‘Education is not a content business but a human one’: Nas Academy’s Nuseir Yassin

As of today, there are over 3,000 edutech companies in Asia, over two dozen of which are unicorns.

Many of these companies popped out or attracted attention only recently because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disruption that the pandemic caused to classroom/offline learning/teaching led new entrepreneurs to jump the edutech bandwagon and become a part of the remote learning revolution.

But the moot question is: are these companies really accomplishing their stated goals? If so, why are the dropout rates so ridiculously high?

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, remote courses have an astronomical dropout rate of about 96 per cent on average. The key reason is “lack of engagement”.

One of the reasons for this is the increased amount of distractions present in a virtual environment and the fact that most of the learning materials provided by these companies are already available online and can be accessed for free on sites like YouTube.

In addition to this, the attention span in individuals has been shrinking significantly at an extremely quick pace thanks to today’s fast-paced world. A study shows that Gen Z has an average attention span of 8 seconds!

Also Read: Edutech will be a hot commodity going forward: GREDU co-founder Rizky Anies

This is a big problem facing the education industry — and this is exactly what Nas Academy aims to address.

Founded by Nuseir Yassin, a video blogger with over 40 million followers across social media platforms, Nas Academy is an online platform that helps people learn from their favorite creators. Since its launch in February this year, the edutech startup claims to have hosted 250 batches (with each batch comprising an average of 80 students) on subjects ranging from storytelling and ideating a business idea, to confidence building.

The company is on a mission to revolutionise not just how learners learn but also how teachers teach.

Mastering engagement

One of the primary goals of Nas Academy is to keep students engaged. It does this by creating a community where students can make new friends and learn at the same time.

“Popular learning platforms like Unacademy, Byju’s, and Masterclass create education that is content- and video-based. But we realise that education is not just a content business but a human business,” Yassin said in an interview with e27.

“Nas means humans. Humans love ‘community’ so we’re all about community,” he said. “When they are with their classmates, students are much less likely to drop out. So for every 100 students who join Nas Academy, we put them in a group together. This way, they not only learn but also see each other, talk about what they’ve learned, and engage among themselves.”

Yassin claimed that this practice has enabled Nas to achieve a 4x higher completion rate than other learning platforms.

But that’s not enough.

Concentrating for a long time is still difficult for many students which is why Nas provides its teachers with tools like quirky music, practical workshops, free merchandise, and memes to connect and engage with students. “Universities don’t have the same energy in their classes as we do. Every class at Nas has music. We build tools to enable creators to teach in fun and engaging ways,” he explained.

By incorporating fun elements throughout the learning process, Nas Academy has a reputation for keeping its students hooked.

Disrupting boring professors

As a popular video blogger himself, Yassin strongly believes that creators have more potential to become better teachers, simply because they are masters in audience engagement.

Also Read: Nas Academy raises US$11M to help creators make a sustainable living

“I’ve been to Harvard and seen what world-class education looks like. And honestly, being part of it is not that impressive. Even in the middle of Harvard, there are five professors from who everybody wants to learn and there are 500 others who are not that popular. And that’s when we realised that the power of education lies in the individual and not the institution,” he went on.

Unlike other platforms that give teachers control over just the monetary aspects of teaching, Nas gives its teachers full authority over their audience and distribution and helps them build their own curriculum from scratch. Moving forward, control is far more important for creators, Yassin believes.

As of now, Nas follows a strict “invite-only” policy for teachers, and those who have signed up can earn 75 per cent of the revenues generated, while the academy keeps only 25 per cent.

Building the “Nas” Culture

It’s not hard to imagine how the workplace of Nas would be like, and Yassin confirms it calling an extremely fun environment to be in.

He further tells his employees to never work for a company with “daily” in its last name (referring to the name of his own company ‘Nas Daily’) because if they work for such companies, they need to work hard. Working extremely hard every day is also part of the Nas culture, Yassin added.

With an ambition to become the biggest learning platform, Nas is fast scaling the team with an aim to add 1,000 people to its roster over the next five years across different roles.

“Are you excited about building a culture where people can work, live and make money from the most remote area in the world? That’s the kind of future we want to build and onboard people who believe in the same thing. We are looking for people who are looking to put life second and mission first,” he said.

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Image Credit: Nas Daily

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