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Interesting idea and I completely agree. I have delved into my ed tech projects and reached more or less the same conclusion - content is a bottleneck. Now I do

Interesting idea and I completely agree. I have delved into my ed tech projects and reached more or less the same conclusion - content is a bottleneck. Now I don't know if your overall critique is correct but I think the major thing we can agree on is this: we need high-quality source material that is preferably free. I think the solution is something similar to wikibooks (which I personally think is a failed project at this point) but it needs to solve the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute similar to how people contribute to wikipedia. Writing an article is easy for a few people to do....but an entire book or curriculum for an entire course...now that's a different story. I do think there is a solution to it which is mainly just a hybrid approach of paying people to write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it. If that doesn't work then we simply need a funding mechanism to write open source books. Once we have these open source books then it becomes significantly easier to build additional tools on top of that source material - exams, practice questions, lecture videos, study notes etc. Most of the ed tech players I see are simply developing tools that are trying to fit into a broken system. Simply put - the current system needs to be scrapped and replaced with something better, built with the internet in mind and built to be a major disruptor of GLOBAL education. I am currently working on a side project trying to bring it to MVP stage. This is the idea I have in mind: Let's build a new platform that rebuilds education for the 21st century - start with writing open source textbooks. At the beginning, they don't need to be perfect, they can be revised as the platform grows. Then build a bunch of innovative self-study type tools using the latest in technology to make learning efficient, easy and fun. In terms of monetization - simple advertising and premium services (tutoring, live streamed classes with teachers etc.) and of course a simple credentialing system with the possibly to have proctored exams to add validity. Long-term vision would be this: a type 1 civilization university - all major subjects would have a course with a free textbook and an amazing set of tools to self-study it (or affordable options to get tutoring/view live streamed lectures with real teachers). Add in localization tools to translate all of these courses into the top 20+ languages. Each course would have a rigorousness protected exam for students to get a employment worthy credential. Eliminate all admission requirements and allow everyone to attend for free.

mncharity 7y ago
> Writing an article is easy for a few people to do Writing a bad article is easy. And pervasive in science education. I'm suggesting there's a level of excellence, at which even a small fragment of an article, for any audience, takes a surprisingly large gathering of expertise. So large as to be implausible with current social/technical/incentive infrastructure. And I'm speculating that it's an interesting level of excellence, with benefits that might justify the investment. Or at least the discussion of the possibility. > write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it I'm unsure how to describe why I don't buy this. Imagine a draft newspaper article, which says "Foos do qux". The fact-checker objects, "But some foos don't do qux". The reporter "fixes" the draft with "Most foos do qux". The newspaper fact-checker says "yes, that's great", and it goes to press. Then someone who actually understands foos, points out to a colleague, that the entire focus on qux was misguided, confusing, and engenders misconceptions, and that indeed, the very concepts of foo and qux are badly flawed. "It's news media - what do you expect?" the colleague responds. So there's a concept that you can wordsmith you way out of getting something badly wrong. You've likely seen some process where two parties have profoundly different concepts, but instead of discussing concepts, are engaged in text tweaking. But what if, in excellent content, even high-level organization is sensitive to expertise-intensive details? "Ok, for the foundational concept, we have proposals for atoms, a different definition of atoms, molecules with atoms as a degenerate case, atoms in molecules, nuclei, electron energy, electron clouds, configuration spaces, trajectory spaces, ... . Let's explore the correctness, accessibility and fruitfulness of each foundation." What if you can't even write a draft title, let alone structure a presentation, until after a massive collaborative process among educators, research scientists, and creative catalysts? > the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute An MIT project to create cell-biology VR content approached the need for expertise by pulling in researchers for interviews about their areas. But there was a reoccurring difficulty... getting the researchers to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. So I offer the hopeful possibility, that a project with just-the-right sweet-spot shape, might accomplish things that seem impossibly difficult, when seen less clearly. > open source books I'm sympathetic to OER. But in the context of transformative improvement... Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. It's not clear to me that a reasonably scaled OER effort can move that needle. Years ago, NSF almost decided to create a national science education wiki, analogous in scale to wikipedia. That might have had critical mass for transformative change. But they didn't.

mncharity 7y ago

> Writing an article is easy for a few people to do Writing a bad article is easy. And pervasive in science education. I'm suggesting there's a level of excellence, at which even a small fragment of an article, for any audience, takes a surprisingly large gathering of expertise. So large as to be implausible with current social/technical/incentive infrastructure. And I'm speculating that it's an interesting level of excellence, with benefits that might justify the investment. Or at least the discussion of the possibility. > write the high-level draft and then allowing a community of people to edit and revise it I'm unsure how to describe why I don't buy this. Imagine a draft newspaper article, which says "Foos do qux". The fact-checker objects, "But some foos don't do qux". The reporter "fixes" the draft with "Most foos do qux". The newspaper fact-checker says "yes, that's great", and it goes to press. Then someone who actually understands foos, points out to a colleague, that the entire focus on qux was misguided, confusing, and engenders misconceptions, and that indeed, the very concepts of foo and qux are badly flawed. "It's news media - what do you expect?" the colleague responds. So there's a concept that you can wordsmith you way out of getting something badly wrong. You've likely seen some process where two parties have profoundly different concepts, but instead of discussing concepts, are engaged in text tweaking. But what if, in excellent content, even high-level organization is sensitive to expertise-intensive details? "Ok, for the foundational concept, we have proposals for atoms, a different definition of atoms, molecules with atoms as a degenerate case, atoms in molecules, nuclei, electron energy, electron clouds, configuration spaces, trajectory spaces, ... . Let's explore the correctness, accessibility and fruitfulness of each foundation." What if you can't even write a draft title, let alone structure a presentation, until after a massive collaborative process among educators, research scientists, and creative catalysts? > the incentive problem...to encourage people to contribute An MIT project to create cell-biology VR content approached the need for expertise by pulling in researchers for interviews about their areas. But there was a reoccurring difficulty... getting the researchers to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. So I offer the hopeful possibility, that a project with just-the-right sweet-spot shape, might accomplish things that seem impossibly difficult, when seen less clearly. > open source books I'm sympathetic to OER. But in the context of transformative improvement... Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. It's not clear to me that a reasonably scaled OER effort can move that needle. Years ago, NSF almost decided to create a national science education wiki, analogous in scale to wikipedia. That might have had critical mass for transformative change. But they didn't.