Why the world needs Tisdoms?

TL,DR:

Because the current educational content is lecture-style and boring. We want it to be interesting and fun.

The problem

The problem with existing edtech content is that it’s mostly lecture-style. One person is teaching, and there are graphics around. 

I never liked this format. I could never pay attention to long, boring lectures, whether in an offline class or online videos.

And it seems I am not alone. 

The course completion rate of edtech platforms is less than 10%. Yes, you read it correctly, more than 90% learners don’t complete online courses.

If you need proof, check out the stats here

The Original Edtech

The main idea of adding technology to education was to make it convenient.

With content available online, a learner can learn anywhere and anytime. At the same time, learners also get access to the top educators from around the world. 

However, when it came to content type, edtech companies essentially copied the standard classroom lecture format.

A teacher teaches and to support that teaching, they added visual graphics. 

The graphics worked up to a certain extent but not to a level that learners stick with as they stick to a Netflix series. 

Ok, then what’s the solution?

We don’t know, honestly. 

But we have some ideas.

And these ideas did not come in one day. It was a gradual process.

The Journey

In case you are wondering, who am I?

My name is Nikhilesh Tayal. I am a Google Developer Expert for AI. I self-learned AI and have been teaching AI since May 2023. 

You can know more about me here – https://www.aimletc.com/about-me-nikhilesh-tayal/

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhileshtayal/

When I started teaching, I also wanted to create content. I had limited resources, so I started creating basic tutorial videos like these

When we started getting some traction, I wanted to go next level, and the first thing that came to my mind was our typical edtech lecture-style videos.

I did create a few videos

Personally, I never enjoyed watching such videos. It requires a lot of discipline and patience to complete.

At the same time, while creating those videos, I realised that I don’t enjoy creating these videos either.

A single person recording in a silent room alone, pretending to be energetic and enthusiastic while speaking to the camera.

This was super boring for me, to say the least.

I would have started hallucinating if I had continued recording such videos (pun intended)

Or you could say that was not my cup of tea.

This is where I decided that I want to make educational videos fun, both for the learners and for myself.

But I had no idea how…

Fun educational videos

In the 90s, there was an NCERT program that used to run on Doordarshan. There used to be a series in that where 2 kids and one teacher. 

The teacher’s name was Lal Bhujakkad Chacha. The kid used to take a science topic, learn about it and the teacher used to facilitate the learning.

As a kid, I used to like this series. There were characters, there was humour, there was a storyline, and that entertainment element kept learners like me interested.

I discussed making such videos with my friends. The good part was that they immediately recalled the program and the characters. 

Even after 20+ years, those things were there in their memory and they liked that program too.

Hence, this series became my reference point.

But writing a script for such a series is not easy for a non-writer like me. It requires the creativity of a professional script writer.

So, I approached a professional script writer. He spent almost a month and concluded that this format is problematic

According to him

The moment we go into scripted conversations, even if they are jokes, with the ultimate objective of teaching some concept in the end (which is AI in our case), it tends to become fake and concocted.

Edu-tain-ment content

He could be right, but somehow I was not convinced. So, I decided to write the script on my own. 

The initial idea I copied from the original series. There were 3 characters, one teacher and 2 learners. 

The teacher’s name is Saral, as he explains the AI concepts in simple language.

I wrote the first episode and started looking for people who could enact. I live in Udaipur, and I found it very difficult to find local actors. I searched for 1.5 months, but could not get the actors.

While this time, an idea of AI teaching AI occurred to me. I don’t remember the genesis of the idea, but I found it interesting.

And then I thought of having 1 learner instead of 2.

Based on these 2 thougts, I wrote the script again.

However, the problem of finding the actors was still not solved. So, after a month of disappointment, I decided to act in it myself.

This is the beauty of entrepreneurship: it makes you do things you never thought you would do.

We created the first video, and unexpectedly, it got a good response on LinkedIn

This gave me the confidence as an entrepreneur, as a teacher, as a script writer, as an actor and as a co-editor that we should make more of these videos.

In the next 3-4 months, I focused on creating the whole course on Agentic AI in 8 episodes. I posted them on LinkedIn and got a decent amount of traction.

Here are some of the feedback:

You can check out all the videos here – https://learn.tisdoms.com/courses/free-course-ai-agents-without-jargon-698dc1911ba37ecdb1ea631b

Level 2 – Edu-tain-ment content

As a next step, I had 2 options:

1. Create my entire course like this, or
2. Level up the game

In the initial set of videos, we added humour, analogies and real-world examples. The videos still looked like sketch videos. 

However, I want to go bold. My idea was 

• Can we make it like a web series?
• Can learners binge-watch educational videos as they do on Netflix? 

Thinking of something is easy.

Executing it is difficult. 

It needs resources and skills as well.

To be very honest, I did not think I could pull this off. So, I deliberately postponed it for a while.

But at some point in time, I had to take a call.

Creating the series

So, I again started looking for a script writer who can write a proper web series. Through a common friend, I contacted a professional script writer. 

He has written some books and a few movies. 

Well, as usual, the guy did not give me proper time but introduced me to one of his students.

The same story repeated with him. After initial calls, he went silent.

But the good thing that happened in this process of providing brief to them was that I started writing my thoughts.

And when they said this looks almost impossible, I wrote more just to provide them a reference that it is possible.

So, when these guys did not show interest, I started building on my brief myself and writing whatever came to my mind. 

And the web series started taking shape.

After working on it for 3 weeks, I wrote a webseries 

When we say webseries, it has a story, multiple characters, and every episode has a theme apart from the lessons.

It’s basically a corporate satire where we highlight traits like fake urgency, short term thinking from leadership, faking knowledge using Jargon and more

Mar 21, 2006 update: We have shot all the videos and are in the process of editing those. We will release them by April 30, 2006.

Edu-tain-tech platform

I see that many experts, when they talk about the next generation of edutech platforms, mainly talk about adding AI into the platform. 

How AI can make education personalised. How can it simplify learning and what will be the future of edtech platforms? 

AI and all is fine, but what we need at core is engaging content, but at the current state, technology alone can’t solve the core problem.

In edtech, the “ed” still matters more than the “tech”

And that’s the reason why what we are building is not just another edtech platform with AI-enabled features just for the sake of sounding next generation.

But we are in the process of building an edu-tain-tech platform 

Our idea is simple: we want to make education interesting and entertaining. We want learners to get excited about learning about education

Learners should find it fun and should binge-watch the content as they do on OTT platforms, even for learning a complex technology like AI. 

We have just started the journey and hopefully will make education fun for all the people in the world.

If you have any feedback/ suggestions, please feel free to write to me at nt(at)aimletc(dot)com. 

Thanks for reading. Happy learning!