Ask HN: What would an ideal online learning platform look like?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529650

by glen • 17 years ago

14 25 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Imagine you have limitless money and can create an ideal online learning site. What would it look like? How would it work? What features/tools (e.g., grade book, discussion posts, wiki).) would it include? How might it disrupt our current educational model?

Think about any online learning experiences that you have had. Common experiences may include: reading comments on HN, editing posts on Wikipedia, watching educational videos, or taking online classes using a learning management system like Blackboard. What features have stood out to you as particularly helpful? Why?

We at www.nixty.com are working on building our own ideal learning platform. I’m reading Jarvis’ What Would Google Do? And figured I’d post the question to HN. As always, thanks for making this a great community and for helping us think through things.

bokonist2• 17 years ago

My high school had amazing math textbooks. The books had been written by the faculty over the course of many years. Each page consisted of 10-12 word problems and nothing else. There would be no explanation, no section introductions, nothing but problems.

The problems were designed to be just hard enough that you could solve them by making a little bit of a leap from your previous knowledge. After solving a series of leading questions, you would make one last leap, solve a problem, and the book would tell you: "Congratulations, you have just derived the Law of Cosines!"

Because the difficulty was set just right - not too hard, not too easy - doing math homework was like playing a game of Sudoku. ( well, the difficulty was right for me, students who had less aptitude for math tended to hate the books). Also, because you learned by figuring out things as you went, the knowledge stuck the first time. No tedious drills or memorization were ever required.

If I was to design the perfect online education system, it would be like those books. No reading and memorization, just problems designed to be in the sweet spot between boring and frustrating. Online you have the big advantage that you can dynamically adjust the difficult level of the problems. This would actually solve the major problem with the textbooks.

The textbooks are all online here: http://www.exeter.edu/academics/84_9408.aspx

If I was creating an online learning site, I would try and license the material from them. Then I would put the problems online, make the difficulty dynamic, add hints and helpers for tough problems, etc.

manish• 17 years ago

That sounds great. I would have loved to learn maths like that

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Wow, looking at the website, this looks like an amazing school.

lsb• 17 years ago

Yes, it's one of the best private schools in the nation.

glen6• 17 years ago

Bokonist, thanks for the recommendation and the link. Interestingly, that is exactly how Kaplan works with their GRE, GMAT online study programs. You've described it exactly in your description. The technical term for that is self-efficacy. The idea is that it is challenging enough, but not too challenging. Another field that nails this, and is consequently very addictive, is video games. We love to feel like we can master something and learning is no different.

Would you consider working with us in approaching Exeter? I've found that having a connection always helps.

Regarding the approach you've described, I think that works particularly well for math problems/courses. Did Exeter do anything innovative with content related courses (biology, psychology, literature) that stood out to you?

toisanji• 17 years ago

Since as long as I can remember, my work and fun has been programming languages and learning foreign languages. Recently, I am building my ideal language learning site. So its pretty focused on tools for learning foreign languages which I think is fairly different from being a general learning platform. I think that really the fastest way to learn a language is live in the area that speaks that language, but everyone can't do that, so I'm trying to build a community where people can practice reading,writing,speaking, and listening in the langauge they are targeting. It is a work in progress and still not where I want it to be in terms of features. You can check it out at http://sanbit.com . I used Blackboard a bit during college, but I don't even really know what it does. Whatever you build, I think to create value, it should help both teachers and students save time, when I used blackboard a few years ago, it seemed for of a hassle rather than actually help me, but maybe we weren't using it to its fullest potential.

glen6• 17 years ago

Toisanji, nice work! I like the layout of the home site. Tells you what it is and how to use it. You are using a lot of different techniques to promote language learning. Have you found any that are more effective than others?

vaksel2• 17 years ago

It needs to be free. An online "college" is a joke in the eyes of the world, so you shouldn't even try to compete in that segment by trying to charge money.

You should instead focus on teaching people the subjects. Think of it as a secondary tool that students could use to learn the material on their own. I'd focus mainly on problems, I think thats the only way you actually learn anything but doing examples.

You also should make it competitive, have different rankings and achievements etc that the students can strive for. i.e. Algebra Level I, Level II, etc. Each level would have a different set of questions, that get harder and harder.

Then let users challenge each other i.e glen vs mike - Algebra III. The users would compete to finish the 10 questions, and the winner would be either the person who got the most answers right, or if its a tie, the person with the fastest answers. Give different point values for tests based on how hard they are.

Then help users further, by letting users offer tutoring services. And to compare, the users would be able to see profiles, and see what type of achievements the "tutor" achieved.

But this is mostly just brain storming off the top of my head

bokonist2• 17 years ago

I would pay for an online learning site if it was good. I think the freemium model would work best.

glen6• 17 years ago

Vaksel, I like what you are saying here. So, for example, let's say I've got a course in Algebra Level I. I can then create a test in which they pass at 80% and gain proficiency at 90%.80% = basic knowledge; 90% = proficiency; 98% = mastery. Their level could then show up on their profile. Is that accurate? If not through a test, then how would you assess the knowledge level?

Also, would you embed these tests/levels in courses or would you make them separate? I guess you could do both. One person could work through the course if they wanted a more comprehensive understanding and another person could simply test-out of it by passing the test.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

Yeah, pretty much I think a course should be doing a set number of problems, working through each step, and explaining what each step does.

I'd probably let them start out with the final, and use that as an evaluation. If they achieve the 80% give them the option to move on to Algebra II or to go through the walkthrough to brush up on their skills and retake the test.

Use that first final to find what the user will have problems with, and adjust the walkthrough based on where the user has problems.

This way the person can blaze through the easy stuff like Algebra and Geometry

neilk4• 17 years ago

Books. Even in the USA, classrooms are starved of just books. Not to mention the third world.

Okay, if it has to be some gee-whiz techno-thingy, then a Kindle which is about as cheap as an iPod shuffle. Which reads aloud and can automatically adjust to your reading level, suggesting new books as you go.

I think we need to look at some new economic models for teaching. Maybe a school could simply garnish 5% of every dollar a student makes above, say, 75% of the median wage, for 10 years. That gives the school some guaranteed income and the incentive to teach students economically useful skills, quickly.

Also, new reasons to learn and new ways to learn.

The main problem with educational software today is that the administration buys it and it serves their purposes, not the students'. This is an exactly analogous situation with corporate IT software buying. Except it's even worse because the administration is a quasi-branch of the government.

Out with the state curriculum and the bureaucrats. In with selling education to the people being educated. Education for its own sake. If that means we develop a course in rap lyrics, we'll give you rap lyrics. But we'll also discuss the history of martial poetry too, from the Greeks onwards. We're also going to discuss rhetoric, the mathematics of periodicity, rhythm, and the Nyquist theorem of sampling. If you want to learn how to read the Bible better, we'll do that too, and that way we can bring in practically everything in English literature after the King James Version.

Graduating from a grade should be like getting a belt in martial arts. Something you do at your own pace and a test you take at your own initiative (with parental prompting too). The difference between slow students and fast students is usually something like 33-50%. So if someone needs two years to master algebra, let them TAKE two years. It's not a race for fuck's sake.

Education should be interwoven with doing actually useful things. I think pg is right on the money that kids are mainly disconnected from society because we go to great lengths to disconnect them. Drug dealers know that at least some 14-year-olds can be trusted with limited responsibilities; so would it really be so terrible to have kids doing some jobs in a more positive working environment?

Let's put education in unusual places, with the people who need it and are motivated to learn. Undocumented workers are where I would start. We already know these people are ambitious, hardworking, and habituated to risk.

jibiki• 17 years ago

The two ends of the spectrum are "education for education's sake" and "education for the real world." You can't insist on both.

joeythibault• 17 years ago

I agree, those things are contradictory. I'd go one step further as well. We can't evaluate how well we (US) are at meeting standards if we're not all looking at success as a consistent end product. We just list standards and say, "meet them".

I think part of the issue is that we all look at success differently (and that is natural). Personally, I think of success as a product of the means that is "education" as being an active member in the economy, e.g. to go and get a job and pay it (education) forward through income tax.

But others look at success as college attainment, which skews data and, in some cases, creates inefficiencies in our economy (landing students in massive debt, starving them of 4 years of wages and experience, pushing them down an alternate career path).

Depending on where you stand, success is evaluated in different ways which really has an impact on what the best educational software design should be.

IMHO, the internet is the ultimate educational tool (because it's the doorway to 1000s of tools). The issue is that educational software is almost always designed to limit access to that material, which I think is a bummer for students today. Sure there are areas of the net that have no educational value. But there are other areas that schools automatically shutoff (blogger, wordpress, youtube, etc.) that represent enormous collections of information.

jskopek• 17 years ago

Your approach to teaching a curriculum that is custom tailored to an individual's goals is one of those things that makes so much sense in retrospect, but at the same time an approach I have never seen discussed.

Here we have this vast repository of most the world's knowledge, all indexable and cross-referencable, and for the first time in history we have the chance to deliver content in a highly personalized way. All we're missing is that last 10% - a way to aggregate and properly present that data.

glen6• 17 years ago

Check out the book Disrupting Education or this blog post for more info on this: http://nixty.com/blog/2008/07/04/disrupting-education-the-ac...

neilk4• 17 years ago

I suspect that last 10% will be as easy as writing the last 10% of a software project.

Personally, I don't see any software solution here. It's going to have to be teaching by teachers, just organized differently. I'd be happy to be wrong.

glen6• 17 years ago

neilk, thanks for the response. I think your metaphor of educational software being analogous to corporate software is right on. Often times, teachers and students are not even consulted on what is purchased and implemented.

I also really like the idea of getting a belt in martial arts. Passing grades has become so expected and boring that there really isn't a differentiation there or a marker that the student has actually achieved something. If you were creating different paths for students to take, how would you organize the content/courses? Would you stay with the curriculum process that is taught in K-12 schools and just allow students to go at their own pace? or would you change it? If you'd change it, what would you use to determine the curriculum path?

Your point about integrating education with real things is perfect. Something we've been thinking about is creating a type of student corp or tutor corp that would match up smart students with struggling students. Peer 2 Peer learning is going to be huge b/c it is really the only thing that scales. (As David Wiley has said, we have limited "teacher bandwidth" so we need to get creative, particularly when you look at things in the context of the entire world. There is just simply not enough educators out there and we are not exactly efficient at turning them out.) So, the question becomes: How do you create an ethos in which students want to help other students? Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient? or, do you think you'd need to be deliberate about creating this culture? If the latter, then how would you go about conscientiously creating this type of atmosphere? One thought is to incentivise it so that students and teachers are rewarded for reaching out. This could come in the form of Karma points, recommendations, a moving up (to stay with your metaphor: yellow belt--> green belt etc.). What else would you recommend?

neilk4• 17 years ago

I'm not really an expert in education. I just get ranty about it. Go talk to John Taylor Gatto, or the people behind Frontier College in Canada, or Room to Read, or self-identified Edupunks... the list goes on.

I offered the martial arts metaphor not because I think graduation lacks pizzazz, but because in the martial arts, students learn at their own pace. Someone who walks in the door at the age of 50 is exactly where some kid is who starts at the age of 12. It is anti-pedagogical to label some students as stupid because they just learn a bit slower than others and aren't advancing in lockstep. It's similarly wrong to label some students as "brilliant" because they happen to master some subjects more quickly. Often what you are measuring there is just greater preparation and support in the home. Schools are a reward and punishment system for trudging through certain institutional expectations of potential (not even actual work or achievement). We don't have this concept in any other human institution -- even the army acknowledges that some people will progress through the ranks at their own pace, and that some people are specialists, others are generalists, some are leaders, others are followers. The expectation of standardized results of human development is a sign that the institution is not being run with the intent to develop real skills.

I have no idea what peer to peer learning would look like, but perhaps that is an interesting model. I disagree that there is limited teacher bandwidth. A society that can pay $5 for a cup of coffee could afford many teachers. A world where the most brilliant and hardworking professionals are confronting nearly 20-30 years of retirement could probably have a glut of teachers, if it wanted.

Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient?

I don't know what that means. Books are a pretty open platform, and students haven't managed to teach each other using those. What about your technology is going to be superior to books?

neilk4• 17 years ago

If you'd change it, what would you use to determine the curriculum path?

I would abolish it.

If your objection is "but then how do we get standardized results" my response is: exactly!

Would it be a disaster if students entered the workplace without standardized results? After a few years in the workplace, they are evaluated on their individual resume anyway, so what's special about the student to worker gap? Why do we assume that society needs a standardized product there?

That said, I think some direction has to be made clear to the students, that math leads to these sorts of jobs and lifestyles, and English leads to these things, and so on. Institutions may want to set their own curricula which are also verified by government-standardized tests, for more easily measured things like literacy or mathematics skills.

jgilliam• 17 years ago

http://www.google.com/

buugs• 17 years ago

Blackboard is awful I have one class that is based almost entirely in it and that class is one of the most annoying because of the website. First it is separated into 20 sections on the side, most of which I do not even use. Another issue if I'm using linux with all the prerequesites I fail the browser check and it tells me to try Firefox3... which I'm using because of the lack of support for other operating systems I almost missed an assignment as it did not attach my document.

Another Issue that really bothers me is the grades, you cannot sort them in any way there is no relative dating just however the teacher enters it in and most don't really care how they enter it, at the very least I'd like to be able to see my total points or perhaps even a comparison between my grade and the average grade, something all my other classes give is averages of large assignments/tests.

The main thing I would like would be something like a simple editor as default and a html editor that actually accepts html code such as bold and paragraphs.

An interface that didn't use massive amounts of javascript to fetch each page would be awesome too but that might be asking a lot.

Id like sections that aren't in use such as calendar or announcements or data kind of things to be unavailable if the teacher has not posted anything in them.

Another good thing would be a way for teachers to change .doc into pages too many times have I seen bullets and numbered lists just copy pasted into a document to lose all formatting.

Thats a lot of what I hate but probably hard to do and not feasable.

glen6• 17 years ago

Buugs, thanks for the review of BB. Yeah, it definitely has some major limitations. I'm with you on the ability to convert documents into Web pages. I think that'd be a great addition.

sjs382• 17 years ago

I've had online classes that were (essentially) normal classes, just online. Classes were set for a specific time, Lectures, notes, files were broadcast and shared via Adobe's Breeze software (its name changed.. can't remember what to). Classes were still held on campus, but I was unable to make most of the classes. It was one of my better online learning experiences.

I guess this example is better thought of as a web-enhanced course rather than fully online,though.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

Perhaps you should contact me off-forum for the long answer. As president of a statewide parent organization for the families of gifted children, I've had occasion to read reviews of, write reviews of, and recommend a great variety of online learning experiences for parents who want to go beyond what is offered by their local school system. My oldest son is an alumnus of distance learning courses from the Center for Talent Development (affiliated with Northwestern University, and I think a Blackboard client), Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, and Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY). He is now enrolled in the EPGY Online High School

http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/

which has been rolling out implementation of eCollege and PowerSchool for various aspects of school communication to students and parents.

Two very crucial things that the part of the market I know still has to get right is

a) building student online communities in a way that encourages emotional and social growth of the students,

and

b) adaptive placement in courses so that able learners can reach a high challenge level and master lots of new materials. Most online courses are too easy and too dumbed-down for the learners I know best.

See my profile for how to reach me for follow-up.

Ask HN: What would an ideal online learning platform look like?

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