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All of these materials are great but they are no substitute for in-person instruction and feedback (I don’t mean sitting in a lecture hall watching a professor

All of these materials are great but they are no substitute for in-person instruction and feedback (I don’t mean sitting in a lecture hall watching a professor scribble on the blackboard for an hour). The real value of a professor is that because they know the material they can see the gap in your knowledge, where you’re making the mistake, and quickly get you over the hurdle. This is hard to do when learning by yourself because if you had the knowledge you wouldn’t have gotten stuck in the first place. I wish there were better communities around learning. Discussion bards, forums, etc. have been terrible substitutes in my opinion for in-person learning. Often a big part of my learning comes from helping and discussing the problems with classmates. I’ve learned as much from my peers as I have from professors.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
crispyambulance 5y ago
There's relatively new instructional strategy called the "inverted classroom" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). It's where students read texts and watch online lectures by master instructors, but then go to in-person classrooms to work on problems and get tutoring with individual attention, and the opportunity to interact with other students. The advantage is that students get really comprehensive exposure to the material. First from a formal lecture and then from in-classroom attention with questions and practice. It's sort of like standard college lectures and recitations with TA's except there's more emphasis on the recitations and the lectures are from really excellent instructors.
- sidr 5y ago
  This is just a rebranding/reinvention of the tutorial system at Oxbridge, so not really that new.
  - wirthjason 5y ago
    I’m not familiar with it. Do you have more details on how the system works? Was it happening pre-YouTube-ization of education?
  - toxik 5y ago
    It really isn’t, you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss things.
- wirthjason 5y ago
  I remember hearing this from Sol Khan, who must be a fan of Plato because he went on to form an academy. I’d like to experience it. The model didn’t get started until after I finished college. I’ve done online classes, but they miss the in-person dialog component. In general the problem is that administration wants to see education “scale” and the flipper classroom is tied to people. You have to get everyone together at the same time and same place (in-person is best, but I guess Zoom might substitute). This puts a ceiling on scaling.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Lectures scale well. Once there over more than around 30 people in the room it isn't possible be interactive anyway. So a video of the best lecturer is better than the average lecturer in person. That video of the lecture can have a few students (ideally plants who are scripted to ask the right questions - though this is not an easy thing to get right), but for the most part once you are over 30 students nobody is interactive anyway. You still need that interactive instruction. The worse professor I had in college was still better than the ones at MIT - I've never been in the same state as MIT which means they were terrible at interacting with me. And of course the in person interaction does not scale.
  - owl57 5y ago
    > I guess Zoom might substitute Yes, but not for everyone. I used the pandemic as a chance to get back into classroom and ask a lot of questions, and even deliberately chose my spring courses to be online every evening from Monday to Friday, wouldn't pull that off with commute. But I'm sure other people can get much more in-person, when the interaction starts with eye contact and not only when the student is bold enough to unmute.
- tbihl 5y ago
  This is the way all my successful courses were in secondary and post secondary school years ago, except with textbooks rather than videos. The inverted classroom is just learning correctly for people who can't use textbooks (which can be a difficult skill, so I don't mean to denigrate the improvement.)
- xmprt 5y ago
  I had one class like this in college and I loved it. It can be a mixed bag though. I think a lot of people came (and continued to come) to lecture thinking it would be a normal lecture so they wouldn't do any of the reading/slides before class. I'm not sure what they got out of it. On the other hand, knowing the material allowed me to follow along with what was being said and even predict some of the points the professor wasn't going to make in the future.
Frost1x 5y ago
The issue with all this is that, professionally, we're held by businesses and clients to basically know everything (then there's the legal liabilities I won't touch on). So the culture is, any admission of ignorance or clear signs of knowledge gaps labels you culturally as being incompetent in your field or profession. So this problem stems well beyond school. In school you get a pass of being ignorant. Once you leave, people falsely assume you somehow miraculously have no knowledge gaps which just isn't remotely realistic for any human. Everyone always has knowledge gaps in some context, including their own fields and even specialities. We need to change the culture so people can admit or show signs of these gaps to improve. I do it often, if I'm sitting in a meeting somewhere and don't know something I let people know I don't know and will fill that gap or ask them to explain so I can learn. This, from my experience, has made more cohesive teams because people are then more willing to admit their own gaps and teams begin to work together more now there's a bit of a humility baseline.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
behnamoh 5y ago
The best learning method I've experienced was in a course in which we had to summarize a relevant paper in 2 pages for the professor. I have to admit that I didn't learn anything from the professor __in__ the class, but reading a paper (which I chose) and summarizing it was immensely rewarding. In addition to reading the paper (which was pretty technical), I watched YouTube videos of the authors explaining the ideas in simple terms and read about the intuition on their DeepMind webpage. There was this comment on the paper which I read on Reddit (or maybe YT) that basically introduced me to the whole field of transfer learning, which then led me to my current research area. To think that all of this started with one paper (and another course which also touched upon transfer learning but from a causal perspective---"transportability") makes me appreciate this method of learning. It's not even learn by doing. It's learn by not knowing. The past couple months literally felt walking in uncharted territory because no one in my school knows about my current research method (so no professor can spot my knowledge gap). I have felt down, up, excited, and anxious as I tread carefully in an area in which I have more knowledge-gap than I have knowledge. A sense of suspense and fear, but also great pleasure that comes with exploring something that few people in my field would even try. It's risky but I like it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gjvc 5y ago
It's not supposed to be a substitute, it's the next best thing to being there, when "there" is twenty years and three thousand miles away. And it's free, for goodness sake.
ekianjo 5y ago
> All of these materials are great I checked a couple of courses, and having just lecture notes in the form of PDF or Powerpoints is not a substitute for the actual topic presented in class. I'd rather have text to read than slides with very few words in them.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

crispyambulance 5y ago

There's relatively new instructional strategy called the "inverted classroom" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). It's where students read texts and watch online lectures by master instructors, but then go to in-person classrooms to work on problems and get tutoring with individual attention, and the opportunity to interact with other students. The advantage is that students get really comprehensive exposure to the material. First from a formal lecture and then from in-classroom attention with questions and practice. It's sort of like standard college lectures and recitations with TA's except there's more emphasis on the recitations and the lectures are from really excellent instructors.

sidr 5y ago
This is just a rebranding/reinvention of the tutorial system at Oxbridge, so not really that new.
- wirthjason 5y ago
  I’m not familiar with it. Do you have more details on how the system works? Was it happening pre-YouTube-ization of education?
- toxik 5y ago
  It really isn’t, you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss things.
wirthjason 5y ago
I remember hearing this from Sol Khan, who must be a fan of Plato because he went on to form an academy. I’d like to experience it. The model didn’t get started until after I finished college. I’ve done online classes, but they miss the in-person dialog component. In general the problem is that administration wants to see education “scale” and the flipper classroom is tied to people. You have to get everyone together at the same time and same place (in-person is best, but I guess Zoom might substitute). This puts a ceiling on scaling.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Lectures scale well. Once there over more than around 30 people in the room it isn't possible be interactive anyway. So a video of the best lecturer is better than the average lecturer in person. That video of the lecture can have a few students (ideally plants who are scripted to ask the right questions - though this is not an easy thing to get right), but for the most part once you are over 30 students nobody is interactive anyway. You still need that interactive instruction. The worse professor I had in college was still better than the ones at MIT - I've never been in the same state as MIT which means they were terrible at interacting with me. And of course the in person interaction does not scale.
- owl57 5y ago
  > I guess Zoom might substitute Yes, but not for everyone. I used the pandemic as a chance to get back into classroom and ask a lot of questions, and even deliberately chose my spring courses to be online every evening from Monday to Friday, wouldn't pull that off with commute. But I'm sure other people can get much more in-person, when the interaction starts with eye contact and not only when the student is bold enough to unmute.
tbihl 5y ago
This is the way all my successful courses were in secondary and post secondary school years ago, except with textbooks rather than videos. The inverted classroom is just learning correctly for people who can't use textbooks (which can be a difficult skill, so I don't mean to denigrate the improvement.)
xmprt 5y ago
I had one class like this in college and I loved it. It can be a mixed bag though. I think a lot of people came (and continued to come) to lecture thinking it would be a normal lecture so they wouldn't do any of the reading/slides before class. I'm not sure what they got out of it. On the other hand, knowing the material allowed me to follow along with what was being said and even predict some of the points the professor wasn't going to make in the future.

Frost1x 5y ago

The issue with all this is that, professionally, we're held by businesses and clients to basically know everything (then there's the legal liabilities I won't touch on). So the culture is, any admission of ignorance or clear signs of knowledge gaps labels you culturally as being incompetent in your field or profession. So this problem stems well beyond school. In school you get a pass of being ignorant. Once you leave, people falsely assume you somehow miraculously have no knowledge gaps which just isn't remotely realistic for any human. Everyone always has knowledge gaps in some context, including their own fields and even specialities. We need to change the culture so people can admit or show signs of these gaps to improve. I do it often, if I'm sitting in a meeting somewhere and don't know something I let people know I don't know and will fill that gap or ask them to explain so I can learn. This, from my experience, has made more cohesive teams because people are then more willing to admit their own gaps and teams begin to work together more now there's a bit of a humility baseline.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

behnamoh 5y ago

The best learning method I've experienced was in a course in which we had to summarize a relevant paper in 2 pages for the professor. I have to admit that I didn't learn anything from the professor __in__ the class, but reading a paper (which I chose) and summarizing it was immensely rewarding. In addition to reading the paper (which was pretty technical), I watched YouTube videos of the authors explaining the ideas in simple terms and read about the intuition on their DeepMind webpage. There was this comment on the paper which I read on Reddit (or maybe YT) that basically introduced me to the whole field of transfer learning, which then led me to my current research area. To think that all of this started with one paper (and another course which also touched upon transfer learning but from a causal perspective---"transportability") makes me appreciate this method of learning. It's not even learn by doing. It's learn by not knowing. The past couple months literally felt walking in uncharted territory because no one in my school knows about my current research method (so no professor can spot my knowledge gap). I have felt down, up, excited, and anxious as I tread carefully in an area in which I have more knowledge-gap than I have knowledge. A sense of suspense and fear, but also great pleasure that comes with exploring something that few people in my field would even try. It's risky but I like it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gjvc 5y ago

It's not supposed to be a substitute, it's the next best thing to being there, when "there" is twenty years and three thousand miles away. And it's free, for goodness sake.

ekianjo 5y ago

> All of these materials are great I checked a couple of courses, and having just lecture notes in the form of PDF or Powerpoints is not a substitute for the actual topic presented in class. I'd rather have text to read than slides with very few words in them.