8 votes

Why I’m learning more with distance learning than I do in school

1 comment

  1. vektor
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    I fear this one's gonna be a mixed bag, depending on the kind of student you are. The author's experience screams good student to me. Maybe not an ace in every subject, but well behaved and...

    I fear this one's gonna be a mixed bag, depending on the kind of student you are. The author's experience screams good student to me. Maybe not an ace in every subject, but well behaved and intelligent. The usual problem facing such a student is boredom or lack of challenge, in a conventional classroom. The whole class is in lockstep, and the teacher matches the pace to maybe a few of the 20-30 students, so some are bored and some can't follow properly. The advantage is obvious: Everyone sets their own pace, so that disappears. But I fear that the less motivated students will have more trouble: One, they're not being disciplined. Two, they might not attend all the technically-voluntary things such as office hours as much as they should. Three, they lose touch with the better students. We can see vague hints of all three maybe occurring in the article. (E: Four, they might not use the freedom to brush up on the basics they might be lacking, wasting the advantage. This might be due to tunnel vision (just wanna finish homework) or due to lack of teacher's guidance.)

    That is not to say I don't think we should be doing more of what's happening right now. In fact, I believe fully in digital, personalized education. But what we're doing right now is an ad-hoc experiment because we lack alternatives. Our tools and teachers aren't prepared, neither are the parents. But I think flipped classroom (watching lectures as homework, exercises in school) shows a lot of promise, as does the centralization of producing those lectures. Imagine recruiting some top-tier youtubers to do lectures on their topics of expertise... Hell, a lot of them do, you just have to pay them to patch up a few gaps in their curricula. Now match students to the teachers they jive with by some machine learning magic, use some machine learning to infer prerequisites of topics and where the students lack those prerequisite, sprinkle in the ability for students to choose their own objectives dynamically (within reason) and we're actually looking quite decent.

    I mean, I could talk about this for days. I'll just leave you with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M

    5 votes