Top Teachers in YouTube in India: While Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the world, some people know the art to utilise the best even in the worst situations. When schools and colleges switched to online teaching mode, some teachers decided to take to social media platforms such as YouTube to explain the curriculum in an interesting manner. While many have discontinued uploading videos, some have found their true calling. Indianexpress.com reached out to a few creators who made a full-time career out of teaching on YouTube. 'Pandemic bolstered my teaching dreams': Sandeep Manocha Inspired by the Khan Academy, Sandeep Manocha started his YouTube channel a few months before the Covid-19 outbreak. However, it was the pandemic that brought million of views to his channel. Born and brought up in Kolkata, Manocha completed his schooling in the same city and graduated with an electrical engineering degree from BITS Pilani. For his master's though, he went to the University of Maryland, following which he joined Microsoft's speech recognition team. While everything went well for seven years, a sudden decline in his father's health brought him back to India, however, he kept working for Microsoft. All this while, though, the dream of starting something of his own was still in the back of his mind. "My mother has a PhD in mathematics and in childhood, I used to joke that I would start teaching with her. I even tried my hand at teaching at the University of Maryland," he said. With this in mind, Manocha gave up his IT job and started teaching through offline classes. However, a few months before the pandemic, he decided to give up the offline classes and instead try his hand at YouTube tutoring. As the pandemic hit and everything turned online, Sandeep started making videos on YouTube and got positive feedback, so he took the decision to stop physical classes. Sandeep concentrates more on teaching science and computer-related subjects. "My goal was to educate about science and math in a practical way. For example, I'm driving the car and teaching them speed velocity, and showing them Archimedes principle experiments," he explained. Sandeep's mother still helps him make content related to Mathematics. Talking about how frequent his videos are, the 41-year-old explained that he does not upload a video daily as his content is a "little complex and the editing takes time due to animation etc." During Covid, Sandeep also took some live classes from home for free. Through this, he now has a mobile app and a website, on which he features some paid content, while the YouTube content remains free of cost. When asked if he thinks YouTube classes or online teaching can replace offline classes completely, Sandeep quickly dismissed it by saying offline classes cannot be replaced as human interaction is critical, "but online teaching is a good source of gaining information, especially at odd hours when you cannot reach out to your peers or teachers. This is your virtual friend who will always help you," he concluded. Navin Reddy: 'Feels motivated when subscribers say they got job because of me' Navin Reddy, a 34-year-old, used to work as a software developer and corporate trainer earlier. While he first released a YouTube channel in 2011 to educate his juniors on Java technology and Graphics in C, it was much later that he adopted YouTube as his platform to teach. Becoming a teacher was not Reddy's first choice, but "as a corporate trainer conducting offline sessions, which I love to do, I realised that using YouTube I can teach everyone who wants to learn coding," he said. "In fact, in one of the sessions, I was asked to teach the topics from the predefined curriculum only, and then I thought, 'Can't I talk about things that are really important but not part of the curriculum?' Or what if someone is asking questions that are so-called out of the syllabus? The answer to this is YouTube. Navin got inspired by YouTube's old tagline, "Broadcast yourself", and decided to start teaching on the digital platform. When he started, he used to record videos on his smartphone with his earphones acting as a microphone. His partner helped him in editing videos. However, as times progressed and his subscribers increased to 1 million, then 2, and even to 250 million view count, Navin hired a team to edit and manage the channel. "In the initial days, the setup for video recording was challenging. Camera, mic, editing software, good computer for editing in terms of availability and cost. So, I started recording videos with my mobile phone and earphones for the mic. One of the biggest challenges for me was standing in front of the camera. I felt a little conscious at the beginning of my journey," Navin reminisced. Navin teaches different technologies such as Java, Python, JavaScript, Web Frameworks (Spring, Django), Blockchain, Mobile Development, Databases, etc, and his target audience is a diverse range of engineering graduates, self-taught programmers, and corporate employees who want to upskill. While being a teacher online is tough, what motivates Navin every day is the love he receives in the comment box. "For me, the biggest motivation to put so many videos is the comments where most of the subscribers say that they got a job or learned a specific technology because of my videos. The efforts, time, energy and resources we put into making those video is surely worth it," he adds smiling. While he is an online teachers, Navin strongly believes that online education will not completely replace offline classes. "Offline classes have their merits. But online education is convenient for everyone to learn from anyone from anywhere in the world, especially when the self-paced courses are highly in-demand," he adds. Roshni Mukherjee: 'Simple experiments can help students understand better' Roshni had been passionate about the teaching profession since her school days, and used to explain small concepts or portions of the syllabus to her peers during group studies, which were highly praised by them. After completing her post graduation, Roshni got placed in an IT firm where she worked as a quality analyst. "Deep down inside, I still wanted to reach out to the masses so that I could teach more people," she said. In 2011, I started surfing social media platform such as YouTube for entertainment purposes. I enjoyed watching tutorials of creating videos on these digital platforms. "Then, I started using the platform to create videos related to several things, but the views were not that great because the platform was not as famous back then as it is now," she recalled. However, Roshni kept thinking of more ideas and the comments section kept encouraging her. She struggled with balancing her family and content creation time for a few years which resulted in a break. Just before the pandemic, Roshni re-branded her channel, little did she know that a wave of online teachers was about to hit the world due to the Covid-19. "My domestic helper children were living in the village, and whenever she visited them, she always complained how her kids are not able to clear exams. She was annoyed with the teachers absence, which led to students not being able to learn and progress. This motivated me to generate free education content for such children, and also others who need a little more help," she said while talking about her motivation to start three new channels during the pandemic. While this was the reason to start different channels, the comments section was what motivated Roshni to keep generating content every week. "There are several comments in which students tell me that they were able to understand a topic a little quicker than they did in class. Comments like these act as a source of motivation for me," Roshni said. The channel, which was earlier called ExamFear Education, currently has 2.68 million subscribers and over 560,364,849 views. Roshni tries to keep her content curriculum based (CBSE or CISCE), and has launched separate channels for different age groups now. As the fee for JEE and NEET coaching centres is soaring high, Roshni is aiming to roll out more free content for students who are preparing for these entrance exams. Her approach is to stay as practical as she can while teaching difficult concepts/ topics. "I've performed simple experiments with things at home, which help students to understand better. Now we create many videos where we do a lot of animations to help them understand topics," she explained. What started as a single-man army has now transformed into a team of 20 people and over 2.68 million subscribers. Roshni also has a website and a mobile app now.
