Community is my University

by Tom Cassidy, Principal of Cambridge Leadership College and co-founder of ZSchools with Zubair Junjunia.

This is just a short collection of thoughts supporting our belief that education is a critical catalyst in accelerating the world into a state of harmony, peace and balance within a reasonable period of time.

We are not alone in this perspective: The United Nations has recently launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Goal Number 4 (of 17) is “Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning”

In this article, I hope to indicate how Zubair Junjunia and I are hoping to be part of this process.

Before we start I’d like to say that I’m not a doomsayer. I think that humans are actually doing pretty OK, and we’re making tremendous strides in any of the major global metrics you could choose to investigate - on average. And if you think we’re not making progress, all you need to do is choose a time you’d rather be living in, and consider what the typical life experience would be in that epoch.

Evidentially, we are making great progress as a race in general, but my theory is that it COULD be happening a lot more quickly and that education is the best distribution channel for the future we need to create. 

And this is exactly why we are so grateful for tech companies like Google, Slack and Zoom who make it easy for people with great ideas, great perspectives and great communication abilities, to deliver value to the world in a regenerative way.

By regenerative, I mean that ‘it grows in benefit for all as it grows in reach, in operation, in size, in influence’.

It brings a greater life experience to all living and future humans without causing ecological offence. (Borrowing heavily from a hero of mine, Richard Buckminster Fuller.)

He was a big fan of the idea of doing more with less. Let me explain.

You might be a great teacher, but if you have to work in a physical school, you are going to be limited by the physical resources at your disposal; your energy, your time, your classes, your salary, your health, your enthusiasm, your travel time and cost, and then the travel time and cost of all your students...

Nothing will replace being in a room with people. Nothing will surpass the experience of interacting directly with a great teacher, but it’s just not very efficient.

I have been teaching for just over 30 years.

In a typical school year I would teach around 200 days.

In a typical day I would teach 4 classes with around 25 students per class, which gives a total of around 100 hour-long Teaching And Learning EventS (TALES) per day. [Yeah, corny, but come on, we’re teachers right? Teachers are the godfathers of corn.]

Anyway, that makes about 20,000 TALES per year. That’s around 600,000 TALES in the last 30 years.

I currently have over 200,000 student enrolments on my courses worldwide.

Assuming that each course probably has an average of 5 hours of content, that means I have delivered 1,000,000 TALES online since I started making my materials available in 2012.

But the real trick is the regenerative nature of the online model.

How much FUTURE physical resource do I need to use in order to continue to deliver TALES in this fashion?

How much of my time?

How much petroleum?

How much energy?

Exactly.

The materials are there, for all to enjoy, forever.

Online education in its broadest term - which is to supply people with information of any type, instantaneously - leverages the extraordinary technological capabilities of our times to produce unfathomable value for all parties with the minimum cost of resource, whether that be time, money or merely the physical resources of the planet!

But ‘Online education’ has some way to go before it is able to tackle the hardest problem encountered by man: The problem of implementation.

For most people, knowing WHAT to do is not the problem. They can find out exactly what to do but they just don't do it.

Information may be king, but implementation is god.

Traditional online learning has not been hugely effective for the majority of learners. The content of an online course is great, but people just don’t stick at it because they don’t have the interaction, they don’t have the experience, they don’t have the community.

And that’s where ZSchools comes in. It’s the content PLUS the community.

Component 1: Atomic Notes

When Zubair Junjunia founded ZNotes several years ago it was always intended to be a forever free resource for students of the Cambridge International suite of examinations at iGCSE and A Level.

Znotes has proved to be a popular resource, with the website approaching half a million hits per month and tens of thousands of repeat visitors and a crack team of dedicated contributors, spanning time zones and continents. 

Component 2: Live-streamed Classes

I approached Zubair some time ago with my plan to make a significant addition to the value that ZNotes was already providing.

My idea was to stream live masterclasses in CIE A Level subjects from our college in Cambridge, so that students from all over the world would be able to supplement their comprehensive subject notes with expert teaching from our faculty in Cambridge.

It seemed selfish for us to limit access to great teachers to people who could afford to come and study in Cambridge. It wouldn’t really involve very much additional resource for us to stream the classes live to an online audience, and to capture the teaching as we went along so that we began creating an archive of all our classes, a library of great teacher insights to supplement the free notes. We did it and there’s over 400 hours of videos available on our YouTube channel. You’re welcome!

This is more content. Now, let’s move on to the community. 

Component 3: A Full-stack, remote school. 

Moving on, we started to think whether we could create a scalable way of students being able to interact with the faculty members directly, to bring in the power of live classes, but with the genius of asynchronous communication.

This gets a bit trickier because it does involve additional resources, most notably the teacher time that is involved.

So, we focused on what really would be the most valuable part of the interaction. What makes learning stick?

And that’s what led us to the idea of community.

The thing that people enjoy more than anything else is interaction with other humans. We love it. We are wired for it and thanks to evolution, the ability to enjoy this has been positively selected for. 

What we realised was that in order for ZSchools to be something that people kept coming back for, there had to be a very invigorating interactive experience, not just between the students and the subject coach, but also between the students themselves.

We realised that a problem-orientated learning approach would be the perfect way to get people interacting. Luckily I was schooled in this method myself since I studied physics at Oxford university and the Oxford tutorial method is a problem-oriented approach to learning. (At Cambridge University they call it the supervision system.)

In a traditional learning environment you are taught the topic first, you then do a few practice examples or discuss it, then you do some homework and finally you have a test to see how well you’ve learnt it.

In the Oxbridge academic method you first try the problem yourself, before you’ve been taught anything!

You might discuss the problem with your peers, you might go to the library, you might go to some lectures, you might talk to other people who have probably done this problem in the year above you at university, or you might just try and hack it out yourself through YouTube videos. 

And then, only after you’ve tried the problems, would your tutor go over any misconceptions you might have picked up, discuss the nuances that you might not have discovered and of course deal with any errors. 

This problem-solving approach is very powerful, because it avoids you spending a lot of time being taught things that you already know. It’s a very efficient use of all the resources available, especially the teacher time, and most crucially, it’s a hugely engaging and empowering process: You are being trained how to do your own thinking and led through a process which results in you discovering the principles yourself.

It sounds good, but most importantly it answers the following question:

How will this bring greater life to all?

(The question ‘how does this bring greater life to all?’ should be the fundamental driver of all ‘business’ practices, and it should be the fundamental driver of any organisation setting out to make a difference. It’s not about making a difference for ourselves, for our families, our communities, our relatives - it’s about making a difference for every person alive on the planet and all future living humans.)

And the answer is that the ZSchools ecosystem is not merely providing students with answers, nor even just giving students a profound understanding of a subject but much more importantly, ZSchools is imbuing students with the specific techniques of independent learning. 

We’re creating a league of extraordinary SuperLearners. 

It’s a bit like Mutant University. But for the rest of us. Mutant powers not required. 

And that’s how we’re bringing greater life to all.

Teaching x Techniques x Technology = A boatload of awesome. 

We hope you like it. To see more about the whole thing, please go to zschools.co.uk