Let's see where this goes

Years ago I took an online programming course, mostly to see what the fuss was about. I was a teacher with a computer science degree, so the content was familiar. What stopped me was the interface. The instructors were writing on screen as they talked, and I recognised the hardware.

“I realized that they were teaching literally with the same Wacom tablet that designers use, and I’m like, if they can do this, I gotta figure out a solution to do this for myself.”

So I built the crudest version I could. A microphone wired into an iPad and the classroom speaker. Screen recording on. I taught my normal class, live, the way I always had, and the rig captured it. Then I gave the recording to my students and said the sentence that has quietly governed everything since: “Let’s see where this goes.”

Here is what I believed before that experiment: teaching happens in a room, at a time, once. If you were absent, you missed it. If you were present but tired, you missed it. If you zoned out for ninety seconds while your brain did what brains do, you missed the step that made the next ten minutes make sense, and the classroom offered you no way back.

We rarely say this out loud, but the traditional lesson punishes ordinary human attention. It demands that thirty different people be maximally receptive at the same fixed hour, and it grades them on a performance that partly measures whether they were. A student who loses the thread in a live class has two options: interrupt the room and be judged for it, or stay quiet and fall behind. Most choose quiet.

A recording removes the punishment. I explain it to parents with audiobooks: for a moment you zone out, and you just skip back fifteen seconds. You don’t lose the story. Nobody calls that cheating. Nobody thinks less of a reader for rewinding. Yet we built an entire schooling model on the assumption that explanation should be unrepeatable.

My standard became a sentence I still stand by: my students should be able to watch me whenever they are in the mood. Not whenever the timetable decrees. Whenever the mood, the energy, and the need line up, because that is when learning actually happens.

The experiment never really ended. It outgrew the iPad, outgrew the classroom, and eventually became a platform that has reached tens of thousands of free learners across 70+ countries. But the operating logic is unchanged from that first recording. Capture the explanation once, properly. Let the student replay the part they missed. Spend the live hours on the things a recording cannot do: the questions, the repair, the relationship.

I did not know any of that on the day I wired a microphone into an iPad. I only knew that designers’ tablets were being used to teach programming to anyone with an internet connection, and that my own teaching was locked inside a room.

Let’s see where this goes. It went further than the room. It usually does.