Like hundreds of thousands of others throughout the world Covid-19 lockdowns, Emmanuel Kasigazi, an entrepreneur from Uganda, turned to YouTube to go the time. However he wasn’t following an influencer or watching music movies. A lifelong learner, Kasigazi was scouring the video-sharing platform for instructional sources. Since 2013, when he obtained his first smartphone, Kasigazi has been charting his personal studying journey by YouTube, educating himself on topics as numerous as psychology and synthetic intelligence. And it was whereas trying to find the reply to an AI-related query that Kasigazi first found MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW).
“The search outcomes confirmed MIT lectures, and I assumed, ‘Which MIT is that this?’” remembers Kasigazi, who admits he was initially skeptical as he opened the OCW YouTube channel. To his amazement, he discovered a whole bunch of programs there — not solely clips, however full lectures that he may observe alongside the scholars in MIT school rooms. He looked for extra info on OCW and tried the channel on completely different browsers to triple-check its credibility. “Right here they have been, all these programs by among the finest — if not the perfect — colleges in tech on this planet, and so they have been free. For a very long time I couldn’t consider it. I informed everybody I knew,” he remembers.
For Kasigazi, the channel turned a gateway to different open schooling sources, together with the OpenCourseWare web site and MITx programs, each a part of MIT Open Studying. “I all the time had the questions — I grew up on science cartoons like ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’ and ‘Pinky and the Mind’ — so I’d go on YouTube to attempt to discover solutions to those questions, and I discovered this complete different world,” he says.
OCW launched its YouTube channel in 2008, and this August handed 4 million subscribers. Whereas introductory pc science, math, and physics are the most-visited programs on the OCW web site, the most well-liked YouTube movies replicate a extra numerous vary of pursuits, together with a lecture about piloting a fighter jet plane, an introduction to the human mind, and an introduction to monetary phrases and ideas.
By way of this in depth assortment, Kasigazi explains that he’s been capable of discover “the issues I like,” whereas additionally finding out cloud computing, information science, and AI — fields that he plans to pursue in graduate research. He says, “That is what OpenCourseWare has enabled me to do: I get the prospect to not solely watch the long run occur, however I can truly be part of it and create it.”
Understanding humanity by the liberal arts
When Kasigazi was younger, a beloved aunt acknowledged his pure curiosity and steered him towards the perfect colleges. “I owe her all the pieces,” he says, “all the pieces I’m is due to her.” Due to his wonderful grades he obtained an instructional scholarship from the Ugandan authorities to attend Makerere College, one of many prime universities in sub-Saharan Africa, the place he earned a level in info methods. Having pursued IT for its sensible functions, Kasigazi admits that he was initially extra within the science and idea behind computer systems than “the coding bits of it.”
“I like the idea of it — how we are attempting to make these machines,” he says, explaining that he’s lengthy been drawn to the social sciences and humanities, notably psychology and philosophy.
“I’m excited by how we work as human beings, as a result of all the pieces we do is for, with, and round human beings,” says Kasigazi, who considers psychology to be foundational to nearly each subject. “No matter it’s you’re instructing these youngsters, they’re going to be coping with individuals. So first train them what individuals suppose, how they act — that was my drive to like psychology.”
Kasigazi has additionally turned to OCW to brush up on his coding abilities, watching 6.0001 (Introduction to Pc Science and Programming Utilizing Python) lectures with Professor Ana Bell and reviewing the instructor-paced model with Professor Eric Grimson now on MITx. “I’m proud to say MIT OCW has made me fall in love with coding … it is smart prefer it by no means has earlier than,” he says.
Nurturing a worldview
In 2014 Kasigazi moved to South Sudan, which had solely just lately emerged from a civil warfare as an impartial nation. Recent out of college, he was there to show pc abilities and graphic design — a few of his college students included members of the brand new nation’s authorities — however his time in South Sudan rapidly turned a studying expertise for him, too. “Whenever you develop up in your group, you might have this bubble. All of us expertise it — it’s a human factor,” he displays. “For the primary time, I noticed that all the pieces I knew shouldn’t be a given. Every part I grew up realizing shouldn’t be common.”
Along with his worldview newly broadened, he started to nurture his curiosity in psychology, philosophy, and the sciences, watching crash programs, explainer movies, and different content material on the topic. “It’s leisure, to me, on the identical time that it’s a ardour,” he says. At present Kasigazi runs his personal firm, which he began in 2012 with pals and resumed when he returned to Uganda seven years in the past.
Since coming throughout the OCW YouTube channel, Kasigazi has labored by all the freely accessible MIT psychology programs. Professor John Gabrieli’s 9.00SC (Introduction to Psychology) have notably resonated with him, even prompting him to succeed in out to Gabrieli. “As a lot as I’d been getting some information on psychology through the years on-line, it wasn’t as deep and as fascinating or fascinating as your lessons have been,” he wrote. “Out of your instructing type, to the reasons, to the subjects, to the way you make individuals perceive a subject, to the experiments talked about and referenced, to the way you strategy questions and later make one suppose deeper about them.”
“The message from Emmanuel is deeply touching in regards to the pleasure of studying,” says Gabrieli. “I’m so grateful to OCW for making this course on psychology open to the world, and to Emmanuel for therefore delightfully sharing what this course meant to him.”
New programs are added frequently to each the OCW web site and YouTube channel. Kasigazi, who’s at the moment having fun with Professor Nancy Kanwisher’s 9.13 (Introduction to the Human Mind), appears to be like ahead to discovering what new worlds of data they’ll open.
