I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?
> helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help.
This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through questions and targeted hints where you're going wrong, and thus make the concepts stick in a more lasting way.
I wonder if there's potential for some sort of digital learning medium which actively tries to "figure out" where the student's misunderstandings and gaps lie and addresses them in a more targeted way (optional hints are a first step, but there must be better).
I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address misunderstandings and gaps.
Sounds somewhat familiar, but the difference to programmed learning (at least as discussed in that article) is that the book contained error paths as well as the happy path.
No more memories, sorry. That was way back when phone conversations were over wires and television was wireless.
The chain of concepts to be taught was linear, and for each concept there would be a few paragraphs of instruction, followed by a set question with multiple choice ("if you think the answer is X, turn to page Y") set. A correct choice would lead to the next concept, while the available incorrect choices would each lead to material clearing up that presumably common misunderstanding[1] (leaving the reader with uncommon gaps to reread the intro?).
I can no longer remember if the clarifications included check-up questions or just looped back to the original.
[1] In book form, this approach wouldn't work well if the concepts had long-tails of possible misconceptions. Online, that could be less of an issue.
Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow.
As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over.
I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.
