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Viliam_Bur comments on The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective - Less Wrong
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At this moment there are already regular LW meetups in different cities around the world. We could find willing instructors in many of them, send them educational materials (one PDF they give to each student, one PDF with the instructions for the teacher), let them teach the lessons and send back the feedback.
The remote teachers and students are already there, and they wouldn't cost CFAR anything. The costs for CFAR at this moment would be: creating the PDF materials from the lessons, and evaluating the feedback.
(I need to think about it some more, and perhaps I will volunteer to make one such example lesson. And publish it on LW, and process the feedback.)
That was my first plan back when things were getting started, but it turned out to be hard to develop instructional materials that worked without a developed professional instructor.
Moving the weight from instructor to material is always a lot of work. A lot of tacit knowledge needs to be made explicit.
These days I am having (as a student) an online lecture about some Java technology. It's 3 days, 8 hours each, we received in total 600 pages of PDF. That is 12 pages per 30 minutes; minus covers and TOC it's 9 pages of useful text.
Years ago I tried to make a non-interactive lesson for high-school students where I just gave them a PDF file with explanations and exercises, and then they worked everyone at their own speed. I needed 8-10 pages for a lesson, and I spent the whole evening just writing what I already perfectly knew. Students liked it, but I gave up doing this because it was too much work for one-time use. However if I had to teach the same thing to many classes (or just the same thing for many years), then it would be less work doing it this way. And the materials can be updated when necessary.
With the rationality exercises it will be even more complicated because we are not even 100% sure about the topic, and there can be more unexpected questions and reactions during the lesson. But I still think it is possible, and that given enough students it may be even more efficient. -- I guess the detailed material needs at least 10 repetitions to be more efficient. So if you design a lesson at CFAR, do it 2 or 3 times and then redesign it, it is not worth making detailed materials. But if we want to use the lessons at meetups, then it could be worth doing.
Yes, this is what we first tried before finding out that it was way below the level of working with late-2011-level knowledge and ability to produce lessons. Might be worth retrying once the lessons have been highly polished at the CFAR level.
I wonder if a Kumon-style approach, with lots and lots of small steps and exercises done at one's own pace would be resistant to redesign.
If so, that would be evidence that it is not the best way to implement. The ability to improve a class by redesigning it is a feature of the organization.
How hard is it to create a developed professional instructor? I was under the impression that less than all of CFAR's instructors were primarily educators...
I think quite a few meetups have at least one person that has gone to a workshop. There could be some teaching how to teach at the workshop so that when the go back to the meetups, they can teach there.
As one of the CFAR initiates and a meetup person, the minimum CFAR could do for us is:
A single well-contained booklet of everything with soft copy (they've done this since I went)
Point form script and notes that is used by the CFAR instructors when running the classes. (AFAIK, this is outstanding still)
Mostly just to prompt memory. Once you've been through it, it's not hard to remember how it was taught and duplicate it so long as the right prompts are there.
If you do this, I'll run the lesson with the Boston group and give feedback.
If you can do it in Boston, I'd be willing to attend and provide feedback, schedule concerns permitting.
join usssss
Schedule concerns are as follows: I reside on Nantucket and my work schedule for the foreseeable future is Thursday-Monday, with little chance to get a day off before Memorial Day. Monthly recurring is not an option.
If you can do a meetup on a Monday night, Tuesday, or Wednesday morning (and crash space is available), I can catch a boat and bus and probably the subway.
Crash space is certainly available for traveling rationalists, but non-weekend meetups are very unlikely.