A Better Way to Learn About Biology

Trying to teach high school students the intricacies of cellular biology with only traditional textbooks and basic 3D diagrams is like trying to explain New York City using only hand-drawn maps, says Tyler DeWitt PhD ’13. “The cell is such a dynamic place with so much going on.”

The former high school chemistry and biology teacher decided to leave the classroom in 2007 in an effort to make an even greater impact on science education. Since earning his PhD in microbiology from MIT, he’s been doing his part to revolutionize the way biological sciences are taught.

DeWitt is currently executive director of innovation at Virtuosi VR, a company that creates virtual reality environments for pharmaceutical and microbiology training courses. DeWitt manages a product intended to teach scientists the complicated techniques that go into manufacturing cell and gene therapies.

“It’s an incredible use case for VR―training people in a virtual world until they get comfortable, until you trust them to do irreversible manipulations to a patient’s own cells,” says DeWitt.

This project is not DeWitt’s first foray into the virtual reality world. He collaborated on a VR tour of the cell with Google and XVIVO Scientific Animation that was presented as one of the inaugural Google Cardboard offerings in the late 2010s.

Elsewhere in the digital realm, DeWitt hosts a popular YouTube channel―with more than 1.3 million subscribers―that focuses on introductory chemistry. He is also one of the authors of a new digital-based textbook called Interactive General Chemistry, published by Macmillan Learning.

DeWitt’s teaching experiences are linked together through one central idea.

“I’m a very slow learner,” he says. “I think that’s actually kind of a superpower, because whenever I’m sitting down to teach something, I tend to be able to put myself in the shoes of learners who are encountering something for the first time. I am always trying to meet students where they are.”

He says that what he learned as a PhD candidate at MIT enabled him to get to the heart of an issue when teaching.

“The sort of training that we had at MIT really prepared us to consume a ton of information very quickly and be able to synthesize it and figure out what that fundamental core was,” he says. “Now, I just fundamentally love to break stuff down. Whether I’m making YouTube videos or whether I’m doing a textbook, I just love taking all this massive confusing stuff and trying to make accessible order out of it.”

DeWitt hopes that increased use of digital tools in education will help transform the field and introduce new ways of learning to students at any point in their lives. He envisions a future where students can select from any number of accredited and vetted outlets for their education―be it online videos, virtual spaces, or traditional university settings.

“Then they can choose from 20 different ways to learn, and different types of students can choose different modes of instruction,” he says. “It would be a deinstitutionalization of learning, granting greater access and greater equity.”