Why I run a free chemistry YouTube channel — and what it has taught me about teaching

The classroom does not scale; the chemistry should

The classroom in Rajkot has a fixed capacity. Even at full intake, I can teach perhaps four hundred to five hundred students directly each year. The chemistry that holds up under exam pressure does not change between a student in Rajkot and a student in a village near Junagadh. The student in the village cannot afford coaching, cannot travel, and is preparing for the same NEET. The video lecture is the only way the same chemistry reaches that student. The classroom does not scale. The chemistry should.

Free teaching does not undermine the institute — it strengthens it

The fear most coaching institutes have about publishing their lectures free is that the paying student base will erode. The opposite has happened. The students who pay for The Phenol Institute classroom are paying for what the YouTube channel cannot provide — the weekly test series with personal review, the 1:1 mentorship desk, the doubt-clearing sessions in the actual classroom, the calibrated, personal feedback that a video stream can never deliver.

The YouTube channel reaches students who would never have been a paying customer anyway — too far, too rural, too constrained by family economics. For those students, the channel is the institute. For the students who can come to Rajkot, the channel is the demo — they have already studied with the teacher, in a sense, before they decide to enroll.

What 500+ lectures have taught me about teaching

The discipline of teaching to a camera is genuinely different from the discipline of teaching to a classroom. The camera does not raise its hand when something is unclear. The video has to anticipate the doubts before they arise. Every recording forces a clarity in the explanation that classroom teaching can sometimes get lazy about. The students in the live classroom benefit directly from the discipline the camera demands.

I have rewritten my own explanation of a handful of difficult topics — stereochemistry of cyclic systems, MOT for heteronuclear diatomics, certain organic mechanisms — three or four times because the YouTube comment thread surfaced misunderstandings that the classroom had let pass. The free channel has improved the paid classroom. That is the part I did not expect when I started.

The mathematics of free education at scale

Each lecture I record reaches, on average, several thousand students over its lifetime. The cost of recording a lecture is a few hours of preparation, a couple of hours of recording, and a few hours of editing. The cost per student of the lecture, averaged across its lifetime, approaches zero. The marginal cost of education delivered through video is, in real terms, lower than any other delivery mechanism the human species has invented. We should be using that mechanism, and we should not be apologising for it.

Where the YouTube channel does not fit

The channel is a chemistry teaching resource. It is not a coaching programme. The lecture explains the concept; it does not run the test series, does not review the wrong answers, does not call the student's parent when the score has plateaued. The free channel is the chemistry. The paid institute is the chemistry plus everything else that produces an MBBS placement. Both are necessary. Neither replaces the other. Anyone selling free lectures as a complete entrance preparation is overselling them; anyone selling paid coaching as the only way to study is overselling that too. The honest answer is to use both, and to know what each is for.

For other educators considering the channel question

If you are a working teacher considering whether to publish your lectures free — do it. The fears about cannibalising the paid business are real but smaller than they feel from the outside. The reach you gain into students who would never have walked into your classroom is a category of impact that no amount of paid coaching delivers. The improvement in your own teaching, forced by the discipline of recording, is its own reward. And the students who pay for the full coaching programme will keep paying for what the channel cannot give them. Free chemistry does not undercut paid coaching; it raises the floor of the whole ecosystem. That is worth doing.