Profile by rohit padmakumar

Empowering the

99 Percent

Balancing the Playing Field with Online Streaming

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et’s do it one more time,” said the cameraman. He took his clipboard, showing the second take, and placed it in front of the camera. After he removed it from the frame, the camera refocused on Kunal Chawla’s face. Kunal took one last glance at his lines before he set them on the chair beside him. “This is lesson 2B,” he said to the camera. At the push of the record button, he looked heavily into the camera’s lense and began his lecture. The green screen behind him and the multiple studio lights shining on his face constituted his work environment. As he began his lesson on application programming, his fluid hand gestures flooded the air and his voice gave off a vibrating channel into his microphone.

After roughly 30 seconds of Kunal talking to students he will never see, the cameraman said “Let’s do it again.” They each repeated the lesson until the perfect take on the fifth go around. One lesson down, hundreds

to go. Kunal is not your typical teacher.

Working at Udacity, a company that specializes in online learning, Kunal is an educator who creates and instructs several technology courses. By utilizing the power of Udacity’s resources in combination with his educational knowledge, Kunal is transforming the way people see a classroom. He specializes in making education a global phenomenon that can reach any corner of the planet with the click of a button, whether the student is a soldier in Afghanistan or a working mother in India.

“One of biggest things online education is going for is scale,” he claims.

It’s one of the major advantages to teaching through a virtual platform

as opposed to the traditional classroom setting. Kunal develops “Nanodegree” programs for Udacity, a new credential to enable people to get skills to change their careers or access higher affordable education. “As online learning becomes more individualized, more students are able to reach their full potential,” states Jason Orgill, a student at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard’s business school. in “Online Learning Programs Are Changing the Way Students Learn.” Through a blended approach that includes streamed lessons and exercises, Kunal and Udacity are allowing students to reach their full

educational capacity in a revolutionary manner.

Being one of the few people in Silicon Valley that strives to help others from an educational rather than a technological and consumer perspective, Kunal has a “knack for asking the questions a novice learner would ask” because it allows him to formulate his lesson plans around what he thinks his students will understand.

“Good teaching and learning can actually change people’s lives and their economic trajectory, and that’s a very inviting thought to me,” he explains.

He strives to defy the societal norms that claim students can only thrive if they get a college education or if they have only majored in a specific area.

Though Kunal teaches the fundamentals of programming, he is part of a larger, socially progressive cause that takes our rapidly advancing our technological culture and applies it to the

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needs of those who want change in their lives. orn in New Delhi, Kunal has a fairly unique educational history. Originally wanting to major in physics, he attended college in India, but after his love for the subject diminished, he transferred to University of Texas Austin to study computer science. When studying computer science, Kunal realized it “wasn’t the full answer for him,” and he longed for something more meaningful. This led him to return to India and teach middle school children science. He felt learning was a “gift,” and in his “small humble way” he wanted to pass it on to a new generation. As a teacher, his ingenuity inspired him to tie popular local music to scientific concepts where he composed 17 “science songs” to teach the concepts of gravity, inertia and magnetism.

After 2 years of teaching in New

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Delhi, Kunal headed a project at Google that involved course instructors and content developers in California beaming videos to three cities in India, 25 classrooms, and a thousand students. “It was essentially a Skype conversation,” where an instructor would ask a question and the students would respond by hitting a buzzer. “Kunal was focused on how you provide affordable education to kids in villages,” said Ann Rogan, one of Kunal’s project coworkers. “He experimented with using video as a method to deliver education,” but it “morphed” into him instructing the teachers in the country as well. Despite Kunal’s work at Udacity where he cannot physically see his students, his previous work throughout his life has displayed his unique ability to mix practices together to better the people around him.

Even though Kunal is a teacher both

at Udacity and in India, he lives a multi-faceted life outside of education. Every Wednesday, he meets with a group of nearly 70 people to meditate in Santa Clara. The threehour process involves sitting in silence for an hour, eating in silence for the next hour, and then sharing a compassionate story that others can relate to. “I like to slow things down,” he explains. He believes there is a very strong link between meditation and education. The silence gives him time to contemplate his life. He wants his students to do the same after a lesson by reflecting on what they have learned and then writing down their thoughts. “We are social creatures,” he claims, and the relationships we establish with our family, friends, and online mates are “critical to our iden-

tity.” His meditation puts the importance of sociality into “overdrive” by empathizing with a group that is connected through a spiritual experience. unal’s meditation is essential to his rigorous work life. Kunal’s work employs the power of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). “Since the advent of broadband speeds capable of carrying multimedia traffic, online distance learning programs have grown in popularity,” says Nicholas Laudato, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh in his article “MOOC.” Kunal has filmed 650 clips for the five courses that he has created at Udacity that have a growing number of thousands of views each. MOOCS are what educators in the online platform use as their classroom to teach to their

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students. Ferguson R. and Sharples M. highlight the impact “massive” has on society in their article “Innovative pedagogy at massive scale: Teaching and learning in MOOCs,” explaining that scale “offers the potential to change professional practice, to increase access to education and to achieve global impact by solving large-scale problems.” Kunal’s role demands the “need to know how to make the most of these possibilities, and how [to] support learners effectively when opportunities for one-toone contact are very limited,” states Curtis Bond in his book MOOCs and Open Education around the World. It’s clearly a tradeoff: lack of intimacy for increased range. Since Kunal has taught in various environments that rely on in class settings,

“It’s phenomenal have someone who not only teaches, but also walks the walk.”

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teaching at Udacity is an alternate strategy of education adapted to be scaled immensely.

Even though Kunal is one of many course instructors at Udacity, his method of teaching differs than that of his colleagues because of how he integrates the learner. Ben Jaffe, a

Udacity coworker, said that Kunal utilizes a method of “role reversal.”

Since he cannot physically interact with the thousands of students he has, he forces them to write down a question they would ask themselves as if they were the teachers. “The students aren’t used to thinking from the other

side,” Ben says. “Education is only scaled linearly.” However, Kunal has unlocked the key to scale “exponentially” because he “engages the learners, not just to learn themselves, but to help teach each other,” through group interaction and collaboration.

“This idea of how [his] student is feeling” (Chawla), is what he most thinks about. When teaching middle school, he had his students ask questions on the “students become teachers” day and had their peers answer those questions on the board, enforcing an interactive environment. This method of instructing correlates to Kunal teaching to help others teach.

He amplifies his knowledge to grow in the mindset of others in the classroom and online. Through this magnification, Kunal is a droplet creating ripples in a pond, since every lesson he streams represents a single wavelet that brushes the surface of the water to educate thousands under him. unal as an educator is able to eliminate the “blind spots” in teaching by asking himself what he thinks the learner is thinking. Jaffe claimed that “His level of compassion, empathy, and the types of questions he asks”, sets him apart from most people. His method of inviting other people to empathize with him lets him overcome the frustrating component of learning as a student by divulging from different perspectives. When asked how he would describe Kunal, Ben said that he would rather describe the vibe that is created with his interactions with the people around him because it’s the atmosphere that he generates that truly defines him. During his time teaching in India, Kunal aimed to establish a relationship that was “built on parity” with his students. “I respected my students and I treated them as my friends” (Chawla), making him realize that the connections he makes with his kids is equally if not more impor-

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tant than the content itself.

Although Kunal is a teacher, he is also a lifelong learner. Recently, he has grown fond of piano playing in his home and has begun to develop it as a skill because he wants to constantly learn. “It’s a vehicle for spreading joy,” says Kunal, who “want[s] to merge music with math or computer science.” His work with his students in India sparked his creative potential. “It’s phenomenal to have someone who not only teaches but also walks the walk. They don’t just tell their students to learn they learn too,” Ben explained. “I don’t get the impression that teaching is a job for Kunal,” he continues, “but teaching is his backbone…and he wants to unlock for you whatever he sees.” Kunal describes himself as “a novice teacher” who still seeks to “observe from the experts.” Teaching “has helped [him] become a better learner,” because he attempts to explore a wide range of topics and understand them, fueling his passion to play the piano since it introduces a new concept that he wants to grasp.

In the future, Kunal wants to continue to be a teacher. “I’ve made the lifelong bet that I will be a teacher,” he claims. It goes back to that act of passing on a “ beautiful gift” to other peo-

ple. By putting himself in the shoes of the learner, he is able to promote social equity in our “unjust world.”

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, states, “ ‘I am against education that is only available to the top one per cent of all students. I am against tens of thousands of dollars of tuition expenses. I am against the imbalance that the present system brings to the world. I want to empower the 99 percent.’ ” Udacity and Kunal share this sense of enabling those who cannot afford college to still obtain a higher education. “The way to level the playing field for a lot of folks is offering quality education at no cost,” puts Kunal. He is against large brand name colleges because they exemplify inequality. By reinforcing those that simply cannot

compete with the upper class demographic, he shines light on the “ ‘99 percent’ ” to further regulate the spread of knowledge through online education. n his room, Kunal wakes up to his own quotation, written in orange on a whiteboard: “Be nice to yourself (and others).” Kunal is more than just an atypical educator; he is a vibrant, compassionate member of the community who captivates those around him, whether it’s a random student or a close coworker. He lives by his words, keeping his spirits continually high and expressing humility to the people around him.

Not only does he choose to grow himself, but he influences the others’ both intellectually and spiritually as well.

By being part of the pioneers that are competing against the one percent, Kunal is balancing the educational system, defying societal norms, and revamping the manner in which we learn to revolutionize the world.

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Works Cited: Bonk, Curtis J. MOOCs and Open Education around the World. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Chawla, Kunal. Personal Interview. 21 Sept. 2015.

Chawla, Kunal. Personal Interview. 31 Aug. 2015.

Ferguson, R., & Sharples, M. (2014). Innovative pedagogy at massive scale: Teaching and learning in MOOCs. Proceedings of ECTEL 2014, Graz, Austria. Web. 26 Sept.

2015.

Jaffe, Ben. Personal Interview. 9 Sept. 2015 Laudato, Nicholas C., and K. Lee Lerner. “MOOC (Massive open online course).” The Gale Encyclopedia of Science. Ed. K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner. 5th ed. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2014.Student Resources in Context. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.

Orgill, Jason, and Douglas Hervey. “Online Learning Programs Are Changing the Way Students Learn.”What Is the Role of Technology in Education? Ed. Judeen Bartos. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2013. At Issue.

Rpt. from “How Online Innovators Are Disrupting Education.” Harvard Business Review (4 Nov. 2011). Opposing Business Review (4 Nov. 2011). Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 23 Sept.

2015.

Rogan, Ann. Personal Interview. 18 Sept. 2015

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