Utkarsh Amitabh argues that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed teachers' true economic importance and that education must be reimagined away from test-prep toward foundational, lifelong learning. He broadens the definition of "teacher" to anyone with specific, hard-to-acquire knowledge who can teach in time-bound formats and advocates cohort-based courses, micro/virtual universities, and community-backed learning. He cites investments and examples (Maven, Network Capital) to show this model can be lucrative—reporting Maven helped teachers make over $1M in four months and Network Capital has thousands of monthly paying subscribers—and predicts many "millionaire teachers" in the 21st century.
Questions this video answers
May 22, 2021.
Over $1,000,000 in four months.
Thousands of monthly paying subscribers.
Chapters
This pandemic has made teachers realize their true economic potential. Now they come to know and come to intimately understand that without their efforts, without their relentlessness, the entire education system will fall apart. So the pandemic has largely been disastrous in all walks of life, but it has made people realize that education needs to be reimagined from ground up. When we try and reimagine education, we need to stop our obsessive focus on things like test prep and other FOMO inducing methodologies and really come to double down on the foundational elements of learning. And what's interesting is that this foundational element of learning needs to start early on when kids are in school, but needs to constantly be rebuilt into the future. Today, 40 year olds, 50 year olds are having to learn the foundations of blockchain. Not just because it's the hot new thing, but because it's going to be integral to whatever profession we choose. It is going to be quite likely what Internet was 20 years back, 30 years back. And amidst all of this, the role of teachers has become something that I find fascinating. Now we need to reimagine and redefine or broaden the scope of who's a teacher? A teacher isn't necessarily somebody with a fancy degree or an institutional aff affiliation. A teacher is any person with specific knowledge that she can advance with her students and in a time bound, in a specific format, make them smarter every day. Specific knowledge is something that is important to understand. When we look at teaching in the 21st century. Specific knowledge is something that cannot be taught, but it can be learned through micro experiments, through, through right kinds of thinking frameworks, by immersive reading. And that's where the role of teacher becomes important. Back in the day, a teacher was supposed to help people get the knowledge. And I think today, the 21st century, teachers need to facilitate learning and essentially play the role of a coach. So with this redefinition and process, I think that there will be many millionaire teachers in the 21st century. Some of them would be working professionals. Some of them would be trained teachers in schools and colleges. Some of them would be people who picked up something like mountaineering or making, you know, people who are not particularly physically fit, fit enough to run a marathon, whatever the topic is, there's somebody in the world who understands it better than most of us. This is a unique opportunity for such a person to hack together a micro university. Think of a combination of zoom, stripe, network Capital, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, build a community on top of it, create a cohort based course and make a handsome living doing so. And there is no better job in the world than teaching and coaching. If students on the other side are motivated to learn, they are hungry to learn and they are willing to immerse themselves in a new context and see what what happens. I invested in a company called Maven and Maven's mission is to redefine or unpack the university experience and enable anybody to teach online. I invested in this company because I saw remarkable similarities between the way the founders of Maven were approaching education and the way we on network capital visualize education as a combination of content, community and career intelligence. And our fellowships, which range from I don't know what I want to do with my Life Fellowship to the side Hustle fellowship, are all focused on building a community and then complementing that community with a set of teachers who are the best in the world at whatever they do. So we bring together teachers who, who've understood things that are really hard to figure out, people who understand sales the best people who are the best marketeers in the world, best product managers, data scientists, and they make the entire learning process relatable. Best is a vague term, so best in our lingo essentially means something that Millennials and Gen Z will strongly resonate with. And again, like looking at Maven and examples of network capital. We today have thousands of subscribers monthly paying subscribers on network capital and Maven in four months has helped teachers make over a million dollars. So clearly this is an untapped and a huge economic opportunity that I think teachers in the 21st century will capture and it will make the whole world look at university as a system of learning rather than a fancy building that you go to if you're lucky. I have gone to many fancy buildings and prestigious universities so I can tell you I'm ever so grateful that I got a chance to study there. But I think it's time to complement them with a virtual university which brings together the community and and the best teachers who figured out ways to share their specific knowledge at scale. I'm really excited by the future of cohort based courses and I think that the time has come that we give due credit to the teachers who are doing whatever it takes to make sure that the learning in the pandemic doesn't suffer. Have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you soon.
