I like to think of learning as a series of journeys. Those journeys have starting points which could be an interest “I love penguins!”, inspiration “I have an idea for a rocketship”, goal “I want to be a doctor” or challenge “my math skill is holding me back”. The journeys needn’t have fixed end points and some legs may be slow meandering explorations, others straight-line sprints. An ideal…
My father, Manusurali Hassanali Nathoo died in 2015 from Parkinsons. He was my hero. He was gentle, softly spoken but strong in his convictions and reaction to life's hardships. He was a great listener and a man of few words. It turns out I'm a lot more like my Mum! He was adventurous. He was Indian by origin but born and grew up in Kenya. He moved to England to get his PhD in Physics and then…
I was recently interviewed about my career and journey to creating Outschool for the alumni magazine of St. John's College, Cambridge. This led to a lot of fond reminiscing and hopes for the future of learning. What did you study at St John’s and w hat are your abiding memories of the college and your time here? I graduated in 2002 with a MEng in Electrical and Information Sciences. I actually…
Homeschooling is interesting because, if some new approach is going to disrupt the current education system and change it radically for the better, it seems likely it would come from outside the system. By necessity, parents who homeschool must try new approaches in order to find something that works for their child. With 1.77M homeschooled students in the US - 3.4% of the school-aged population -…
How do you decide what features you should build next? A lot of startup and product management advice says that you should decide this by being obsessively focused on listening to your customers’ needs. But at the same time you shouldn’t listen to what they say literally. So how do you interpret what they say? Here is a mental model I use for classifying features that helps me with that…