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.
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here.
Growing up as an aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young Julius Yego was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the most prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to succeed, he instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic javelin thrower Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and attempting to imitate the fine details of his movements. Yego went on to win gold in the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and holds the 3rd-longest javelin throw on world record. He acquired a coach only six months before he competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a decade after he started practicing.
Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.
Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.
Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a central authority. The center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.
Some will object that tacit knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of a skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled autodidacts. It’s true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge by directly interacting with the object of mastery and figuring out things on their own, but this is very difficult. True autodidacts who can invent their own techniques are rare, but many can learn by watching and imitating.
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%. Learners who wish to acquire tacit knowledge, but who are unable to figure things out on their own, are therefore limited by their access to personal observation of skilled people.
Massively available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate how to use multimeters and how to assess breaker boxes, to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn basic knife-handling techniques from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has grown 70% year-on-year.
This ability to transmit visually apparent tacit knowledge at scale has only recently become technically possible as a result of the convergence of four factors:
All of these factors come together in YouTube, where people upload their digital videos to the internet on a viewing platform that allows for easy search and content aggregation — all on a massive scale.
Early results of this knowledge-transfer revolution are easy to find, like an explosion of at-home science in domains such as dermatology. Such efforts combat industries with incentives to advertise pseudoscience to consumers.
Can this growing corpus reshape knowledge inside established institutions as well? Take academic science, for example. The ongoing replication crisis is after all partially the consequence of the questionable assumption that every procedure and observation can be expressed in exact scientific writing. What if the scientific literature shifted its balance much more towards visual documentation?
The unflinching eye of the camera captures what experimental scientists might not know that they know, opening a window to distant collaborators. Through this mutual transparency, we can create a truly open science, going beyond current methods like preregistration and the sharing of source code and original data sets.
JoVE, a peer-reviewed video journal, is the only effort of this kind I’m aware of. They record and make available online tacit knowledge from universities and laboratories across the world. They have been collecting such material since December 2006, making it almost as old as YouTube. While maintaining and using their own player might have made sense in their early days, they would today probably be better off migrating to YouTube.
Who today would argue that YouTube will one day be evaluated in the same category as the printing press or the telegraph? It is quite possible it will be.
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