

Personalized Education -- how would you do it? - amichail

Each student is different.  So why not provide a web service that personalizes a topic to each student so as to maximize learning in the shortest time possible?<p>How would you build something like that?
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mdemare
I'd like to see a version of Wikipedia with prerequisites. Each article would
list the articles you'd have to know and understand in order to understand the
current article. It would also store which articles you'd already knew, and
show for which articles you'd be ready, much like the knowledge tree in
Civilization (the game). This would work best for the exact sciences, since
most articles don't have prerequisites.

For instance, given the article about the Heine-Borel theorem
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heine-Borel_theorem>) I'd love to know which
articles I'd have to read before it will start to make sense.

About personalized education: I think it's going to be huge, (good human
teachers will always be better, but who can afford private sessions with good
teachers?). I'm working on it as well.

But you need a lot of knowledge about the domain you're teaching, apart from
all the usual technical bagage. Finding co-founders or employees with both
these skills is awfully hard.

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rms
With regards to Wikipedia prerequisites: while they aren't explicit, usually
they are linked in the article. For the Heine-Borel theorem, I think if you
understood the Wikipedia articles subset, Euclidean Space, closed space,
bounded set, open cover, compact space, metric space, complete space, and
totally bounded you'd be pretty much set. Of course, these articles have their
own prerequisites, like set notaiton.

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te_platt
My experience in school indicates that the quality of the teacher makes
quality of the lesson. Also different teachers with different styles have
different effects on different students. What I would like to see is series of
video lessons by various teachers on a given topic in a neatly organized
environment. For example, I would love a site that had links for History, Math
, Science, etc. Under Math there would be links for Algebra, Geometry,
Calculus, etc. Under Calculus there would be links like Differential Calculus
in 38 lessons by Dr. Math Guy. Calculus in 3 lessons by Dr. Talks To Fast
Calculus in 7362 lessons for slow people etc.

Anyone know of such a place?

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webwright
I recall (from my overpriced and underutilized psychology degree) that there
is some pretty good tests to determnine how people learn... Some people absorb
better when listening, some by reading, some people are haptic (hands-on),
etc. I think that the challenge is understanding each user enough to be able
to personalize the presentation/learning style.

Telling me I need to take 10 minutes of tests for a site to be able to provide
value isn't going to be an easy sell.

~~~
downer
_ > Telling me I need to take 10 minutes of tests for a site to be able to
provide value isn't going to be an easy sell._

People LOVE those kinds of tests. Just look at all the ones on LiveJournal and
OK Cupid. "Tell me about ME!!!"

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robg
There is good work being done on intelligent tutors that adjust what they
present based on how the student responds.

See for instance: <http://www.pitt.edu/~vanlehn/>

They have pages of completed projects toward the bottom that may help you
generate some ideas.

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kabanossen
One element would be the ability to browse topics freely, just like browsing
the web. And it would probably be helpful for the "student" to set goals for
the tasks. Maybe choose from a set of goals.

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downer
Naively I'd say you can't do it without a mind-reader. Someone may not know
what they don't know; thus an intelligent agent probes to determine. This is
where tutoring/mentoring comes in, but it's never exact, as the instruction
from any given person is probably hardly ever the _most_ effective way to get
the concept across to someone _else's_ brain.

Just present all the material and they can skip ahead as warranted. But books
tend to be better at reinforcement than introduction; e.g. go out in the field
with a paleontology dig and you'll probably remember stuff you learn much
better because of the associations with all your senses at once.

I often note important but _subtle_ points in material when re-reading on a
subject _after_ personal experience, which I missed when reading the same
thing previously. In the repeat case I now have _references_ , and the written
word causes those experiences to spring forth from whichever compartment of my
mind contained them, whereupon I can hold up the new piece of information to
see how it fits, compare it to what's already there, add it in, and then pack
the whole thing back up.

The best way to teach someone is to get them as engaged as possible through as
many avenues into their brain as possible. You can read about elephants all
you want but there's no substitute for meeting one in person.

