Haven’t found a model yet that really orchestrates in a way that reflects how learning works. Or at least, how I learn.
I can get them into different teaching/learning “modes” and configure those modes appropriately, but they don’t know how to switch between them in context and automatically, and they ALWAYS go tangential and ADHD mode after depressingly few exchanges before they need to reset. I’m talking like, 5? Just not good enough to really satisfy.
Huge improvements over time of course, but they seem to have plateaud for this particular issue.
I started learn linear algebra and some mid-level math stuff couple of years back. While I really wanted to learn I still struggled to find a good learning path and use a product similar to Duolingo for math.
Eventually I learned some, then stopped using it and then forgotten all of it.
But my point is despite if me really want to learn I found it quite challenging to find learning path that I trusted to be good start for me.
I also need to make the point; I didn’t have 5 hours a day, so this 30-90 minutes in a good day endeavor.
There are still tons of things to solve in this area, how to cross to chasm, a learning path that’s right for you and how can you be sure of that. Learning something in one good 60m instead of 5 different videos and 5 hours. Etc. I think these problems are far from solved.
I also want to get fit but that doesn’t mean I’ll show up in my gym to workout everyday. So even when you really really want to learn you still need to stay motivated.
The issue with sources like these is that they are inherently passive. They don't include exercise sets. While they can be good supplementary material, learning happens by doing, not by passively watching.
What you're looking for is not something to help your with your goals, it's something that sells you the idea that you can achieve your goals while seemingly be unwilling to put the necessary effort in.
What if it's simply impossible to learn linear algebra and mid-level math stuff by spending only 30 minutes a day? What if you can't get fit if you don't go to the gym?
It sounds like what they are looking for is a pathway. Khan used to have a really good one with the world of math pathway where you could go for 2 + 2 to Calculus in a set sequence of steps each building on the next. I've tried Khan a few times since they got rid of it and it just feels like you're all over the place and regularly missing skills it expects you to have.
They aren't trying to get fit by not going to the gym they are looking for a progressive overload program for math.
People want to learn at the last moment, when it is needed to know, and then they want to discard that knowledge until it is needed again. We need to implement both in our modern software: it needs to solve complex problems, and it needs to guide a human (or AI) operator in the subtle nuances of that complexity so their solution of the moment is good to last for the time being.
AI isn't that general purpose. If There is a chef course curated / tested with Jamie Oliver I'll buy that over a Claude chat. And by "I" I mean regular folk who are most of the market every SaaS and AI wants to capture.
I think learning from another human being live who can understand your confusingly articulated questions and who can adjust their answers for you, another human being, that's great.
I agree, at least in that we need more human contact, not less.
But I will say Gemini / Claude have both been surprisingly good at understanding my half-assed attempts to put a complicated question into a coherent sentence.
What obstacles do you tend to run into? I'd be inclined to use a Chinese model for that, since Claude was presumably RLHF'ed primarily by native Anglophones.
Have you tried a Chinese-trained LLM for learning Mandarin, and if so, did it help?
I think to learn a language you need to do as many modalities as you can: Speaking, listening, reading, singing, asking questions to native speakers, asking questions to LLMs, writing, flash cards, etc.
The obstacle with LLMs is that they are specifically going at their own uncanny valley pace. I do see how that might be not a problem for some prompts.
I haven't tried a Chinese-trained LLM for learning Mandarin, so I'm not sure which LLM is best..
>Too costly. Now its viable with AI to do it cheaply.
Where is the data that shows this sort of technology beats normal pedagogy?
From a study I read that came out last year, AI tutors are at best no better than a teacher, and whats worse is that AI tutor use caused many students to become dependent on them. These students could not recall information or perform nearly as well without them.
This is just another example of a long line of behavior from software engineers thinking they are god's gifted people, who can waltz into any industry and revolutionize it overnight with an application.
This is exactly right. I started teaching undergrad CS about 18 months ago after 20 years wandering through other careers, and I quickly realized that students do not need better teaching. They need frequent, direct feedback and an environment that more or less requires them to commit to studying until mastery or to quit early and do something else.
Effective learning techniques have been known for decades, but universities have -zero- incentive to improve teaching quality. There is no standardized assessment infrastructure to compare graduates across schools, or to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching interventions at scale. So any effort put into teaching quality is invisible and thus worthless to a university.
Every attempt to make high-quality instruction available for free has been largely irrelevant to the unwashed masses, because universities have a monopoly on credentialing. The self-starters can learn anything for free, but they were never the problem. It’s the middle 50% that we have utterly failed.
I believe a huge part of the failure is the lack of teaching anywhere, the general idea of how to manage discussions of disagreement. Because that is not discussed or taught, any topic with disagreements triggers emotional reactions in just enough people that no discussions of any progress can be made in such areas.
When the "middle 50%", as you call them, find they need help or really anything beyond what is immediately available they find they cannot articulate their need, nor can anyone around them understand them in their requests. They are propped up with an incomplete script and just left to flounder around, and because they cannot articulate their situation larger society is allowed to ignore them. Which is a completely manufactured situation.
Scorm is a zip file with html files to structure content any way you want with a minimal amount of mandatory standards.
It was never meant for assessment, nor is it secure. The creator of scorm said to not use it learning had to be secured.
It’s not a system or a framework in any meaningful or standardized sense, and more of a format for compiling content that can be copied between different places.
I just took the conceptualization of it away from the sufficient experience I have with LMS to do the same with it:
Learning management systems are rarely about learning. Too often, they're first about about managing learning for the learning manager, and teh priorities of the learning manager (maintaining compliance) and that's what the software and sales process aims for.
The learner, actually learning, or being a central focus is a second or third class citizen in such tools.
Yep. Literally every EdTech idea is a rehashing of the same flawed reasoning: we just need better monitoring and metrics to manage everyone’s learning process! No. Learning comes from repetitive deliberate practice in the zone of proximal development. For essentially all knowledge-based skills, what’s missing is the core foundational skill progression that leads to actual mastery.
How many different personal training styles do you see for competitive sports? There’s variation, but only at the margins. Nobody deviates from the essential training core because doing so leads to poor performance and competitive failure. And yet we have a total free-for-all in knowledge disciplines where we just throw untrained PhDs in front of a classroom and assume they’ll produce results. Oh, and we also provide zero tangible incentives for them to improve learning outcomes.
How to teach, and how to learn, and how to learn how to learn are for sure different things.
With post secondaries, one thing I see is the obsession with pedagogy, which makes sense on one hand, where teachers who teach K-12, learn how to teach children, for the unfamiliar - peda is children, and gogy roughly means "how to lead".
If our teaching is rooted actually or inaccurately using a word that is rooted in a practice of how to lead children, it doesn't surprise me that the learning experiences of non-adults, including young adults, are so hard.
I've got to work in K-12, Academia and Industry training/certification, and where they work, they do not share as much as each of the categories would like to think.
Thus, when someone takes a K-12 framework or approach and applies it in industry, it's feasible that it might not work, but the takes on why seem to get ignored.
Fundamentally skills and the ability to use your skills change and evolve and fixes curriculum that takes 1-3 years to change one sentence doesn't really work in more and more places. This is more a fundamental change than a short lived irritant.
You don't have to see the value - the learners have to benefit, being the majority, they usually won't be setting it all up like you are implying on their computers.
Is it? People want to learn things they think they need. Is there a growing disconnection between what they think they need and what they actually need?
I mean "People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems." means that this is the obvious target market for a learning system. Since there are lots of those out there you win on execution.
>If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.
Most companies try to address a known market and not create one.
At any rate you have two types of people who don't want to learn:
1. people who don't want to learn and have to anyway, for some reason (generally work related)
2. people who don't want to learn and have nothing forcing them.
Number 1 is a potential market, number 2 seems hopeless.
Most people don’t want to learn, they want a credential. The real hard problem here, that has been sidestepped for decades and decades, is how to gate credentials behind standardized skill assessments rather than branded gatekeepers. Stanford, Harvard and MIT can do whatever they hell they want in the classroom as long as they continue to skim the cream of each generation and no objective assessment exists to demonstrate that they contributed nothing above what their exceptional students probably would’ve done in four years anyway.
> 02 Adapts to how you learn
> 03 Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills
1 and 2 any of the big AI companies will do that for you. I have Claude doing this for me for a few learning areas.
3 to me feels like the Duolingo bird.
IMHO, they are trying to solve the wrong thing. People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems.
If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.