
Conscientiousness and online education - gwern
http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20education?2
======
hooande
This article raises some interesting science fiction-y ideas. Quite a long and
in depth read, but worth it because gwern's mind is one of our real treasures.
Two things I found interesting:

1\. If everyone in the world had the exact same Khan Academy style learning
experience it would control all of the random factor associated with
education. This means that the only differentiating factor would be raw
intelligence, which is scary for those of us who were born as geniuses.

2\. Conscientiousness (aka discipline or work ethic) is more important in
online classes. So future Einsteins might be too bored by mundane assignments
to take their work seriously.

Improvements to IQ and personality testing might mitigate both of these
problems in the future. If we can accurately measure a student's IQ we can
give him or her harder or easier questions, essentially baking a curve into
every assignment. Personality testing might yield the ability to identify
students who are lacking Conscientiousness in order to target them with more
interesting problems at a challenging pace. As usual, I think that machine
learning and data science could lead to great benefits for everyone.

This was an incredibly well researched piece that provided some interesting
hypotheticals regarding online education. As Gwern points, out drastic
technological changes rarely benefit everyone equally. Education tech is going
to create some big winners and losers over the coming decades.

~~~
netcan
regarding "discipline/conscientiousness/work ethic": It will probably always
be a big factor (it always has been). Probably bigger than usual for the next
few years as we figure out this online self learning stuff. We just have to
remember that these things are very very new.

Imagine taking a bunch of smart people and turning them into middle school
teachers. None of them has ever taught before. They have access to nothing. No
textbooks or curriculum. No experienced teachers to help. They probably won't
do a great job, not at first. It'll take time to learn what works.

We have time to figure this stuff out. I like that we are in a rush as
individual players. Khan Academy can't let coursera blow them away. That's
great. But as a culture, we have time. Maybe generations to figure out how to
teach people using these new tools.

I believe solutions will eventually be better for almost everyone. We'll
probably need to tailor the tools for people with a naturally low self
discipline, but I think that is possible.

~~~
VLM
"Imagine taking a bunch of smart people and turning them into middle school
teachers."

An interesting analogy might be .mil drill instructors and other .mil
instructors. They have a very high opinion of the value of self discipline,
even for future REMFs like I was. I did a lot of OJT when I was in .mil many
years ago, on both sides, and decades later all I can really analyze it to at
this moment is "its complicated" not just easy or difficult. What little I can
get out of it, is the average motivated dude can pretty successfully teach the
average motivated dude pretty well.

There is also the business model issue where you profitably churn out three
times as many kindergarten teachers as the market can adsorb. Very
optimistically you'd end up with a perfect top third being hired, and the rest
being my baby sitter or waitress (true story). This survivorship bias
naturally leads to peculiar ideas like only the top fraction of people have
what it takes to be able to teach; not so, it means the market and culture
produce waaaay too many teachers...

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wcbeard10
This topic was also discussed on the most recent EconTalk episode [1] with
Tyler Cowen.

[1]
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html)

~~~
gwern
Indeed! I actually have a whole laundry list of Cowen quotes I need to
incorporate at some point - not just from that podcast, but also from his book
_Make Your Own Economy_.

------
VLM
I did a quick search of the linked article, did not find any historical
analysis of conscientiousness as relates to all previous distance learning
initiatives, from correspondence courses to radio classes to film-strips to
VCR tapes to analog laserdiscs to multimedia cdroms.

I'm assuming the brain has no magic way to respond differently to a video
lecture delivered over analog NTSC on a PBS station in 1960 than to a .h264
file delivered over the internet in 2013.

It would be interesting to know if this was all figured out WRT postal mail
correspondence courses circa US civil war era or whatever.

~~~
jerf
Just musing: Many of the learning methods you cited lack user control. If you
miss something on PBS in 1960, you don't rewind it, you just lose. Same for
most classroom experiences (except for the 10% who actually raise their
hands). That's a difference big enough to matter. Postal mail correspondence
sound like a interesting comparator, though. (I started with "valid"; it
probably isn't. Online education also has the possibilities to incorporate a
ton of extremely swift feedback. But at least interesting in terms of
measuring the effects of conscientiousness.)

~~~
VLM
Good points. Although even a brief comparison of similar yet somewhat
inapplicable examples might be handy.

I'm old enough to have spent considerable time doing interactive arithmetic
drills on a Commodore PET... Other than not being online, and having much
lower res graphics (as if that matters) I'm not sure if there is a difference
in the last 30+ years in that small sub-genre, so that tiny sub-genre would be
a good area to explore.

Its still a good article, within its self imposed bounds. There's so much
interesting / exciting stuff just barely over that boundary...

~~~
nswanberg
If you would like to read studies on self-paced learning with immediate
feedback going back to the 1960s, search for "programmed instruction":
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=programmed+instruction](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=programmed+instruction)

------
strlen
While data is not the plural of anecdote, I've found the same things with
friends who have taken MooCs or previously have followed along MIT OCW -- for
some it has worked out very well, for others they fell prey to procrastination
and taking easier routes.

I've also noticed similar things in community colleges: I attended a community
college and then transferred to a university; this saved me a great deal of
money. My community college (De Anza) has been known as a "federal school" for
UC Berkeley and UCLA, yet very few of my classmates took that route. I
wondered why, but came to the same conclusion: unless you're strongly
motivated and self-disciplined, it's too easy to fall through the cracks in a
community college (no requirement to graduate by a certain date, no financial
pressure, no residential learning, no exam study sessions, etc...). To me the
desire to study upper division math/physics/EE/CS is what drove me; was
already used to working independently and learning from textbooks. On the
other hand, those who have always studied in groups, who didn't have quite a
clear educational or career goals in mind tended, or who were not used to
having clearly spelled out requirements ("you complete these classes in four
years with this GPA, otherwise you can't get in" vs. "these sets of
universities demand these classes and usually accept students these with these
GPAs") would languish, either dropping out without transferring, transferring
only after 4+ (3 years was very common), or doing poorly once they've
transferred.

As is think MOOCs and any other high-autonomy self-structured educational
programs are of great benefit[1] to autodidacts with great motivation and
self-discipline. However, nothing says they can't be combined with traditional
teaching environment. As an example, consider the case of Calculus -- it's the
foundation of all modern mathematics; you _have to_ get it to study all even
slightly quantitative disciplines from Computer Science to Political Science.
Yet, we entrust its teaching to high-school AP (or IB for rest of the English
speaking courses) teaches or graduate TAs. With MooCs we could have these
classes taught by professors distinguished for their teaching ability, but
conducted with the structure of a regular high-school/lower-division college
environment.

... or take the case of a machine learning, a specialized and quickly evolving
discipline. A small university might only have a single professor who
specialized in it, but she may not have the resources to teach the class (or
teach enough sections of the class). She would, however, likely have the
resources to organize an experience around a MOOCs and assist the MOOC
students.

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dpatrick86
> if every child is in an environment that lets them develop and flourish to
> their fullest extent, then any remaining differences in their development
> will be due to hereditary factors!

Well, almost! There's also variation in diet and other aspects that fall in
the "nurture" category.

~~~
dragonwriter
All of those are part of the environment, and, consequently, addressed by the
premise "if every child is in an environment that lets them develop and
flourish to their fullest extent".

