In this TEDx talk, Christian Rebernik reflects on how the COVID‑19 pandemic exposed the deep flaws of the traditional lecture‑based education system, which has changed little in six centuries. He begins with personal anecdotes—his ten‑year‑old son falling asleep in a live online history class and his own experience dropping out of university—illustrating how passive, long‑form lecturing fails to engage learners. He cites historical evidence of the same model persisting since the 14th century and shares a contemporary student story (Lena) that highlights the loss of social interaction during remote learning. Rebernik presents data showing that while only a minority of students currently prefer fully online study, online degree programs are projected to grow 17% annually, indicating that online education is here to stay. He then introduces core learning‑science principles from self‑determination theory—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—and connects them to active, challenge‑based, and mastery learning approaches that keep learners in the optimal “flow” zone. Technology, he argues, can provide individualized pathways, real‑time mentorship, and scalable personalization. Drawing on his own background in building an early e‑commerce shop, he co‑founded Tomorrow University in 2020 to apply these ideas. A key innovation is a metaverse campus that recreates informal social learning moments (pre‑lecture chats, post‑lecture discussions) and enables collaborative workshops, thereby restoring the social dimension missing from many live online lectures. Rebernik concludes that while the lecture model has remained static for centuries, the permanence of online education offers a unique opportunity to redesign learning with technology, fostering motivation, mastery, and social connection for a future‑ready education system.
Chapters
Do you smell this? Change is in the air. And as I learned, change can have different connotations. Let me start with the biggest change we all experienced in the last years. Let me start with the pandemic. In the pandemic, many of us have been at home, maybe working from there. If you have kids, maybe your kids have been at home learning from there. The same was true for me. I have 3 kids, and all of them have been at home, and I was working at the dinner table. And we had a large dinner table at home. On the opposite side, my son Ben was sitting at the age of 10, And he had a live lecture, and I was quietly working on the other side of the table. And as a good father, you watch a little bit over what your son is doing. And I watched while he was listening to his teacher teaching about history. So my son was looking like this. And I was saying, OK, let's see how this goes. And while I continued working, I was watching at him, and the time passed, and the teacher continued actually talking and talking and talking. And my son continued going down and down and down. And eventually, he fell asleep. He fell asleep in a class. On the other side of where I was working. Oh my God, I mean, is this really happening here? And I thought, this cannot be true. But then it made me think about my own education. And I was thinking about my time at university, where I went to lectures, and I sat in classes and courses, And I also listened to teachers, and many of them just kept on talking. And when I thought about myself, actually, this wasn't really engaging for me. And I was also like, I really had trouble following. But eventually, you know, you start to memorize things, you repeat things because, you know, you have that exam coming up. For me, this was really not the best experience. And I really had troubles learning for the exam. It wasn't any fun, any engaging for me. And eventually, I also dropped out of university because I said, that's not the right way to learn for myself. But was it just my son falling asleep and then only me here in the university being bored and not having troubles literally to learn successfully? I started to be curious about this, and I started research and talked to many students. And I found this common denominator between many students actually. And let me just share one. Let's call her Lena. She's 20 years old. She studied business at a university in Germany. And she described her experience at the university as okay because she was meeting friends there. And before the class, she would hang out with them. They had— can interact and have a chat and had some fun. And then there was the lecture. And eventually, After half a year, there comes this exam where you need to recap or apply what you have learned eventually. But for her, when the pandemic hit, it has changed, but not the learning. The way of learning was still the same. It was still the same approach where you actually go into a course, you listen to the teacher for 1 hour or even longer, And then you need to remember the things, so you learn at home, and then you go and go to take the exam. But all the social aspect of meeting her friends was gone, and she really had trouble through that time. And that made me think, is it just online education which is broken? And we know that online education has its troubles. Actually, it's famously for its low completion rates, and it also, when you look into online programs, there's a big lack of disengagement. But this is not just about online learning. So I looked, and as a good student, what you do is you go to Wikipedia and you look up about the history of education. And in Wikipedia, I found this beautiful picture here, which is a class In the 14th century, so 600 years ago. And if you look at the picture, you see that above there, there's one person who forgot her book. She's reading with the other ones. There are the 2 people there behind who are chatting with each other and not listening to the teacher. And then there is this blue person in the blue robe. He reminded me really of my son, actually, who fell asleep. This is not a problem, a modern problem. Education looks like it has not changed for literally 600 years. And the good thing is now in a Zoom lecture and a video lecture, you go online, you have the same behavior, but if you fall asleep, you can turn off your video. I mean, that's now— that's technology involvement. So How now after the pandemic, how did we change? Because we now know education maybe doesn't work anymore. So how did we— have we changed actually things? Yeah. But if you look into most of the schools and also universities, they went back to on campus. So students are back, you can again mingle, you can again interact with each other. So it's okay, it's bearable. But we haven't changed education actually. And the interesting thing is online education. If you ask students today how many would like to learn online, 18% of the students say, I would like to learn online, or 49% say, I would like to learn hybrid. And if you go into further research, you find out that online degree programs are actually predicted to grow 17% every of the next coming years. So online education is here to stay. And I think it's a very important part now that we look and see this as an opportunity for us maybe to change education. Because there are great benefits also from learning online, like more flexibility, more accessibility, People saved on commuting and driving around. So I thought, let's look at the time when I learned the most. And I learned the most— this was back in— one example was back in 1998 when I actually dropped out of university. I was really excited about the internet. Okay, it was 1998. There was no Amazon, there was no Facebook, there was no Google. It was back then, those days, and I thought, Software is going to be really exciting. The internet, there's so much what you can do with that and so many people you can reach. And I was super excited about that opportunity. So a friend of mine and me, we said, hey, we want to do something there. And we thought, but what can we do? And then we went into a shop. And I must admit, the shop, they had the problem that the customers, they have been scared in entering the shop. So the shop asked us, Hey, can you actually build us an online shop? There is this internet and we would like to sell there something. Okay, I admit it was a sex shop. Back in those days, we said, okay, we do that. We develop a shop for you. But we had no clue about programming, about the logistics when it comes to actually how does a shop work, about checkout processes, basket corps, all those things. So the next Days, nights, weeks we spent actually intensely on figuring out how to build an online shop, how to develop actually, how to develop software, how does this whole basket checkout thing work, how to scan images. It was a really intense time, but at the end we mastered it. We developed the shop and the customer was really happy because now finally he could sell his products online. Wow! That was for me a really exciting experience. Now, I talked to Thomas Funke, an expert in education, about the science behind this, because what does the learning science say? And he shared with me a lot about the things which are there. And he's a teacher in existing universities, and he said, He's so frustrated because there is so much actually about how we learn effectively out there. There is research which tells us how it works. It's nothing new. It's there. It exists. And I see, why isn't this applied today? So let me share with you quickly a key part of that, of the learning science, is a theory which is about actually our human motivation. Which tells us about how we as people actually work, what motivates us, and it consists of 3 element pillars. One is autonomy. This means about our inner drive, our curiosity, our purpose. Why do we want— what do we want to achieve, actually? About the possibility that we actually, from ourselves, can decide what we want to do. The second part is about competencies. feeling competent, feeling being in control of what you can change, feeling of achieving this mastery, that you actually feel, wow, I can do that. And the third part is about relatedness, about this, hey, I care, I want to interact with you, we want to do this together. And together, these 3 factors of growth, they create high motivation and engagement and also an enhanced performance and well-being. On top of that, there are things like active learning, which is more about the interaction between the teacher and the students, or, as I learned, challenge-based learning, which is about solving challenges, real-world challenges, real-world problems together with others, where you learn the relevant competence on that, apply the learning, get deeper in your knowledge, and solve the problems, really take action. And a key part of that is mastery learning, which is not that you just learn something, but that you advance based on your competence you have. You can go to the next step and really evolve. So online learning is here to stay. And if you look what online learning has done in the first wave, With all those massive online courses. It made learning accessible. It made it more so that we all can actually learn wherever we are at any point of time. But learning is not about ease. Learning is about hardship. It's about being challenged. That's where the magic happens. So how can technology help us to learn better? If you look into technology, what technology really can do is to individualize things, make it for you, adaptable for you. Let's challenge. Let's see about about you. So if I ask you to split your fingers, can you do that? Please test this. This is a challenge. I see this is a challenge which most of most of you for few works. And if you look at the challenge-based Sorry. So if you look at the challenge-based learning, you see that there are 2 different things. From traditional learning, I would be asked to code, in a sense, hey, learn about coding, learn to memorize it, and then apply the code that you have learned. In my case, when I learned on developing the shop, I had a problem to solve. I was thinking about how can I master that problem. And then how can I solve the challenge? If you now think about the challenge and if you have a too easy challenge, then literally you would be bored. So, but on the other hand side, if I would ask you now to make a backflip, who can make a backflip? Then it's a little bit scary. You'd say, hey, oh my God, how can I make a backflip? It doesn't work. There's no chance I will learn this until next week. And between that, there is the zone, the flow zone, which actually— where you're actually challenged. It's not too easy for you, but it's also not too hard for you. And this is where technology can come in. If you look now at conventional classroom education, And then you can develop your competences further, and in the right zone, you have mastery learning. And if you add on top even mentors who help you to learn these challenges, then you have what is called also the Bloom's Sigma effect on effective learning. And as a teacher, Maybe I struggle to customize it for 50 people I have in my class. I was at the university, and I was in the same class with 500 people. So how can a teacher individualize it for me? This is where technology can help. It was back in autumn 2020. My background is literally in building— in using technology to build meaningful solutions. And we thought about change and what we can do actually to contribute here in a positive way. And I sat down with Thomas Funke back then, and we decided, let's take a step. This is now a great opportunity to use technology and create a better learning experience. That's where we founded Tomorrow University. But how about social learning? How does this help the student I explained to you at the beginning, Lena, who struggled actually to learn online because there was a lack of social learning? And the reality is that many of the live lectures we have today, they are very transactional. You step into the lecture, then you're there, you listen to what the teacher says, then you step out. Literally. But that's not social. The magic happens actually in the 5 minutes before the lecture where you ask your friend, how did you do about this challenge here? Or the 5 minutes after the lecture when you actually say, hey, how does this actually work, dear professor? And you can reflect on that. And live lectures just in the sense of transactions doesn't fly. So the question for us was, how can we solve that? And here I would like to show you one of our solutions, which is a campus in the metaverse. Because learning is not about being alone. We have here a learning in the campus, a metaverse campus. And you see me here literally walking up to people with my avatar. As soon as the avatar goes to somebody, then you can talk to them. There's a video on there. You can throw snowballs even at some other people. But you can also check in with other people. They are not here, then see— To other people who are just standing there around, and maybe you'll get to know new people, actually. And again, share this curiosity, allow the serendipity to flow. There are also the possibilities to have this kind of classroom interactions, do workshops, engage with each other in a normal form rather than just in a transactional form. So, education hasn't changed. much in the last 600 years. But online education is here to stay, and I believe this is our opportunity to improve education. Technology can help to make it more individual, can support mastery learning, and technologies like the metaverse can help to make online learning even more social. Let's use online learning to improve education. I believe if we want a future worth living, then we need to work and improve on our education system. The education system is the future for all of us, for my son, for you, for your families, and for all of us. Thank you very much. Thank you.
