. The technology is available and costs are declining, which means that the best education can be made available globally to practically anyone.   At the same time our existing educational system is under extreme financial pressure.  In the U.S. we’ve had numerous protests because schools and universities have needed to start raising fees. And in the wake of the Bush programme “leave no child behind” there’s been tremendous pressure on schools to raise their test scores. Many people think that schools are failing them.  Government simply doesn’t have the luxury to pay for the type of education we had in the past.  So there has to be a disruption. The great thing about online educational platforms like Brightstorm is their scalability.  It disrupts the most important cost driver of education: the teacher-student ratio.

 

Human interaction obviously remains very important. But one aspect of good teaching is instruction; that is, explaining a complex issue. There seems to be little reason why that aspect of teaching cannot be done via video. Obviously you can do this via audio too but I think it is very important to still see someone explaining.  Next to instruction, there are many other aspects to teaching, like coaching and organising group work. It is in that sense that I hope the role of the teacher will change.  Group work on projects is really powerful; and teachers have a very important role to play in facilitating such work. Teachers can move from group to group, supporting students in their work.  That’s where the really rich interaction happens.   The idea that a teacher’s primary role is to prepare and deliver lectures seems so obsolete to me.  It is such an ineffective model, compared to the model where a student is coached, facilitated and challenged by an engaged teacher.  A teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.  Human interaction is really important, but the idea that most education is achieved via a teacher delivering instruction to a group of 30 students is a myth; that process of instruction happens in less than 5% of the time.