The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer

[-]Viliam6y180

The scarcity of people who can truly learn from what they’re given is why the massive open online courses of the early 2010s didn’t work out, with 95% of enrolled students failing to complete even a single course, and year-on-year student retention rates below 10%.

I am not sure this supports your article's point. The problem with MOOCs is that most students ignore them. Like, 50% didn't even start them, and most of the remaining ones just started doing them too close to the deadline, so they obviously didn't have enough time to complete them. In other words, the problem of studying "at your own pace" is that most people will procrastinate until it's too late. The traditional university fights procrastination by having you attend the lessons in person at predefined times.

The analogy would be if the main problem with teaching metalworking would be that no one actually opens the metalworking textbook. While your point, if I understand it correctly, is that things such as metalworking are difficult to learn even for those people who actually open the textbook and give it enough time and effort.

[-]romeostevensit6y310

"ChuckMcM 3 days ago [-]

I am always amazed when people make comments like this: "The results of the University of Texas at Austin’s first full-semester foray into massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are in."

"Professor Michael Webber’s “Energy 101,” which had an enrollment that peaked at around 44,000 students, had 5,000 receive a certificate of completion — about 13 percent of the roughly 38,000 students who ultimately participated."

So let's unpack this a bit. Professor Webber created a class called "Energy 101" and processed 5,000 students through it to completion. Your typical 100 level undergraduate class might have anywhere from 50 to 200 students in it.

UT Austin this year had 8690 freshman total.

So assuming the largest possible class of 200, this professor in one semester taught the equivalent of 25 semesters of 200 student classes, in one semester.

Why should we care that 32,000 people signed up and then said "Woah, really don't have the time to commit to this right now?"

[-]Viliam6y50

This suggests that the interests of university are not well aligned with the goal of spreading education.

Most obviously, there is no incentive to give education to people outside your university. Teaching 200 of your students is strictly better than teaching 190 of your students and 10 000 strangers.

The 32,000 people who signed and gave up are not a problem per se, but if 10 of them are your students, then perhaps you are going to have a problem.

It's like a university version of the "No Child Left Behind" problem. Preventing one child from being "left behind" is rewarded more than helping hundred children get much further ahead.

Possible solution: A separation of education from the school system.

[-]gwern6y120

I ran into an example of this recently. An older Californian ranger was telling us about his two experiences homesteading by himself, 20 years ago and recently. He learned far more from the second time and had a much better time in general. Why? Youtube! When he hit a problem like a chainsaw not working, he could fire up Youtube and watch videos until he had an idea what to do. This made things far faster and more pleasant and he learned much more from his time.

I noticed that it sounded very much like 'gamification': what were nigh-insurmountable problems before, leading to getting stuck, are suddenly reduced to difficult but soluble problems which could be tackled one by one with rapid iteration, feedback, and reward.

[-]Raemon6y90

Huh, this is quite an interesting take and I think conceptually updates me a bit on the state of human knowledge.

I initially was going to make a similar skeptical-comment-about-MooCs, but it didn't really impact my main takeaways from this article. (Romeo's comment also significantly updated me on how valuable MooCs were by putting them into better perspective).

But the main question I have now is:

What's the state of scalable-tacit-knowledge for skills that _aren't_ about physical-interactions (where, i.e. you can watch exactly how someone braids their hair) and are more about internal things like introspection.

A lot of rationality training seems hard to scale because it depends on tacit knowledge. It's about internal mental motions, which you can't really "watch someone make." Or, you can, but you might easily misinterpret it. The tacit-knowledge-transfer comes from a teacher who is able to notice subtle mistakes you're making and correcting them.

Hmm, thinking about doublecrux in particular (which has a history of being hard to teach) – something that might valuable is a video where a facilitator and two participants are working together, and the facilitator is very "hands on", pausing them to ask questions about their internal states and what they're going for and suggesting alternatives. Which might not actually be optimal for an individual doublecrux, but might make a much better doublecrux-learning-tool.

[-]ChristianKl6y40

I don't think there's evidence that MOOC failed because people lacked the skills to complete them. It seems like motivation was a much bigger issue and even courses with little skill requirements have high drop-out rates.

I know multiple people who sell self-help material where people would just have to watch a bunch of videos and could watch them without doing any exercises but where still most people who actually pay money fail to watch all the videos.

[-]uncomputable6y40

I'm with Viliam, as regards the MOOCs. If we looked at statistics about how many people go from searching for javelin throwing videos on Youtube to successfully throwing a javelin without injuring themselves or others, the percentage is probably quite low. We'd see MOOCs doing better if we looked at whatever subset of the population who click the "start" button cared fractionally as much about the material as those who jump through the process of applying to a university, paying piles of money, and waiting until the start of a semester to begin learning.

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The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer

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