I still didn't know why they hired me I had no previous experience in the field and I had no idea how to do this what they wanted me to do it didn't help that I was woefully unprepared when I showed up the first day I was so nervous that I 10 minutes before I'd thrown up into a duck pond close by but now here I was standing in front of 30 young faces about to teach my very first class this was in Vancouver in the spring of 2006 and I was terrified but I didn't know
it at the time I had just stumbled across my passion and uh as I was standing in front of these students rumbling through my unprepared lesson I had one thing going for me prior to the class I'd memorized a class list I thought that's what teachers do and as I started addressing the students by their names Something Beautiful started happen interactions between me the students them and themselves and and I realized in that moment teaching has less to do with the content I deliver but everything with the interactions I create with my students now it
is one thing to connect to 30 or 60 students sitting in a classroom right in front of you right you can look at them and make connections but a completely different thing to do this online in a virtual learning environment with people all across the world now how do we do that how do we add personality and that's so important human touch to a virtual environment these are the kinds of questions my team and I ask ourselves as we are building Jamie let me introduce you to our project jamy is a virtual incubator for passionate
entrepreneurs that want to start companies companies that solve comp complex and meaningful problems you know that humano human interaction becomes even more important in an online learning environment where technology has a tendency to take Center Stage often at the cost of the individual learner we believe that education that is built on a one size fits all doesn't work never has but less so today the problems we are faced today cannot be solved using the same methods that we used in the past over decades they require education to develop individuals that are passionate that are creative
like our students here and Innovative and can do stuff Jammy is by Design fully learner Centric not content or techn ology Centric the human stands in the middle it's a virtual place where entrepreneurs can come together share their ideas learn from one another compete in competitions and most importantly receive mentorship local and international mentorship now this changes the role of the teacher to one of mentor and perhaps partner in learning Jami by the way means community in Swahili a language spoken in Kenya one of our first International Partners we think quite proudly that Jami could
be the next iteration of online education we call it massive individualized there you go or mile know since that terrible class in the spring of 2006 I have taught hundreds of workshops and classes not just design leadership all kinds of classes there's a couple of things that I have learned by being in a classroom and interacting with my students that I would like to share with you today there they are just graduated last summer so number one what's the most important thing relationships first before we can embark on teaching anything we need to build a
relationship create contact with our students I truly believe that at the core of everything we do everything we do is the human that interconnectedness of people so to speak the most compelling classrooms are the ones where learning has a deeper purpose right where where something important is taking place now we can think of our students as this cohesive group of people but no they're all individuals and they want to be seen as such none of you are alike there is no average student doesn't exist we're all different now in order to build these courses and
deliver learning experiences we need to know where our students come from what they struggle with what they're passionate about what they're up to so about a year ago pretty much a year ago on jamy we were working with a group of Kenyans and for some reason they stopped responding to our messages and user engagement on the platform was terribly low now you can understand this is a bit of a problem for a platform that Prides itself to build relationships and connect people to one another so we were a bit desperate so on a whim we
posted a photograph of the parking lot outside of our office and it happened to be one of those typical watero winter days February you know what I meanus 30 windchill snow blowing sideways marvels of nature this photo elicited immediate feedback students started sending us things they shared photographs of their views in Kenya as they were working on their startups lush green Landscapes kids running through the streets in shorts and in one instance people dancing in the street they shared by the end of the of the competition they had shared with us all kinds of important
things not just photographs of things they saw also important things to them for example when their campus was on lockdown and they were all hiding under the desk because of a terrorist threat this informed our design decision of using photographs as backgrounds in our user interface from all the places that our users come from kind of a visual way of connecting them these are photos from Canada Kenya Egypt and come spring 2017 Scotland all our partners number two learning needs a purpose as you have students in the room you know we can't force you to
learn anything as a teacher teach I can't force you however I can create the learning environment that is conducive to learning the most compelling classrooms have purpose a bigger meaning right and they Foster learning with social interactions that allows people to talk to each other talk to me talk to themselves on jamy WE challenge our startup teams to tackle complex problems for example example um agricultural issues in subsaharan Africa or infrastructure problems in Egypt big big complex difficult problems we want them to tackle these things so this could be a team in Kenya building a
startup that addresses water scarcity in their Village or a twers team in Cairo building a conduit between government service providers and the disgruntled citizenry jamming is designed with the purpose problem centered learning at the center and students work around that number three my last Point authenticity is key you know that you can't fake that you care about something or somebody you have to love what you teach now let me repeat this this is really important for the teachers here you have to love what you teach if you don't your your audience your students will see
straight through that you can't Inspire them with your topics if you don't love the topic you teach well force yourself to fall in love dim the lights put Rose p ped stare light a candle I don't know like an actor has to do who has to play a difficult character and has to dig deep to find that beauty inside that person to represent it authentically now we are virtually connected to each other like never before hashtag htag right now this is a huge opportunity this is this is how walls come down how good things could
happen we can share our voices support each other and Tackle those daunting problems that we're currently faced with all around the world everywhere now if you haven't figured this out by now I absolutely love teaching it's where I come alive it's it's what I would do for free well good thing I didn't say this in public but uh I don't have to throw up before my classes anymore and being in the classroom for the last 10 years interacting with my students I have learned a ton everybody has something to offer teaching and mentorship there are
multi-directional processes now my students know this I always talk about love and care in my classes they make fun of me sometimes but I mean this love for the topic love for our craft for the problems we're tackling in a class but also love for how we treat each other as student and teacher teacher and student now you might think this is a bit inappropriate to talk about love in an educational setting I say it's the opposite because you see care and love and building these relationships with each other that's what it's all about that's
our most powerful most important tool in our teaching and learning and human toolkit thank you [Applause]
