By Jorge
Manuel Zelaya Fajardo
www.jorgemanuelzelaya.com
June 11, 2019
The first time I spoke with Fernando Herrera, he seemed to me like a
simple, somewhat introverted man, with sincere desires to share what he knows.
I sat with him at a modest coffee shop in a busy shopping mall in Tegucigalpa,
Honduras on a Wednesday afternoon. When
I finished the meeting with him, I kept thinking the same thing as at the
beginning of our meeting; but now I had certain adjectives to add to describe
Fernando. Adjectives to describe the impressive numbers achieved
by this young man born in Guápiles, Limón province, in the Caribbean of the Republic of Costa Rica, 33 years ago.
I never imagined I was talking to the instructor with most registered
students (137,922 students in 22 courses) in Spanish (Spain
and Latin America included) in UDEMY (an online learning platform, with its
first course was launched in 2010). I really needed some time to digest the
amount of 137,922 students (read as individual, not repeated, users).
Those numbers were, for me, somewhat superlative in dimension, since my
cognitive ability, having given my first class (of English as a second
language in a non-curricular university format) at age 18 and my first
master's class at 31, I could not understand how, in so little time (he
released his first course in UDEMY in 2015), this young man had had (and
has) many more students than me. In order to understand these numbers
a bit, we must understand the story, the business model and the disruptive
strategy behind UDEMY.
UDEMY ("The Academy of you" in English or "Tu
Academia" in Spanish) is born from the original idea of Erin Bali,
who, being in his native-born Turkey, had the vision that, on the internet,
people should be able to learn anything, being anywhere in the world at any
time. "The best teachers in the world might be in the places you least
imagine doing other things," says Bali, defending a business model
where the teacher, the learning platform and the student relate to each other
very differently to how traditional education has done it for many decades (not
only in the structure of costs, asynchrony of interaction with the teacher-student-content, and non-recognition
of university credits for the given courses). UDEMY today has 30 million
students, more than 100,000 courses offered by a bit more than 42,000
instructors, in more than 50 languages.
Once I understood UDEMY's business model, I understood Fernando Herrera
much better. The situation could not be more particular: a professor of higher
education like me was about to receive a class from a UDEMY professor; however,
the class would not be from Angular, Flutter, Ionic or Node (subjects he
masters in several of his 22 listed courses). He would teach me how to
teach differently. To challenge my paradigms and embrace change with a
focus on the end user/client/student.
Fernando Herrera has found in UDEMY a place where he combines his
passion for developing software applications and being a teacher. His technical
expertise and his didactic talent. His professional experience with something
he himself says he can do every day of his life.
Fernando Herrera shares, with simplicity and propriety, what he has
needed to get where he is. "You don’t need an expensive camera team or a sophisticated study; but what I do recommend is a good
microphone.” —Fernando pointed out to me as he finished his cup of coffee
in our meeting. For Fernando, the secret lies in teaching how he would have
liked to learn. He shares his story with a naturality that could make us
believe that it was easy, when he himself says he was not sure that anyone in the
world would enroll in his course. "When the first student wrote to me
saying that the course he had taken with me was the best one until that moment,
I told myself ‘...well I must be doing something right’." —he
confessed to me with some relief, at the same time that he always emphasized
the fact that he who is afraid of failure in this business has already failed.
In 2018, UDEMY invited Fernando to San Francisco, California, to share
his experiences with the best teachers of the platform worldwide, since, for
the quality of his courses, he had become one of the instructors that had
helped the most with the growth of UDEMY.
Fernando Herrera has another virtue: he is hungry. He
is hungry to continue teaching students through his online courses. He
is hungry to share people who want to teach like him, but who don’t know
how to do it. He is hungry to continue changing people's lives through
education and learning. He is hungry to continue doing it for the rest
of his life, as he says it himself.
I have always thought that learning and teaching are variables of the
same equation; but after meeting Fernando, watching his 13-thousand-follower and
345-video-YouTube channel, I’ve started to think that we all have the
responsibility to share what we know to give the value of "executable
file (without virus)" to knowledge itself.
I am proud that Fernando Herrera is my teacher. I'm learning a lot. I hope to learn more.
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