Like hundreds of thousands of others through the international 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 assets. Since 2013, when he bought his first smartphone, Kasigazi has been charting his personal studying journey via 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 believed, ‘Which MIT is that this?’” recollects 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 comply with alongside the scholars in MIT lecture rooms. He looked for extra data on OCW and tried the channel on completely different browsers to triple-check its credibility. “Right here they had been, all these programs by among the best — if not the very best — colleges in tech on this planet, and so they had been free. For a very long time I couldn’t consider it. I advised everybody I knew,” he remembers.
For Kasigazi, the channel grew to become a gateway to different open training assets, together with the OpenCourseWare web site and MITx programs, each a part of MIT Open Studying. “I at all times had the questions — I grew up on science cartoons like ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’ and ‘Pinky and the Mind’ — so I might go on YouTube to attempt to discover solutions to those questions, and I discovered this entire different world,” he says.
OCW launched its YouTube channel in 2008, and this August handed 4 million subscribers. Whereas introductory laptop 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 this intensive assortment, Kasigazi explains that he’s been in a position to discover “the issues I really like,” whereas additionally learning cloud computing, knowledge 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 possibility to not solely watch the longer term occur, however I can truly be part of it and create it.” Â
Understanding humanity via the liberal arts
When Kasigazi was younger, a beloved aunt acknowledged his pure curiosity and steered him towards the very best colleges. “I owe her all the pieces,” he says, “all the pieces I’m is due to her.” Because of his glorious grades he acquired an instructional scholarship from the Ugandan authorities to attend Makerere College, one of many high universities in sub-Saharan Africa, the place he earned a level in data methods. Having pursued IT for its sensible purposes, Kasigazi admits that he was initially extra within the science and principle behind computer systems than “the coding bits of it.”
“I really 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 fascinated 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 virtually each discipline. “No matter it’s you’re educating these youngsters, they’re going to be coping with individuals. So first train them what individuals assume, how they act — that was my drive to like psychology.”
Kasigazi has additionally turned to OCW to brush up on his coding expertise, 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 sensible prefer it by no means has earlier than,” he says.
Nurturing a worldview
In 2014 Kasigazi moved to South Sudan, which had solely lately emerged from a civil conflict as an impartial nation. Contemporary out of college, he was there to show laptop expertise 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 grew to become a studying expertise for him, too. “While you develop up in your neighborhood, you may 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. The whole lot I grew up realizing shouldn’t be common.”
Together 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 similar time that it’s a ardour,” he says. At present Kasigazi runs his personal firm, which he began in 2012 with associates and resumed when he returned to Uganda seven years in the past.
Since coming throughout the OCW YouTube channel, Kasigazi has labored via all the freely obtainable MIT psychology programs. Professor John Gabrieli’s 9.00SC (Introduction to Psychology) have notably resonated with him, even prompting him to achieve 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 attention-grabbing or charming as your lessons had been,” he wrote. “Out of your educating model, to the reasons, to the matters, 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 assume deeper about them.”
“The message from Emmanuel is deeply touching concerning 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 often to each the OCW web site and YouTube channel. Kasigazi, who’s at present having fun with Professor Nancy Kanwisher’s 9.13 (Introduction to the Human Mind), seems ahead to discovering what new worlds of data they’ll open.
