DaFranker comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - LessWrong

41 Post author: ShannonFriedman 16 August 2012 08:02PM

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Comment author: abramdemski 17 August 2012 06:16:42AM 4 points [-]

This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree.

The nice thing about this is that it works on an existing market, while leveraging the successful tactics discovered through hard work by Coursera & the like to bring advances to the domain.

Of course, techniques designed for university courses may not precisely transfer.

I'm skeptical about 'leveraging' videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.

This idea may fit with the general spaced-repetition enthusiasm I am seeing in other proposals.

It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.

...And you just blew your cover. :)

Comment author: DaFranker 17 August 2012 08:49:25PM 3 points [-]

I'm skeptical about 'leveraging' videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.

Some selected public or private schools are already doing this, with great results from what little data I've seen. The feedback from the children themselves, at the very least, is impressive - the vast majority of them allegedly report (in less sciencey words) a vast improvement in their reasoning skills and their enthusiasm, motivation and enjoyment of mathematics, sciences, and studying in general.

Unfortunately, this is still on an extremely insignificantly small scale, with only a handful of teachers spread out over 4-6 schools doing this, some of them with direct collaboration from Khan Academy IIRC.