It could also be if he's on a Mac, you have to go to Terminal -> Preferences -> select your current profile -> Keyboard -> check "Use option as meta key"

I found that out because I was trying to start using org mode but I'm new to emacs. That was one of many issues I ran into trying to get it to work. (First was that the emacs that comes with OS X is ancient and doesn't have org-mode, so I had to use brew to get a good version).

Next is none of the tutorials actually match the shortcuts that org-mode actually uses on my system.