107: Crafting the Future of Education: Christian Rebernik on Tomorrow University and Technology-Driven Mastery Learning

Holly Owens (00:02):

Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic episode of Edup Ed Tech. My name is Holly Owens And

DaNadia Johnson (00:11):

My name is Nadia Johnson and we're your Hosts

Holly Owens (00:15):

And we're super excited today. We have a fabulous guest coming in from Berlin, Germany. We have Christian, I'm going to say, you know what, you say your last name so it's said appropriately because I know I'm going to butcher it and I don't want to disrespect that. So if you want to say your last name properly, please do

Christian Rebernik (00:35):

Christian. Yeah, hi Nadia. So please be. I'm Christian Rebernik, I'm c e o and co-founder of Tomorrow University of Applied Sciences.

Holly Owens (00:42):

Fantastic. That's what I should just do every time because I don't want to butcher it with my semi American Southern, whatever type of

DaNadia Johnson (00:53):

Accent I have going on here. So Christian, we're really excited to have you in

Holly Owens (00:59):

And thanks for coming on the show.

Christian Rebernik (01:02):

Thank you so much for inviting me. Really pleased to be here.

Holly Owens (01:06):

Awesome. Well, before we jump into everything tomorrow university, we really want to know more about you. So tell us a little bit about your journey into this tomorrow university space. You get started, all the different things.

Christian Rebernik (01:21):

Yes, more than happy to do it. It's maybe a little bit a special story because it's different than, yeah, I'm new to the education space I would even say. So I'm not the education expert. I'm actually a learner more myself, how I would consider it. I have a background, I'm a university dropout. I started economics but then actually wasn't passionate about learning just for the next exam. And that's when I eventually started a tech company and that dropped out of university and then the tech part was actually quite successful. So I had the opportunity over the last, pretty much a little bit more than two decades to do a couple of companies like with N 26 creating a bank or with vvi creating a digital health record for Germany with 37 health insurance companies together or nations about food program creating shared meal as a global donation platform with more than 100 million users.

(02:12):

And then reality hits, I have three kids and they have three kids. They have been in the pandemic actually at home in homeschooling and they sit on a dinner table on the other side and they took a class about Berlin history, which is actually really interesting if you think about what Berlin has actually went through. But the teacher was literally teaching at them for more than one hour. And I was watching my son who was just getting obviously a little bit more down every couple of minutes in his seat and at the end of the session he fell asleep. And that's when I was so frustrated that, oh my God, that's literally actually I went to school. I thought not much has changed since my time at school where I was born and counting the second eventually. And that's when I thought, okay, why is still the case?

(03:00):

Yeah, why do we still learn? And I think that our world has changed so much. This kind of, you mentioned in your other episodes we have so much content now available at our fingertips, so we are not talking anymore about this kind of being in a library and exclusive access. The knowledge is there so easily and we still teach the same way as we have done hundreds of years ago actually. And this is what I thought so frustrating. And then I started to talk to people about this and now my co-founder, but back then we know each other with friends from 15 years he's into education. And he told me, Christian, I asked him, why is this the case? We know how to do it better. He says, no, no, we know how to do it better. And I said, but if we know how to do it better, why is this happening?

(03:51):

Why aren't we? Is This happening? And then he told me, no, it's really hard to change the systems. It's really tough and I am an educator in universities, I'm trying, but it's really tough. They always fall back, even if you do something new and innovative, they don't incentivize this kind of innovation. Actually this learner centricity. And then based on his frustration and my ambition, my kids literally this was the starting point. I thought, okay, we want to do something about it. And then eventually, yeah, we dove way deeper into this whole topic of what is this? How does learning actually work? And that's when I literally started to educate myself a lot about education because again, I didn't have a background in that. So now in the last years now I'm really learning a lot myself and I think I'm not, there's so much more, but there's so much more to learn actually.

Holly Owens (04:51):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's interesting, and Nadia, I want you to jump in here too. And we have the same issues over here in the States. I think it's across the world that people are just, even from K to 12, to higher ed, to adult learning, we're just, we're getting bored and we're tired of being talked at all the time. We want something that's relatable, relevant, clear, it's meaningful, it's applicable

DaNadia Johnson (05:19):

For sure, real life. I think we're starting to kind of move into this space where we want real life, we want to be able to apply this to real life or what we're learning. So for sure, I can a hundred percent agree with Holly on that. Yeah,

Christian Rebernik (05:38):

It's important. I think that again, it was like they went through all the months and what happened and the teacher was talking about what happened in which order, and he named all the people. And I was also listening a little bit to it and I was really bored. But imagine I talked to my son afterwards and I said, Hey, imagine you are the chancellor at that point of time and now the war falls, so what is your speech? What do you talk? How do you address the public? And then he was really interested and then all of a sudden he jumped into it and said, okay, but now I want to learn what is actually going on and what the people have felt back then and what was actually happening between east and west. All of a sudden his curiosity was sparked and he thought about, okay, how can I actually, what do we need to learn actually to give a speech?

(06:31):

And it's a very different approach than just being taught at. And I think in this approach you'll also learn so much more because you really get interested into it. And again, I thought education is such an important part for our future. I think the future of the planet, at the end of the day, it's really the biggest lever. I mean we can't do so many things, but the biggest lever on having a better future is education. So that's the reason why I thought it's so important. It's not just my child, but it's actually, I think it's really for, it's so important that we really do invest into education and make sure that people not just pass exams, but actually build skills which they need in their life actually, which are relevant and which resonates with them. And we are all different. So it's really important that they also have this kind of personal relation to what they learn, not just giving a random task, but really this kind of what their interests sparked. So that was the beginning of tomorrow.

DaNadia Johnson (07:41):

Yes, absolutely. Sparking that curiosity, number one. So what I want to know is who along this journey inspired you as you were moving into building Tomorrow University? Who inspired you along this journey?

Christian Rebernik (07:58):

It's really so many people. I started to research a lot about what are the schools currently, which are doing a good great job in this part. What are the good universities which are doing a good job? What are the individuals, contributors, academics? We have actually so many I think role models from my perspective in this space, which we can learn a lot from. And what I found out, for example, we are not talking about challenge-based learning, competence-based learning. There's a university in Europe, it's called Masters University. They're doing this since a couple of decades even. They're very good systems in place, but it's not easy nonetheless to do this really systematically because it's like in my time school I had one good academic, maybe two, maybe three, maybe four. But at the end it was just a small number of academics, which have been great. And so then the other question we wanted to solve is not just about how does learning work, but how can we ensure that every class is outstanding? Because why should that be in one class, which is not good. So that's where we not just talk to individuals but then also look into systems and how we can actually build a system which is really ensuring the quality of every class.

Holly Owens (09:20):

It sounds like it was first the inspiration was seeing your son being bored and then you went out and you made connections with people who were actually in the space that continued to inspire you and also kind of reaffirm that this is a direction that you needed to go.

Christian Rebernik (09:39):

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, it's really many people again, don't want to name so too many. Yeah, It's okay. You can just say everyone inspired me, the whole world.

Holly Owens (09:53):

We just want to give people shout outs. We know that there's a lot of people that supported you along the way.

Christian Rebernik (09:59):

Yeah, so give you example, Ben from Minerva, founder of Minerva for example, was inspirational how he built in Minerva University. We have here in Germany, one which is Iver, which was around one of the early digital universities, which was around social learning and how can we learn together actually and that the future is way more around this concept than it was about, there is a research group from Stanford 2025 about competencies and this research group hasn't done an amazing job where we worked together with one of their researchers actually was part of that, Anna, and she was tremendous in that regard just and helping us to understand how competences work and how do you actually build those competencies like a muscle. It is not just a one-way street and you always get just better, but if you don't train then you lose your muscle as well.

(10:53):

And this is a little bit happening with competencies. So for me, again, I was talking to so many people and I'm still talking to many people because I think it's not easy. And I think especially now, I think we don't know yet how to learn online really effective because it's different. It's not the same thing being in a class, you have a different setup. You don't have this physical touch, this physical context, it's very hard to look at a person very specifically. I think there are bigger challenges in online learning and we haven't figured it out yet. And I think to be honest, I think nobody has figured it out yet really. I think this is something in the classroom, we have hundreds of years of how we can teach, but in online not, and it's not the same thing, it's so many industries which move from offline to online. It's not the same thing. You just don't do the same thing online. You need to rethink actually how things work and what is the benefit actually also of technology.

Holly Owens (11:52):

And that's a good segue into the next question. I was definitely going to ask you about your definition of ed tech, but I more or less, I kind of want to adjust that a little bit because you're involved with the university and you've talked to so many people about the advanced going for us higher education or university. So if you had to define what is university to you, what do you see that as somebody who is in this space now? And I think it's going to be interesting because now you have that educational perspective, but before you didn't, you just had your own experiences or your kids. So I really want to know from you, what is university, what is that all about? When people are talking about that,

Christian Rebernik (12:38):

Again, I'm learning from people like my co-founder, the term university is actually derived from the Latin universita and this means actually the community of learners and teachers. So that's their origin. And it was the initial concept of a university was actually a community coming together of people who teach others and people who learn. But then the learn eventually become the teacher and teach the learners now. And I think this is a very interesting concept actually fundamentally because at the end it's about learning from each other. And it's not that the teacher has all the wisdom because that's a really big responsibility for a teacher. Oh, you need to know it all. You need to have all the answers. But this is not life. Nobody has all the answers. It's something we need to figure out and we can help each other and which is very different fundamental concept.

(13:32):

And if you talk about university, this is our understanding and this is also what we want to build. It's literally a community of teachers and learners from that perspective and technology in that way. Technology is a tool which can help us. And again, just addressing one of the toughest parts of learning. If I'm a teacher and I have went into classes where there have been 500 people with me as students, I had classes of 50 people. But you never, it's so hard as a teacher to personalize anything. You cannot support every person. It's ridiculous. It's not just not feasible, but it's also important because we know one-on-one mentoring, one-on-one tutoring is really helpful and it's really, if you can do this and personalize it, it really excels the learning path. So where technology can help from that perspective is always kind of helping the teacher to personalize it, helping the learner to personalize it more and make it to more data fit from that perspective. And this is for me then the ed tech part which comes in at tech education technology can help us literally as a tool to help our learners learn more effective. And this is for me, personalization, it's the topic of availability, accessibility, and for us as well is that it's not just we really believe that we can also improve the quality again, because you have good days and you have bad days. But the question is how can we ensure that again, every lesson is really great and that's the third thing that technology really can help.

DaNadia Johnson (15:12):

That's awesome. And that's funny because I never really knew the official definition of university, so I like that you asked that Holly, but as soon as you asked that, that's kind of what I thought about just community of learners and in teachers. And I think that's just a good point that all the responsibility as far as learning is not always placed on the instructor or the teacher or the educator, but that we learn from each other as well. So I really love that definition added into what you were saying. So now this is the part that we've been waiting for. We're wanting to know a little bit more about tomorrow University, what this service or what this provides for learners. We're just interested to give us a little bit more about tomorrow University.

Christian Rebernik (16:07):

So yeah, coming a little from my kids, I really believe that we need a sustainable future and sustainable society to be more precise but sustainable. I like to refer to sustainable development goals of the United Nations. And I think what our purpose was is to accelerate that transition to sustainable society. And we want to educate and empower for that, the change makers because we believe that this kind of sustainable society is actually built by individuals, by really empowered and strong educated individuals. So that's the reason why we want to really support them. And I'm mentioning this because our programs which we're offering our degree programs, bachelor master degree programs or short-term programs like impact certificates, all are actually orchestrated around helping people to build this 21st century skills. And we have in the fields of technology, sustainability, entrepreneurship, and we want to create and to educate those solution so those people who create those solutions and help to transform themselves, transform their companies, their teams.

(17:16):

And when we think about tomorrow, we see ourselves as this mission to really help people have an impactful career. And we have built or developed a formula for that which is also very simplified is that thinking about yourself, you need to have a purpose, something which drives you to be something which is close to your heart. This gives you the persistence, the energy that gives you also the possibility actually to master challenges. So we want to help you to define your purpose, what you want to change. We want to help you actually become capable, have those competencies, and then we want you to have a network of people because you can't go fast alone. But if you want to go far, you need to go together. We want to help you build that network actually for an impactful career. And this is how we organize literally our philosophy around actually learning and how we want to help our students to grow and build this kind of impactful career.

Holly Owens (18:19):

I love your philosophy around all of this because of the way you look at it as the community as a whole and not focus on any individual and what you're developing and you have so many different unique programs and really developing, like you say, those real world skills for the 21st century and tomorrow. So that's really important and I think that if other people would tune in a little bit just a smidge into what you believe and what you're building, it will vastly change the landscape of what's happening in education all the way K to 12 primary school all the way up through when we become adult learners. So really kudos to you for starting this process and really getting all the stuff out there. I do want to ask you, when it comes to tomorrow university, so do you enroll people from across the world or are there certain areas or is it just anybody, anywhere, anytime.

Christian Rebernik (19:26):

When you did the introduction asked me to pronounce my name. That's actually funny because I'm doing this with all our students as well because our students come from across the world and one of the hardest problem actually is to pronounce their names so often

Holly Owens (19:38):

That

Christian Rebernik (19:38):

Resonates really well with me. No, we a very international community. We believe also this diversity, this high level of diversity when it comes to regions, but also when it comes to age or professional background, it is really beneficial and give you really different perspectives, different entry points for actually building connections across the different students. So what we have currently is we have bachelor programs so that way when you are out of school starting to learn with us or also if you have certain eventually studied already something or started a career already, then the bachelor programs in responsible entrepreneurship or one in AI and sustainable technologies. We have also master program, master of science and sustainability, entrepreneurship and technology and for example, an impact M B A program, which is really about transformation in sustainability leadership and innovation as well. And what we maybe to worth mentioning is we started off as an EdTech company because we built our own learning platform.

(20:43):

So what we learned, we integrated and designed and also develop our own learning platform design really it's one of the first ones I think from a platform perspective, which is actually exclusively designed for online teaching and it's built not based on traditional education, it's built from the scratch based on modern pedagogy. And this is very at the beginning partner with an existing university, which is one of the top business schools here in Europe is the Vienna University of Business and Economics. They're again maybe mentioning also one role model there is Dr. Barbara, the dean of the school, which helped actually to develop also the master program at the beginning together with them, which was a huge success. And then out of that success actually we started to also say if you want to make it available to way more students and that's when we also after a pretty long process became a university ourself. So we are currently also from that perspective, they're only ad tech in Europe, which also is a state recognized university.

Holly Owens (21:48):

Yeah. Congrats. That's awesome. Thank

Christian Rebernik (21:50):

You very much. Yeah, that's really amazing. We're very proud of this and it's really great to have this possibility actually to develop a bachelor's, masters and give students here in Europe really full degree programs. And with that the credibility also to have the impact and that's really important. And there is, in Europe it's called the Bologna principle, but then you as a university, if you have a bachelor, it's transferable to any European union country and also internationally quite good recognize. So it's also really a high quality standard from that perspective. And again, transferable across the different regions, which is really great. That is also standardized here from that perspective.

Holly Owens (22:32):

That's

DaNadia Johnson (22:32):

Awesome. Yeah, that's super cool.

Holly Owens (22:36):

I'm looking at the programs right now, I'm like, all right, now you need a doctoral program having issues here in the states with those, and Nadia knows my journey to all but dissertation and it's so expensive and it seems like maybe that's something in the future. Go ahead Nadia.

Christian Rebernik (22:56):

Yeah, No,

DaNadia Johnson (22:59):

That's funny. Yeah, it's a struggle over here. I'm finally wrapping up my master's, but I told Holly I'm done after this. You're on your own with that.

Christian Rebernik (23:10):

But

DaNadia Johnson (23:12):

Without giving away too much information, we don't want you to violate any NDAs or anything, don't want to give away all of your secrets, but what is on the roadmap for the upcoming year, for tomorrow university, anything that you want to share as far as goals or new things that are happening at tomorrow University?

Christian Rebernik (23:34):

So as a young university, we have also, I think there's a lot to do for us, not just next year actually over the next, I'm always referring until 2030, there's a lot to do. We have a roadmap which actually takes the next seven years because I mentioned it's for us also a journey. We are constantly learning, we are engaging with our learners actually also what works for them, what doesn't. We are doing research and studies actually on our own learning tech and how we use AI to do competency-based learning and how to personalize learning. So there's a lot actually happening on our side to again, personalize the learning, make it better from that perspective also when it comes to the quality and there's a lot and the AI definitely will play a role in every educational sector on so many fronts. And this is also what is for us really important.

(24:29):

And then on the other hand side, I think one of the, for us really most interesting topics actually is the social learning, the hardship about online learning and I mentioned it is that the connection is harder to build. The great thing is I think one of your guests also said it's about matching. It's really great online you can match students better than in a physical space. Yeah, that's really great. You could connect even better, that's also great. But the personal connection is much harder to build in a classroom. If I'm watching at the screen and you see 20 people, it's so hard. It's so hard to build this kind of personal bonds. I cannot look you in the eye and make you twinkle with the eye or something. It's so hard.

(25:19):

And already we have a campus in the metaverse and it's really great because we have with all our course rooms there and it's really cool because you can see who's talking to whom, who's mingling with whom. Then there's academic after the cross session you can go to him and then chat with him. So I think we are doing some certain things already. This works also really nice. We have really good feedback about this from the students because our courses in that way are less transactional. It's less going in and going out. It's exactly this magic moments of a good program is that you actually five minutes before or afterwards the class when you talk to other students, when you talk to your professor and really can engage on a personal level. So this is there, but what is not solved is really this kind of more personal connection during classes, this kind of being able to watch with people and this is what we are working on. And also we'll be very excited about this next year actually to give you an update on that.

Holly Owens (26:27):

Yeah, sounds good. And I'm just looking, and I want to mention this for the users in the United States who have our student loan repayments have started again for

DaNadia Johnson (26:39):

October 1St,

Holly Owens (26:41):

And your programs are super affordable, super affordable certificates programs. I mean we pay in one year here what your whole program is. It's it's kind insane. So that should attract some people to come into tomorrow university and check it out and see what's going on.

Christian Rebernik (27:09):

Thank you. Thank you. And it's even that the master of science for example, is Triple Crown accredited, so it's the highest level of international accreditation which you get with that. And I think for us, we really care about accessibility and I mentioned before, our mission is really to also acceler the transition to sustainable society. And this is done by empowering the laws, but then we need to empower a lot of people actually to have a bigger change on the planet. And this is what also makes our communities so especially because everybody who comes to tomorrow actually wants to have this kind of impact. And then the course discussions, they really have a high energy level which makes them really special and the community is really active and they're connecting. And then maybe the dimensions one as well because that's really fun. So we have it's learn online, you can't do this worldwide.

(27:59):

But then we have student groups locally. So for example, I am here in Berlin and there have a lot of students also in Berlin. So they go and meet, they go in the dark room spinning. It's really funny how they come together and this is happening in cities around the world. This is so important part because this is also one of the things actually where you eventually want to party. You want to build those connections, you want to make relationships, whatever. We also try to foster this with official meetups. So next week we have for example meetup here in Hamburg and we have learners in Boston who again then connect there area. So it's really something which is possible. All these little

Holly Owens (28:39):

Hubs of people just connecting and making friends and connection.

Christian Rebernik (28:43):

Exactly. And this is possible. The great thing is also that this kind of cross border education becomes possible so that you study actually on a very international level if tomorrow you connect on a very international level from that perspective. And then again for us, the accessibility part is also important so that we really can provide this kind of access.

Holly Owens (29:07):

I love everything that you're doing and as we're coming up here on the end of the episode and we definitely look forward to having you back in six to 12 months to see what's happening. We want to know is there anything that we missed, anything else you'd like to share? But from your perspective in being in tomorrow university and co-founding this company, we want to know from you what does the future of ed tech look like? Education, can you tell us the future? So anything we missed and then we want to talk about the future.

Christian Rebernik (29:38):

Yes. So maybe what I can mention now in two days on the 19th of October we have a virtual open day. So if you want to check out actually how this Metaverse Campbell actually looks like, how the learning platform and experience actually looks like. Join us, you can sign up at tomorrow university and then, which is for the virtual open day, you're really invited from that perspective. And we have also short programs like it's called trial challenges where you can explore actually how learning is we informed trial challenge for building with generative ai, a big topic currently. Another one for mission identification, what is really what you want to pursue, where do you want to have your impact? So this is just to mention that because I think it's relevant just to see how this actually really works. It's always better. Talking is one thing, but then again experiencing it a second thing and then talking about the future of education because this is something I actually spend a lot of time also on.

(30:40):

And for sure we don't know how the future looks like and I think we need to build it. That's why we are here and together we can exchange and discuss about this. But I really believe this when you looking at where what is changing the world and this accessibility of information, the tools which become more powerful by the day when it comes to ai, I think we need to move from sheer knowledge dissemination to, I'm saying this now, technology empowered mastery learning technology empowered I think is important because this helps us to personalize learning more effective. And I think this is not just true for us. I think that we are, it's now the education in the next and referring here to the next decade or even two decades because education, it's not about fast, it's not about we don't need to move here fast.

(31:40):

It's more about setting us up for the right direction and then taking the steps which are necessary one step at a time toward the direction actually that we help learners really build up skills that they build up mastery in the sense that they also reflect on their learnings and help eventually others, again, to learn what I mentioned before. Also this kind of community. I think that what we will see is this direction. And it's not just happening. I think that we are not doing here something, but I think it needs to happen. It needs to happen in all the different educational institutions. We move forward there and I believe actually this is happening. Yeah, it's a question of when and how fast. It's not a question of if.

Holly Owens (32:22):

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, and you're doing it. So I mean, thank you. I mean this was a great episode, learned so much and I'm sure the audience did as well. And we're going to link to all the things about tomorrow university, including that virtual open house, which is going to be when this episode drops, it'd be two days following the drop of the episode so that people can sign up and come meet you and see, learn your ecosystem about all the different programs and certificates. And we can't thank you enough Christian for coming on the show and chatting with us.

DaNadia Johnson (32:58):

Yeah, absolutely.

Christian Rebernik (33:00):

Nadia, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm happy to support and connect Annie, God and really much looking forward to eventually to come back here.

Holly Owens (33:10):

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we'll do where are they now? And we'll have updates. Absolutely.