David Malan

And I somehow talked my way into the job.

They were interested in having a senior professor.

faculty member take over the course.

I guess they weren't able to find someone that first year, so I was meant to fill in for just one year until they found someone else, and that was somehow 19 years ago.

very much a process.

And so what people see now is really a evolution of the class as opposed to some overnight revolution, so to speak.

The online aspect really started with Harvard Extension School since I was fortunate, right place, right time, to be teaching that Extension School course my senior year when distance education, so to speak, was becoming a thing in my

Mentor and boss, Henry Leitner at Harvard, offered me the opportunity not only to teach this class, but also to put it online, I think in the year 2000, give or take, the very first year I taught it, spring of 1999.

We were still filming the class, but on VHS.

And fun fact, at the time, it was the course's teaching fellows who were, in fact, my friends who were also undergraduates at the time.

who were doing the filming and operating a tripod with a camera.

And I swear to God, we still have footage probably on some VHS tape of one of the cameras going when one of my dear friends and teaching fellows fell asleep during the middle of class.

So we've aspired to higher production value since.

But it was really...

But it happened very organically.

So once we started participating in the Extension School's online education program for several years, Apple released the iPod around 2003 or 2004, give or take.

And so at the time, we were distributing the course's videos via real video and or real audio, which are older technologies now, but were state of the art for streaming at the time.

We figured out a way how to sort of download all of those bits for redistribution as MP3s.

threes initially and put them on iTunes, which back in the day you could upload and maybe still today your own RSS file, which is a flavor of XML, which is kind of similar to HTML, but more custom that just describes what and where your audio files are.

And we made this available primarily for our own Harvard Extension School students, because at the time, even though it was very progressive to have streaming, it was a little annoying that you needed a constant internet connection.