Ryan Ahmed gets a lot of messages from his students, but two in particular stand out.
The first was from a 55-year-old on the brink of retirement, Ahmed recalls. “He reached out to me and let me know that he started a second career in the field after taking my course.”
And the second was from a student who called him “the Mo Salah of artificial intelligence” (AI).
“What can I say? It might be the greatest compliment a student has ever given me,” says Ahmed. “We’re both from Egypt, he persevered, and when his opportunity came, he seized it. He did it in soccer, and I try to do the same in AI.”
Ahmed, an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering and an associate member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University, also teaches online through Udemy and Coursera, and has his own YouTube channel with nearly 265,000 subscribers.
And he just hit 1 million learners across these platforms.
Here, Ahmed reflects on his journey from industry to 1 million learners, how online learning can revolutionize education and why he loves what he does.
What motivated you to start teaching online?
I became a full-time professor at McMaster in 2023, but this journey started much earlier.
After doing my Master’s and PhD at McMaster, I worked at General Motors and Stellantis, mostly in the area of electric vehicles and artificial intelligence (AI).
At that time, I was extremely busy. I was working full-time in industry, but had also taken an adjunct teaching position here at McMaster, meaning I was driving back and forth from Detroit and Windsor to Hamilton once per week to teach a battery management systems class. And, on top of all of that, I was also pursuing my MBA.
In 2017, I took my first online course with Chris Haroun, one of the top business instructors on Udemy. The course was pitched as an MBA in one class. But when I enrolled in it, I saw that this one class had 250,000 students signed up, and I just couldn’t believe one course could have that type of reach.
After seeing the type of impact an online course like this could have, I thought about the engineering courses I had seen online. They weren’t overly practical and most of them only covered theory, so I thought, “I think I can teach this stuff in a practical, engaging way.”
So I went out and bought my first camera, and taught my first online course in battery systems.
Your love of teaching resulted in you commuting from Detroit to Hamilton and back. Now, it’s led to over 1 million learners reached. What’s your favourite part about it?
Can I say “everything”?
I think I was born to be a teacher. On the corporate side of things, I got to work on cutting-edge projects, but in academia I’ve been able to publish research papers and teach the next generation of engineers.
I love to lead such passionate and energetic students, and seeing the impact of that work firsthand is second to none. I’m also leading a group of researchers here at McMaster working on AI for battery systems, bringing together the two fields that have defined my career.
But the best moment for me is what I call “wow” moments — the moment when the students understand what these AI tools are capable of and I can see in their eyes that they’ve just realized what they can do with them.
You mentioned that your first online course was in battery management systems. How did that first experience shape your online teaching journey?
Well, the reviews were terrible. I thought this was going to be like university, where there were prerequisites for students, and anyone taking the course would have to already know concepts like integration and differentiation.
But when you teach online, your classroom is the whole world. So, I took my students’ feedback to heart and I changed my curriculum. Now, we start from the basics and cover all the fundamentals first before jumping into the practical applications of this information. This ultimately helped create content that was more engaging and fun for my students.
Did you have a goal when you set out to do this?
When I started this back in 2017, my dream was to reach 5,000 students. Naturally, it started a bit slow, and I was able to reach students in maybe five or six countries.
Nine years later, I’ve reached 1 million learners in over 160 countries. On Udemy alone, my content has been viewed for more than 74 million minutes.
Once you see those numbers and you start to receive messages of gratitude from your students, you really start to see the real impact of your work and you just get addicted to hitting more and more milestones.
Speaking of milestones, what does hitting 1 million learners mean to you?
It’s incredibly humbling. I couldn’t even imagine these numbers when I started doing this, to be honest, but here we are.
It also makes me think about my own journey.
I came to McMaster as a graduate student from Egypt, and the mentorship I received from Drs. Habibi, Emadi and Lightstone helped push me down this path.
There is an incredible culture of support for students here at McMaster and that’s why I came back after spending time in industry.
I’m also grateful to Greg Wohl, Chair of Department of Mechanical Engineering, for his leadership and support.
When I first started my journey as a teacher, the MacPherson Institute for Excellence in Teaching and Research was an invaluable resource for me. They, along with my mentors, helped shape me into the educator I am today and showed me how to keep students engaged. I wouldn’t be where I am today without their support and guidance.
Ryan Ahmed with his family and family members, standing under a campus banner with him on it.
And above all, it makes me think of my family. My parents sacrificed so much so that I could chase this dream. My father worked in the Gulf for more than 40 years away from us to make it possible. The day we all stood together on campus, under a banner with my photo on it, I saw tears in his eyes. None of this happens without my family’s love and support.
What lessons have you taken with you over the course of your journey?
I’ve realized that people really love to learn — they want to learn and they want to upskill. They just need two things: a door and access to it.
As educators, we need to make our content engaging and practical, and that goes for both in-person and online teaching. Once you do that, students tend to engage more and have a better time in the class. They just need an avenue to learn and someone to show them the way.
Additionally, the democratization of education is something I am passionate about, and I genuinely believe that being alive in the age of AI is one of the greatest opportunities of our lifetime.
And this one is personal for me: When I came to McMaster, I came on a scholarship. I know exactly what it means for someone to open the door to education for you when the cost might otherwise have kept you out.
That’s what drives me to teach online — I get to open that same door to millions of people who face those barriers and give them the same high-quality education, just at a scale I never could have imagined.
When I started working in this field 10 years ago, we didn’t have the tools we do now. But we’re currently living through one of the greatest opportunities for students and professionals alike. You can literally build in one weekend what it used to take a team of developers two months to build. And all it takes is a laptop and a few courses.
Let’s think about your fellow educators for a moment. Do you have any advice for teachers who are interested in starting their own online teaching journey?
Just do it. Don’t overthink it.
Even if you only see 10 views on your content, this is a good enough place to start — it means there’s some traction there that you can build on.
Once you start teaching online, make sure to be authentic and bring your energy to the camera. My first courses were boring because I didn’t know that the camera cuts your energy in half, so you need to be overly energetic to keep the content engaging for your students. But also make sure that you’re doing what’s natural to you. When you really find your groove, teaching doesn’t feel like work, it just feels like fun and makes it that much easier to be energetic.
And finally, think about the impact you can have. Your classes might be big on campus, but you will never be able to teach this many students in-person. But online, you create the course content once, and now it’s open to the whole world.