The most precious skill you can learn!: Eren Bali at TEDxBayArea

I'm Eren Bali. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Udemy. Udemy is a company which allows anybody to teach online. Simply, we believe that there are millions of experts around the world that are pretty passionate about different subjects, and years ago we asked ourselves, ourselves one question: why wouldn't anybody teach online, right? So if you have knowledge that you want to share, why wouldn't you do that? So today I'm gonna talk to you guys about education in general, not just Udemy. And as a part of it, like, I'll tell my personal story and I will talk about one thing which is learning. And my— simply my hypothesis is learning to learn is the biggest skill you can ever learn right now because If you— once you get that skill, then you can go to our connected internet and you can find courses about pretty much any subject that you want, and that will actually improve your personal skills more than anything else you can. So let's start with my story. A lot of people ask about why I started Udemy. So I grew up in a small village in southeast part of Turkey, and my primary school was this one-room schoolhouse. with just one teacher trying to teach 5 different grades at the same time. So you can imagine the quality of education that you can get there. So the way it would work is the teacher would start teaching the first grade and then all the other 4 grades would actually study by themselves and then the teacher would switch and switch and switch until she finished all the 5 grades and then start again. So I studied there and I I was fairly interested in mathematics, science, and chess, but really there was not a lot of room to improve myself. But as I grew up, we moved to the city center, and then I attended a better high school. So there were more resources there, but it was also very enlightening to see the difference. So in the village school, there were all these kids, like some of them would have to walk 1 hour to go to school every day. and they wouldn't miss one day of school. But when I went to a better school, I realized that most of the kids were there because their parents kind of asked them. They didn't really realize the importance or the value of education at all. But for the people in the village, in the small school, there was actually no ambiguity around the value of education. It was very clear. It was hope. So they were all looking for hope to improve their lives. They just had hopes for a better life. And what was tragically happening is the moment they lose their hope, they were giving up and they were becoming uneducated people. And then their chances for success in life was significantly decreasing. So seeing both ends of the stick, I like, was pretty good for me early on. And what happened for me is one day my parents bought me a computer and internet access for a few months. So I remember the price, the computer cost around $700 and monthly internet access was $100 per month. So it was super expensive back in the day in Turkey. And for my parents, they didn't have any idea about the potential value of a computer or internet access. They had never even seen a computer. But they just believed that I was looking for something and I didn't have what I wanted, and they speculated that this thing called internet and computers may be a solution for it, just without knowing anything about it. And then what happened to me is I started finding math websites and math forums online, and I started self-teaching myself mathematics by using the computer and internet access. It was very expensive, so after a few months I had to learn how to hack into other people's internet connections and use it for free. But because it was a significant financial sacrifice for my parents— so long story short, self-teaching myself mathematics, I won a gold medal in Turkish National Math Olympiads as well as a second position in International Math Olympics. And obviously this changed my whole life. So I had all the attention of the university professors, I had the attention of even American colleges inviting me to come here for an undergrad degree. But essentially it all started like seeing the options, seeing the value there, and your motivation plus the technological availability actually creates hopes for millions of people around the world. So as I grew up, I started— I decided to study computer science and mathematics. I really like computer science because I figured out that it would be a tool to to reach a larger audience. You could do a lot more using computers and internet than what you could do with personal teaching. So what happened is, over college, I started questioning some of the things that everybody takes as granted in education. For example, I was studying mathematics, and I always believed that mathematics was being taught in an incorrect order. It was completely broken because what you do is you first teach kids like numbers and arithmetic and calculus so they can make calculations. And usually they have no idea about how that would be used. And then like years later, they start seeing engineering problems and usually they cannot even make the connection between what they learn and how they should be applying it. Actually, mathematics is not such a boring subject. Fun subject if you teach it the right way. And when I looked at computer science education, it was very different, right? So if you look at your friends who are learning programming or web development, what they do is the first thing they are trying to do is build a website or build an iPhone application, like create something with computers. And then over time, what they do, the next thing they do is they start learning the principles of how those things work. They start going to lower language— lower-level languages where they are closer to the algorithms than data structures. If they are still interested, they start going down and like they learn simply how the machines work and all the underlying principles. But in mathematics education, it was the opposite. We were always learning how to calculate things without really understanding the problems. So that's obviously— that was my personal belief, and that may or may not be true. Like, I would like to inverse the whole mathematical education. But more importantly, the real problem is there is no way you can test new ideas in education. If I have a different way of teaching something, there was no environment that I can do it. So right after college, we felt this need. Like, there had to be a place where any expert could teach the way she likes. And the other students would actually freely take these courses and benefit from that. And if millions of different people do this, like, over time you would actually figure out what courses, what teaching style, what material is the best, what works best. But what's happening is quite the opposite. The whole education system is pre-scripted, there are rules around it, and you cannot go over it. My big epiphany moment was after coming here. I was watching an ASU conference talk from Reed Hastings, who is the CEO and founder of Netflix, which is, as you may know, one of the largest technology companies. He's also an education philanthropist, so he sits on the board of California— he sits on the California State Board of Education. And he told this story in his talk. He said one day the board was trying to figure out what textbooks to use in schools. And he says, why don't you A/B test textbooks? A/B testing simply means you have textbook A and textbook B and you don't know which one is better. And traditionally, just committees of education discuss about this for like hundreds of hours, and usually it's a political decision at the end. And what happens is that all the students are doomed to accept what's given as the norm. But if you are— if If you lived anywhere close to Silicon Valley, like the first thing that you would instinctively do is A/B testing. So control, make a control test. So apply, give one of the books to some part of the students and give the other book to the other part of the students. And then you can compare the outcomes, the success rates of different cohorts. So this is so natural for us. So I thought like, why not? I mean, I thought that would definitely be what they are doing already. Reid mentioned that when he suggested this idea, everybody went crazy. It was impossible for them to consider testing things. And if you are in technology market, if you are anywhere close to mathematics or statistics, you would know that without doing a controlled test, no data means anything, right? Like, you see data like this everywhere about education. People who have graduate degrees make 30% more than people who are high school graduates, right? All these numbers feel like they are real statistics and they have a meaning, but they actually don't have any meaning because unless you can take some of the students, put them to like make them high school graduates and don't let them get a university degree, and you take the other part of the students and give them a degree and you compare their results, the observations don't mean anything because they may not be causality. They may be just just the final outcomes of those people. People who go to college are also people who are more motivated people, and thus they actually take better jobs. So at the moment, like when Reid mentioned about the talk, those were the times where I was starting Udemy in the US. And then I realized that the whole education system, the biggest problem was that it's not changing. It's been maybe 300 years since this this form of public education has been set up and there has been almost no improvement. People, like, it just is not changing and this is the core of the whole problem. And people in education are not doing this because they are evil people. It's actually quite the opposite. Pretty much everybody who works in education is genuinely interested in making education better. But the whole system is built around resistance to change. The whole system is actually avoiding all these progressive improvements. And the core of it is that we are so concerned, we are so afraid of failing so that we cannot run A/B tests and experiments. And education is doomed to stay as it is, which is not the best product. So the loop is like this. When we talk about high-quality education, like, just do this, right? Search high-quality education on Google. And read some of the articles, they will always talk about standard compliance and accreditation and having accredited faculty, peer grading, peer evaluating, all these things which sound like they should be the criteria for quality, but in reality, they actually prevent experimenting and they prevent testing, they prevent innovation. And when there's no innovation or experimenting, like even you have the most genuinely interested smart people making the rules, they will be poor choices. And people in technology world know this pretty well. If you're not iterating a product, your product will suck after some time. It will be a bad product. And that's what's happening. The education is actually losing its competitive advantage to people. And then you can see this on numbers pretty easily. So in the last 30 years, especially in the US, the ratio of people who have higher education degrees is significantly increasing, but the employment is not increasing. So in 30 years, in the last 25 years, the cost of education has gone up 3 times more than the inflation. And this year, actually this very year, the number of unemployed people who are over 25 and who have a university degree actually passed the ones who don't have a degree. So just because education couldn't iterate and evolve, being an online— being a university grad doesn't mean anything anymore because the job market is significantly changing. The job market is requiring a lot more diverse set of skills. They need people with critical thinking capabilities. They need people who can adapt different environments. They need people who can actually catch up with technological improvements. But the education system is actually constantly generating, like producing the same types of styles of people. So back to my story. So as I said, I was in Turkey, I got all these awards and decided to start a company which helps there, which is Udemy. So simply we wanted to let anybody teach so that millions of people could iterate and try, experiment on teaching. And we intentionally wanted to stay away from all the accreditation requirements Because we saw that if the moment we started to become compliant with those, actually the main value of our marketplace would actually be lost. So, and what happened is we were in Turkey, we were in Turkey, we actually started the company in Turkey first. This was literally 7 years ago. It was the same general vision, same idea, but I think we were too early there. And we launched the company, but it didn't work out well. But we still really genuinely believed in the idea, and we really liked doing it. So we decided to shut down the company. We found different ways to come to the US, and we started working in Silicon Valley companies here. And Tatiana mentioned one of them. I came to work full-time for a startup called SpeedDate. And it was pretty good for me because I learned a lot about consumer web dynamics and how Silicon Valley companies work. But still, like, we still believed in the Udemy idea and we couldn't let that go. So in 2010, we decided to give it another shot and we started the company again here. But it really didn't work out that easily because the first year we started the company, no investor wanted to invest in education. So there were— it was almost a blacklisted market. They were believing that there's almost no room for innovation in education and Those guys were right because they had previously invested a lot of money and it hadn't worked out. But we were trying to convince them that this is the right timing. Like, it didn't work out 10 years ago, but it will work now. So I think what's happening is in the last 2 years you may be seeing all these improvements in education. I think Salman Khan was one of the first people to popularize the market. So he started teaching online, teaching K-12 courses, mostly mathematics, from YouTube with small videos on YouTube. And he gained an amazing— like, he got a lot of press and he got hundreds of millions of people teaching from his video-based courses. And then companies like Udemy launched and we started getting a lot of traction, which also helped the market because we were actually opening up the markets to a lot more people than like who could access it before, especially on the teaching side. And more recently, you may have heard of companies like Coursera, Udacity. They came out of a project from Stanford where 2 Stanford professors opened up their AI class for free to anybody who wants to take it. And for the first course, there were 200,000 students enrolled, which is like a lot higher than the total number of students in Stanford. And this simply created a frenzy of all these online courses. Like in 2012, I can't tell you how much the approach to online education has changed. From people who have no belief in education, right now we came to another set of universities where if you cannot catch up with online education advancements, you're actually fired as a president of the university. So which happened, and the media is crazy about it. So like, I have charts about it, but in the last 1 year, the amount of tech stories on TechCrunch, which is a technological journal blog, went up by 5 times. And the investment has gone up more than 3 or 4 times in this just last 1 year. And as a part of it, obviously we were one of the leading companies behind this, so we were also able to raise $60 million and significantly grow our operations. But the good news is there are hundreds of thousands of very smart people working on education right now because there's more hope. So in the last few years, the trend has helped attract the smartest people in the market to work on this problem, which is definitely good news. And also, there is money in the market, fresh money, which helps some of the companies. So, I think I want to close out with one thing, which is this time is the right timing. We are in the intersection of multiple trends which will change education forever. So, the cost of education has been going up and everybody realized that this is not a sustainable model. Financially, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't reach enough number of people. And even if they can educate the audience, those people can't actually find jobs and return the investment. And then the other trend is actually all the positive trends. There are a lot more people who are online at any given time. And if you also look at the mobile improvements and number of internet-connected devices, it's exploding. So there are $100 mobile tablets right now that are being sold in the developing world which can connect to internet and run all this technology that was available on a pretty expensive device before. So all these positive trends of education and availability and connectivity is intersecting with the problems in education, and this is the time, this is the right time where it will change. In the next 5 to 10 years, education will change more than it changed in the last 300 years.