Lotfullah Andishmand felt the need for a platform where Afghan learners could access online educational materials in their own language, so he’s creating one.
Our guest for this episode, Lotfullah Andishmand, grew up in a village in rural Afghanistan where there was no internet access or electric lights. (He describes having had to navigate by moonlight to get to his uncle’s house for tutoring in chemistry.) In search of educational opportunity, he eventually moved to Kabul, where he discovered MIT OpenCourseWare’s lecture videos while studying electrical engineering at the university. Even there, though, the internet infrastructure was shaky enough that Lotfullah often resorted to downloading the course materials so he could study them at leisure when broadband wasn’t available. He now resides in India and recently graduated from the MIT Emerging Talent certificate program in Computer and Data Science, specifically designed for displaced communities worldwide. As he continues his educational journey in data science and artificial intelligence, he remains deeply mindful of the challenges he encountered as a student in his home country. Recognizing that most of the available online educational resources are in English, a language few Afghans are fluent in, Lotfullah has used his computer skills to create an online learning platform offering educational materials in Persian. Someday, he hopes the platform will expand to include full online courses with direct interaction between instructors and students.
The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut and hosted by Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen.
Relevant Resources:
MIT MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science
6.0001 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python on MIT OpenCourseWare
Hooshmand Lab online learning website (in Persian)
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Share Your Open Learning Story
To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: The main question is, how can I help my people? When I came to India, I saw this potential of, for example, how technology is affecting people's life here, from medical schools, from universities. Even if you go to a small shop, there is integrated of technology. And that was my main motive to get into computer science. And from that point onwards, I was thinking, I have learned all this stuff for free. Now, how can I give it back to my community?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Welcome to Open Learners--
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: --a podcast that tells the stories of learners all over the world, who use MIT's OpenCourseWare.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I'm Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi, an open learner myself from Kampala, Uganda in East Africa.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: And I'm Michael Jordan Pilgreen, an open learner from Memphis, Tennessee. Hey, Emmanuel, how are you doing?
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I'm good, Michael. I'm good, excited, excited, excited.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: As we just heard in the clip at the top of the episode, today's learner is all about using what he learned from OCW to give back to his community. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about him?
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Yeah, sure. Today's guest is Lotfullah Andishmand. He's originally from Afghanistan, and he's currently living in India. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical and electronics engineering and has completed a number of courses in the computer science and computational thinking field. He is currently working on his MIT MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science with the support of Emerging Talent. After completing his MicroMasters in December, Lotfullah plans to continue studying artificial intelligence at a doctoral level.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: And as we've already mentioned, one of Lotfullah's motivations for studying computer science and technology is so that he can create products and applications for people in his home country of Afghanistan. He is particularly interested in wanting to create Open Learning resources that are taught in the languages people in Afghanistan actually speak. That way, everyone can benefit from Open Learning the way he did.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: And he's made that hope a reality. Earlier this year, Lotfullah helped launch Hooshmand Lab, an online learning application that provides online learning programming classes taught in Persian. And to top it all off, Lotfullah engineers the software himself, which is quite impressive.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Yeah, it's really cool. And it took a lot for him to get to the place where he is launching his own app. In our interview, he tells us about how he used to use the moonlight to guide him through his small Afghani village to learn chemistry from his uncle before dawn. And he's really never stopped learning ever since.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I'm excited for our audience to hear more about Lotfullah's curiosity and generosity. Here is our conversation with Lotfullah Andishmand from Afghanistan.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Hello, everyone. My name is Lotfullah, and my last name is Andishmand. I'm from Afghanistan, currently residing in India. And here I'm pursuing my education. And my main focus and my main area of education is computer science and artificial intelligence.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: So usually we like to ask people, how was your life before finding Open Learning? What were you doing? Were you working? Were you in school? Maybe give us a brief background on that.
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: When I was in Afghanistan, I used to live in a village, a place where there were plenty of natural resources rivers, the mountains, and the clean air, a peaceful place to live, where the beautiful echoes of birds added more to its richness. Everything was in harmony with the nature. But there was an issue. We did not have access to the internet. And there was very little electricity. My father always used to say to me that we did not have this opportunity as you have now. Please don't waste it.
By the meantime, when I was living in my village, I had an uncle who was very good in chemistry. In fact, basically, he was the best in the subject. During the day, as he was busy with his own work, I was not able to reach him and ask him for help. But during night, I used to go to his house and ask him to help me in my studies, especially in chemistry, basically, because we did not have that much of electricity, and I used to rely on the moonlight to navigate to his home. Sometimes when there was no moonlight, I had to take the help of walls by touching those walls and go to his home.
And on the other hand, for example, we had a religious scholar, which he was far away from our own village. He used to teach in that village for one hour about Arabic and some information about our religion. And I had to wake up before the dawn of the day, and I have to be there before everyone else, because his main responsibility was to teach to those people, not for me. But I had to be the first one to reach there and take my lessons and come back to my home.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Just a quick question-- so, how did you go from your village to Kabul? How did you get into the traditional education? And what is the traditional education in Afghanistan?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: From first grade till seventh grade, I used to study in my village. So we are having schools, and then up to 12th grade, we will be studying in schools. And after that, we will be having an exam to go to universities if you pass that exam. And then when I was in seventh and eighth grade, that amount of resources were not sufficient for me. And my father used to push me to go more and to learn more. And through him I got those connections, for example, that religious scholar. And then my uncle was obviously-- he was my relative. So he was there to offer and help me.
And then after seventh and eighth grade, because my uncle told me, you have to move to Kabul because there we had, for example, electricity. Internet was there. Then we have had access to better education. Then for four or five years, I used to study in Kabul.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: So when did you first encounter OCW? Was it in any of those grades, or was it when you are heading towards university? At what point in that educational journey?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: For the first time, I had to study too hard to get into university. And then when I passed that exam, I went to the university, and basically the curriculums were mostly similar to the US because the Kabul University was mainly supported by US universities and Japanese universities, and we had some same subjects. And then there we had one subject, physics one. The curriculum was almost the same as what we used to teach in the USA.
And then one day my friend brought one lecture series and he showed me that, have you seen this? And then we started looking for around 30 minutes into that lecture series. And then I asked him, from where you got this, and do you have all of these lecture series? And he said, yes. And then I asked him, please, can you transfer all these lecture series to my flashcard? And then I got those lecture series.
And for around two months, three months, I was watching them. And really, I was stunned by the amount of passion, the easiness of understanding those lectures. That was the first moment, which I came to know about MIT OCW. That was through a YouTube channel, you can say. And then there was not that much of high speed internet in Afghanistan. We had this kind of internet collapse, where there is a high speed internet, and then if we pay for some amount, then in exchange, we will get, for example, for one hour or 30 minutes of high speed internet.
And then, for example, whenever I was curious to know about something or had difficulty in my studies, I used to go there and search. The first time I used to go through MIT OCW website. And then I was looking whether this course is available or whether something related to my question or my subject is available in the MIT OCW. And if something was there, then I used to download PDFs, I used to download videos, and come back to home and watch all those lectures and read all those materials.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Oh, wow. So you discovered it through YouTube first.
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: Yeah.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Me too. Me too. I discovered it through YouTube. Then later I found out there are all these other websites and so many Open Learning resources. That's a very inspiring journey. I wanted to ask something about the language in which the traditional education back home was taught in. You said, yes, they had a lot of American influence in the education system in Kabul. But was it all in English? Or it was all in Arabic? And then-- because OCW is in English. And I wanted to know how that was for you.
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: I would say this is a point where most of us are finding difficult to follow these lectures because not all people are familiar with English. And the language, which we used to study in Afghanistan is Persian and Pashto. In Kabul it was Persian, even though the books were in English, but teachers and professors used to teach in Persian.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Oh, Persian.
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: And then for us, it was a bit difficult to follow the MIT OCW lectures unless we had previous education and previous background in English. Some of us used to follow private courses in Afghanistan to learn English. And luckily, I was one of those, which I could follow the lectures and understand the concepts in the lessons.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: And as you started using these open educational resources, did it start changing how you were performing in your traditional education as well? Were you getting better grades? Or were you just learning more about life and the world and it just made you feel better as a human being? Maybe you could talk about how it was making you feel as you found this stuff. How was it affecting you personally?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: Yeah, in fact, apart from getting good grades or helping me in getting good grades in the university, in fact, it was kind of an eye-opening moment for me. It was not like just, I will follow these few subjects which I had in the university. But in fact, it had opened my eyes on different subjects and different areas. For example, I didn't know anything about computer science or programming. Really, I didn't know-- we didn't have that much of idea how much this computer science and technology is changing the world because in Afghanistan, we are not that much advanced in the field, and we are not that much taking advantage of these fields.
So that's how-- it's not that much famous in Afghanistan. But through MIT OCW courses, I came to know about computer science and programming. And I feel that education is not only about getting grades. In fact, if you are curious about something to know more and then you are going deeper into it and you are getting better materials to help you to understand the world, that's what matters the most for me. It's not only about getting grades.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: You've mentioned you had no idea of computer science, so I wanted to know, did you end up inevitably, because there are some things you're working on in the computer science related Field? Is that what you are studying, first of all, in university and then transitioning to this whole new field of computer science? How was that for you?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: No. In fact, I was studying electronics engineering. So in Afghanistan especially, we don't have that much of subjects in related to computer programming. First year, I came to know about these courses. And then when I came to India here, we had subjects in this field, in programming, even though the branch was the same, but because of different curriculum, we had few subjects from computer science as well.
There is a course from intro to computer science and programming using Python from MIT OCW. And there are different versions of it. For example, one was released earlier. And I like that one, actually, because the professor used to go more into behind the concepts. He used to teach maths. And later on, for example, now we are having only slides. And I don't like that. I like more of the traditional way of using that white chalk and blackboard.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Yeah, me too. I like the sound of chalk on board. It's really-- it's therapeutic. So you mentioned you did electrical. Was that a passion? Is that something you wanted to do? Is that something that's widely done? In terms of your passions in life, like the things you like, has OCW contributed a lot to that outside the things you have to learn? Because we all have things we have to learn, either for the job or to get grades, or you mentioned something like that, but any other thing outside, like something you just enjoy learning?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: Yeah, about my branch, It's not that popular in Afghanistan. In fact, they're more of civil engineering and construction. Then, as I mentioned earlier, the way of navigating to my uncle's home. So I was like, can we do something about electrical engineering so that I can help people to have more electricity in my village? And then, yeah, that was the main motive for me to pursue electrical and electronics engineering. And honestly, when I came to the university, that was not what I thought. There were different misalignments between what I thought I will be getting in the universities and then what was really there.
Coming to your question about was programming was part of my passion, in fact, yeah. They are also-- always I see, how can I-- my main passion is, how can I help my people? That's my main passion. When I came to India, I saw this potential of, for example, how technology is honestly affecting people's lives here from everywhere, from medical schools, from universities. Even if you go to a small shop, there is integrated of technology. And for example, computer science is there. People are using it and making the people's life easier there. And that was my main motive to get into computer science. And I was trying to, how can I help my people there?
And from that point onwards, I was thinking of, I have learned all this stuff for free. Now, how can I give it back to my community? And then I came about an idea of having an online platform, where students from Afghanistan can learn about programming and computer science because it's not that much familiar, first of all, in Afghanistan. And then even if it's there, people will find difficult to get resources in their own languages.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the problems which we had about MIT OCW and most of these materials outside of Afghanistan is that most of these materials are available in English. And many people in Afghanistan don't know English. So I thought of, how can I not make a clone of MIT OCW, which I cannot, just for example, a few subjects which really getting them to the introduction to the computer science and learn about computer science, this computer science has existed. And this really can help them in their future and help other people in Afghanistan as well.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: You talked about how open educational resources changed what you were doing and your vision of the future. And you're working on this app now. Is there anything else on the app you're developing that you want to tell us about?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: Yeah. Basically that web application is not a mobile app. It's an a web application where I have recorded videos. And I will put those videos in that web application. And then related to that, we will be having assignments. We will be having GitHub repository related to each lecture, where they can go and grab the coat. Also, as we go on, if the people like the material, we will be having online classes just, for example, you are having from universities so that there will be a direct interaction between instructor and between the students. I think that can be more helpful, rather than just putting the contents there.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Nice. And you're planning to do all this in Persian, English, Arabic?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: Yeah. The content will be completely in Persian because our native languages are Persian and Pashto. Mostly the people are using these two languages. And for now, I will be adding the contents in Persian language. And then later on, I might do it in Pashto as well. But for now, it will be in Persian.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: That's really awesome. One question we get from the director of MIT OpenCourseWare-- if you had magical abilities, you had a magic wand, is there anything that you would want to see happen with open educational resources at MIT?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: I feel I want two things to happen. First one is I want MIT OCW to be universal knowledge of where all students can come and learn from it. On top of that, I want all the lectures be there from MIT OCW because now all of them are not there. I want all the lectures to be there. For example, if the lecture is recorded today, I want them to be there in the MIT OCW. And then the other thing is just it would be my wish if we have lectures in all languages, for example, in different languages, so that everyone can, regardless of their native language, can come and learn.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Well, you could help because I'm seeing Persian is spoken by around 70 million people, so who knows? But I also feel you on the languages bit, yeah. Yeah. I would also suggest the same.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: How does your vision of the future and the future of the world change when you think about open educational resources? Do you see there being many more opportunities for more learners like you? Or what do you see when you think of the future now that you've used open educational resources?
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: Yeah, honestly speaking, it helped me to understand that if we empower other people without expecting something in return, definitely if that return is not directly to us, and that will help other people's lives. And then sometimes seeing all this cruelty around the world and uneven distribution of resources and opportunities around the world, it makes me sad to think that we are living in this world. And then seeing courses and institutions like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, where they are putting all their contents for free for other people to learn, that makes me believe more into the humanity.
And there is Lex Fridman. I'm listening more to his podcast. He always says that I believe more that humans will prevail, and I believe that by seeing these all contributions from other institutions from MIT. And I feel that as long as we are helping each other, we can have a better world, and our humanity will prevail for sure.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I feel you. Education should be-- it's what's actually changing the world. It's how we change the world. And clearly, we have examples of that working. Your own journey is a clear testament to that. I really liked your journey, all the way from the rural part, studying by the moonlight. I can relate to that. I also grew up in the village. Then you come to the town part of your country. And then, so in all this, I just wanted to know, do you see yourself continuing, first of all, to use OCW materials, first and foremost? That will be my first question. And the second one maybe would be, how do you see yourself now? A lot has changed.
LOTFULLAH ANDISHMAND: First of all about am I still learning, I think I'm young. And even though it doesn't matter that how old or how young you are, as a human being, we should always learn and be more curious to know about our universe, about our nature. And definitely how I do, I do, honestly, as of now, these MIT OCW you and open education resources from other resources, these are my main resources where I'm learning and getting my answers, yeah.
My advice would be for my younger self to believe in yourself, believe in your guts, which you can do anything possible, and do not restrict your imagination to these things which you can't see around. There are many things and more things which you can explore and do, just not related to your environment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Another great conversation, Emmanuel. Lotfullah's life's really changed a lot, from using the moonlight to guide him, to chemistry classes that his uncle would teach at his house, to living in India and starting his own application. And I love how he's so dedicated to paying it forward for his community. What's your biggest takeaway from our conversation with Lotfullah?
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I agree with you, Michael. My biggest takeaway, I guess, would be how much a person can achieve. You see, Lotfullah has done a lot. Not only did he just power through the limitations of his environment to go on and achieve great things, go to India on scholarships, but he's also doing a lot. Not only did he plan to develop a platform to give back home, but he engineered it himself, which goes to show the heart that some of our learners really have and how much they really enjoy these resources that they feel that they should give back to the community.
From a person who was just receiving courses on a flash disk, to a person who's now giving back that same service, that same reward to his community, that, to me, is a really noble cause and something that's really inspiring to the rest of our learners. So anything else you want to add, Michael? What was your takeaway from this story?
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Yeah, I think Lotfullah is a living example of what the Open Learning community is all about, especially at MIT. We have all these resources, OpenCourseWare, but everything can be better. And the idea behind Open Learning in general is what can you add to this story now? And Lotfullah has added a lot. So translating everything that he's learned to Persian on its own is a monumental task, but then creating an application to share that information freely was just another layer of extraordinary giving back to the community.
And I think it is a great example for all of us to strive to, is if you benefit from these resources, if you benefit from learning, figure out how to share it with your community, with your family, with your friends. And don't stop there. Just keep going because when you pay it forward, it always comes back to you.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I hear you. I hear you. Thanks to everyone for tuning in to our conversation with Lotfullah Andishmand, originally from Afghanistan and is currently residing in India. Don't forget to check out Lotfullah's application, Hooshmand Labs. We'll put a link in our show notes just to make it easy for you.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: And we'll be back in two weeks with another story from a different learner in the global OCW community.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: See you then.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Open Learners is produced by Alexis Holt. Special Thanks to the supporters and donors who make OCW possible.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: To learn more about MIT's OpenCourseWare and to check out the courses mentioned in this episode, visit the OCW website at ocw.mit.edu.
[MUSIC PLAYING]