It took two students, over a hundred training engagements in 6 markets and a life working with risk and finance to change my mind.
2007 was a good year in many ways. It was also the year when Abbas Qureshi at SP Jain, Dubai and Adnan Iqbal at Deloitte Consulting, DC asked me the same thing. “Can you please start putting up your training materials online? There are tons of individual out there who would pay good money to let you teach them online.” I wasn’t sure if I was the video guy, if we had the bandwidth or if I really wanted to do this. Two previous attempts to record workshops had worked but with disastrous results.
While Finance Training Courses was a first step in this direction, Adnan and Abbas both felt that something along the lines of Khan Academy would be a lot more useful. There is only so much you can read and a good instructor with a good deck can simply beat plain text hands down. While I wasn’t sure if such a model would ever take off financially, Salman Khan quickly became the inspiration and the guide on the path for putting videos online.
About two months ago we started thinking about putting our slide decks online for the most popular courses on the Finance Training Course portal. The first milestone was investigating WordPress capabilities (you can do about 50 meg per video per post using wordpress), a search on tablets and the tools of choice used by Salman Khan (Wacom Fun Touch Bamboo versus the Genius much cheaper and larger pen only tablet), the software required (Camtasia by Techsmith) for the work Salman has done and we were there.
The first video on liquidity risk management took over a week to plan. While the content had been around for a while, it took me a while to convince myself that I was finally ready to put videos online. Something we had always talked about but never done. The Quant Crash Course took even longer. While the first course on liquidity was just the proof of concept, the second was supposed to be the real thing. This evening we put the first episode of the four part quant crash course online. Hopefully before I head out to Abu Dhabi on Tuesday the whole series will be up and running and available for sale.