Highline College instructor Michael Girvin says he wants to make the world a better place. Well, there are many people who would agree he’s succeeding.
The Seattle resident has a popular YouTube channel called excelisfun, which has more than 1 million subscribers. Girvin posts free Microsoft Excel instructional videos that are watched worldwide by those who are eager to learn the program. Since 2008, Girvin has posted the videos from every one of his Highline classes on YouTube. He said he receives comments from people “thanking him for the free education.”
Girvin, 62, who is a tenured Business Data Analyst professor at Highline College, has been interested in Excel for decades.
He said he noticed in graduate school that none of the teachers were teaching Excel. “It made no sense to me,” he said. “The teachers were not teaching THE most important business tool.”
So, when he started teaching at Highline he “brought Excel into the classroom and taught students the real-world tool.”
“I used Excel in all my classes, including accounting and statistics. But I could not find any good textbooks that included Excel. So in 2005 I started to make videos for students so that they could have resources when they were not in class,” Girvin said.
Originally from Oakland, CA, Girvin has lived in Seattle for 22 years with his wife and two children. He moved to the area for a part-time job at Highline, intending to move back to Oakland but instead “fell in love, got married and has had a wonderful family life,” here.
Girvin said that in his early days at Highline he worked in the accounting and business departments at a time when it was technologically challenged. He credits former division chair Kathy Dunn with noticing the demand for “unique and needed skills” to the department and was able to create a tenure teaching position for him.
Girvin displaying his 1 million YouTube subscribers plaque
“Back then it was very difficult to make and share videos. We had rudimentary tools. It was difficult to watch videos at home. But I made videos anyway. Then when YouTube was invented, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head. Finally, I had a way to deliver video content to students by using YouTube,” Girvin said.
So, considering the name of Girvin’s YouTube channel is “excelisfun”—what indeed makes Excel fun? By Girvin’s account, “Excel is just plain fun because it makes things easy, and when you change a formula input and everything updates, it is 100% like magic.”
Girvin said there’s also a storytelling element to his videos that makes them compelling to watch. “These stories are how I teach,” he said. He noted that a 30-minute video takes on average 30 hours to create, and that a successful, inspiring, video makes the complicated less complicated and “adds a dash of fun!”
Speaking highly of Highline College, Girvin said “it is just an awesome place to work with many innovative and caring employees.”
Asked whether his students are aware of his internet fame, Girvin said some students say it’s “why they came to Highline.” Also, one of the advantages of his platform is that his videos attract questions from professionals all over the world, meaning Girvin “gets to bring up-to-date Excel examples into the videos and classrooms.”
His advice to Highline students is to do what he has done. “Follow your heart and all else will follow. Make the world a better place in all that you do and treat everyone with love and caring, AND have fun and get rad doing it,” he said.
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