When MIT OpenCourseWare committed to creating Open Learners, a special season of the Chalk Radio podcast, we sensed that it had the potential to be something extraordinary. We knew that the hosts of the new series, Michael Jordan Pilgreen and Emmanuel Kasigazi, had inspiring stories of their own, having discovered the power of open educational materials as a transformative force in their own lives. We trusted that the two of them would succeed in forging personal connections and drawing out equally engaging stories from a range of podcast guests.
Left: Photo courtesy of Emmanuel Kasigazi. Right: Photo of Michael Jordan Pilgreen by Emma Fox.
Now that the season is over, we can say definitively that Michael and Emmanuel have a rare gift for interviewing. In their conversations with the season’s six guests, you can hear not only an enthusiasm for open education and an attention to the details of the guests’ different learning journeys, but also a personable, sociable tone that bridges cultural divides, consistently eliciting interesting anecdotes and insights from each guest. Those guests—three women and three men—came from a wide range of backgrounds, from six different countries on three continents. Their stories are all distinctly different, and yet there are many common threads to be found among them.
For one thing, several of the guests grew up in countries where internet connectivity was unreliable or expensive or both—those guests, such as Jerry and Lotfullah, appreciated the fact that MIT OpenCourseWare allows users to download materials, for use when they were offline. For these users, having access to lecture notes and problem sets meant that their learning didn’t have to stop even when they had no internet connection.
Secondly, we note that most of the guests reported having initially discovered MIT OpenCourseWare by way of our YouTube channel, often by way of the videos from some of our most popular courses. Maria and Jae-Min, for instance, both mentioned Prof. Gilbert Strang’s linear algebra courses by name; Maria, Jae-Min, and Nader all mentioned Prof. Andrew Lo’s course on finance. From there, they moved on to the wider panoply of course materials available on our website.
It was also enlightening to realize that for these users, reaching our website was not the end of the road as far as their online learning was concerned. Most of them were motivated not only to learn but to improve their own lives by learning, and for many of them that meant moving on to certificate-granting programs such as the MITx MicroMasters or even the highly selective MIT Emerging Talent program. These programs, created by our colleagues in MIT Open Learning, have helped Nader, Lotfullah, Jerry, and Sujood to pursue new careers and find new employment opportunities in fields they’re passionate about.
Lastly, it’s striking that so many of the guests described their learning journeys as being motivated not only by the desire for self-improvement, but also by a desire to improve the lives of others in their country or their region. Lotfullah, for instance, has used his computer skills to create an online learning platform offering educational materials in Persian, to assist under-resourced students in his native Afghanistan. Jerry, from Uganda, launched a financial-services platform that is intended to increase financial literacy among people in sub-Saharan Africa. And Sujood hopes that someday she will be able to employ her skills in helping to rebuild Sudan’s educational and scientific infrastructure.
Sujood Eldouma leveraged several online learning opportunities from MIT Open Learning, including OpenCourseWare, the MIT Emerging Talent certificate program, and a MicroMasters program, to pursue her dreams of a career in data science.
We at MIT OpenCourseWare have access to plenty of quantitative data about how much the world values what we do—we can track how many millions of people subscribe to our YouTube channel or how many people from how many different countries make use of the course materials on our site in a given year. But those numbers are just numbers. Hearing individual learners’ own testimony about the impact of open education in their lives is an altogether different experience, one that fills us with hope for the future and with redoubled energy for our work. Thank you, Emmanuel and Michael, and thank you to all six of the guests who joined them on the podcast in the past season!
