
Where robots fail: Why education can’t just be digital - akharris
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/where-robots-fail-why-education-cant-just-be-digital/
======
droithomme
Yet another weekly post saying the same thing about completion numbers, the
only argument they have.

According to this argument, 1500 students from all nations of the earth
successfully completing a CS class at Harvard, provided at absolutely no cost
to them, is a complete failure.

Meanwhile they don't mention how the schools they represent have programming
weeder classes with 900 people enrolled at the start and 100 at the end. This
is considered OK since 800 officially dropped the class and the class is
supposed to be tough.

Every week, the same argument.

If 90% completed the class the exact same people would write their PR articles
claiming that the classes have failed for not being rigorous enough.

~~~
akharris
Author here - that's not at all what I said. I'm saying these courses set
their own standard of measurement, and haven't lived up to it yet. They're
iterating by bringing in different support systems to raise completion rates.
I hope the MOOC model succeeds, but it's a long way from fulfilling its
promise thus far.

~~~
droithomme
> I'm saying these courses set their own standard of measurement

No, you are claiming that and saying that that is their standard. It's a straw
man, which is a dishonest form of argument. Your arguments here are without
merit. If you want to succeed with your tutoring company you need to establish
yourself as a reliable and honest person, not someone trotting out absurd self
serving arguments attacking other ventures that you incorrectly and very
foolishly see as your enemy.

To succeed focus on your product, make it good, and show how it benefits
people and is worth paying for. Focusing on these other people instead is a
waste of your time and shows that you presently don't understand either what
to do to succeed in your own market, or how to run a startup business. You
might take what I am saying as criticism, but it is highly targeted and good
advice. You should think about it. Ignore it at your own peril.

~~~
cinquemb
Exactly. People seem to expect that MOOCs/or the like are for the same old
feed-people-into-the-system. It's like people can't see the glass houses
around them with all the stones flying around, to see that something else will
emerge when their glass house shatters and not somebody elses. Long student
loan defaults and tuition hikes.

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purplelobster
Personally, I see it as a great opportunity. Today you need a great teacher
that can sit down and figure out why a student has problems understanding a
specific concept etc, and explain in many different ways. I don't see how
computers can't do that. Online education will actually level the playing
field and make the best material and pedagogy available to everyone. Today, if
you get a lousy mathematics teacher, you're set back years potentially. I
know, I had one for 3 years in high-school. Compared to my peers, it really
set me back. Had to work very hard to catch up, but fortunately I was
motivated enough to do it.

While Khan Academy might be good today, what I think would help even further
is to find the absolute best teachers out there and "capture" the way they
teach. Capture all the questions students have and incorporate them into the
videos. For example, if there's a video talking about the number PI, the
student should be able to pause in the middle of the video and see commonly
asked questions and answers about this portion of the video. This also has the
great benefit of students being able to go through the material at their own
pace. Today teachers have to either leave half the class behind, or spend too
much time on the weaker students.

~~~
zwieback
I think this is heading in the right direction but teaching methods of the
best teachers have been studied for years and I don't think the algorithm is
simple. I have no doubt that computers can be better than the worst teachers
but I think we're far a way from beating the best ones.

I'm surprised at the negative comments here, I'm guessing there are a lot of
education software entrepreneurs who somehow interpreted the article as a
swipe at their industry. I thought it was a good counterpoint to the hype
around online courses although it was also clearly a plug for another product.

My kids are already growing up with a mix of online and warm-blood teachers.
They talk a lot about how they like or dislike this or that teacher and they
try very hard to succeed in the classes of the teachers they respect. They use
Khan Academy and stuff like that but it's just this thing on the web they can
draw on, they have zero emotional connection to it.

~~~
purplelobster
Let me clarify that I think computers would help the most with explaining
concepts in an engaging, pedagogical and interactive way. Having a personal
tutor that helps you with your homework and example problems is much further
into the future. But my biggest problem in school was not that I didn't get
help to solve problems and do homework, it's that the teachers often didn't
explain high-level concepts in a way that made it click for me. It's the one-
to-many teaching that is especially bad today if you get a teacher that either
can't explain well, or just doesn't understand the subject deeply enough to
explain it well.

Edit: As an example, listen to Feynman talk about anything and everything, and
compare that with your average or below average college lecturer. The
difference in your understanding is immense. A good teacher helps you build a
mental model of the world and gets you excited about it. A bad teacher just
regurgitates what the course material says with no real engagement. I wish I
could have had Feynman-level lectures on everything from the start, it would
have saved me years.

~~~
PebblesRox
My aunt has a story about this: one time she listened to a Feynman talk on
tape. Afterwards she was explaining it to her son and she started to draw out
some diagrams that Feynman had been drawing on the board during the lecture.
Her son said "Wait, weren't you just listening to this? How do you know what
the diagrams looked like?" She realized that his explanations were so clear
that she had been able to picture everything without even consciously thinking
about it.

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adaml_623
"While MOOC proponents argue that these completion rates are irrelevant
because of varied interest levels of participating students at the outset,
they’ve set the stage for their own measurement by using enrollment factors as
their topline metric in interview after interview."

What's the term to describe this logical fallacy whereby you dismiss a valid
proposition by quoting something that your opponent has said about something
different.

Completion rates and Enrollment numbers are connected but both must be weighed
separately when judging online education.

(Also where are the robots :-( )

~~~
infectoid
It sounds close to a Strawman argument but not quite...
<https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman>

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BasilAwad
Summary: MOOCs have (1) really really low completion rates and (2) a user base
that is already highly literate and educated. So MOOCs don't target the
majority of students who actually need a person to direct their learning.
(Author then mentions his tutoring directory company called Tutorspree).

Then the author cuts MOOCs some slack and says they are hiring TAs and
encouraging meetups.

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j_s

      > This is a guest post by Tutorspree CEO Aaron Harris [...]
      > a New York-based startup that finds the perfect tutor for every student.

~~~
pyre
The same could be said of advocacy for online-only education by (e.g.) the
Kahn Academy.

~~~
j_s
Interesting that you picked that example! From the article:

    
    
      > Sal Khan isn’t pushing for his videos to be the final say in teaching. 
      > They are meant as a gateway to unlock significantly higher rates of 
      > one-to-one teacher student interaction in the flipped classroom.

~~~
pyre
It was just an example, Sal Khan seems like a reasonable guy, so I wouldn't
have expected him to take a hard-line, but they were the first 'online
only'-type education startup I could think of.

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tbatterii
misleading headline. there is no mention of robots teaching anyone anything or
even how robots fail.

How's tutorspree any different than sylven?

What was the point of this article again?

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mattangriffel
This article and others like it are arguing against a strawman. No one ever
proposed removing teachers from the equation. The idea is to leverage
technology to allow teachers to reach more students and/or teach more
effectively.

Sure, no online educational platform can rival a good teacher in a classroom
setting yet, but that's because a good teacher is able to pick up on and
respond to a lot more data through a physical interaction (a student's
posture, tone, and other social cues) than a computer can online.

That being said, in theory an online education platform should be able to
track all that and more. They potentially have access to an incredible amount
of data including the exact amount of time a user takes to engage with a
lesson, how fast he or she is typing / is able to complete tasks, even the
varying levels of difficulty at which different concepts are being learning,
etc. This is all stuff that none of the current online education platforms
have even tried to do anything with yet.

But to say that an online education platform will never be as good as a
teacher in a classroom is like going back to 60s and saying that computer
image recognition sucks so we might as well stop trying.

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ivankirigin
Founder of company that specializes in adding humans to online educations says
that you need humans in online education.

Self promotion doesn't need to attack other good causes. There is a bit in the
article about the failing brick & mortar institutions, but that should really
be the entire focus. That is the only real story here. Online efforts are
scrambling as offline continues to be a clusterfuck.

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alan-crowe
The article made me think about home schooling. Some home schooling is done
for religious reasons, but other home school is motivated by academic
concerns. There is not so much of the second kind because it raises an awkward
question: how is the parent to do better than school at teaching a subject
about which they themselves are ignorant?

Enter the MOOC. The content is available, at a level and pace to suit a child.
The stay-at-home parent can learn along, providing the child with both
guidance and flesh-and-blood encouragement on learning and learning to learn.

I anticipate that MOOC will change the balance in home schooling with a big
expansion of the academically motivated aspects.

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btian
The article is a massive fail. I don't see where the "robot" is. Is Sal Khan
not a teacher? Andrew Ng is a "robot"?

~~~
rimantas
How do you define a teacher? If it is anyone who teaches, then yes. If it is
someone who understands most of the issues related to teaching, then no, by a
long shot.

~~~
tbatterii
> If it is someone who understands most of the issues related to teaching,
> then no, by a long shot.

I would love some more details on this.

~~~
saraid216
As I understand it, pre-college teachers generally have Actual Training for
dealing with kids, like child psych.

~~~
tbatterii
I don't know if that's what rimantas meant though.

------
aaron695
Point out current problems with X. Somehow proves X is never possible.

A real hacker would think, ok robots don't work yet, how can we make them
work.

------
jholman
I think this article is all over the map, and I hope akharris is a better
entrepreneur than writer. Though he makes one or two good points.

The title is total bullshit. "Linkbait" is giving it too much credit. "Robots"
is a complete head fake, and the article literally says nothing at all about
whether or not education can be totally digitally mediated.

The completion-rate issue. First of all, I think we can all agree that
completion rate is at least _somewhat_ interesting, and the link to Katy
Jordan's piece is useful if you haven't seen it yet. And while I agree it's
not a HUGE deal, for the reasons many others have gone over, akharris makes a
good point, as follows: The MOOCs opened themselves up to this criticism,
because over and over again they post their vanity metrics of _enrollments_ ,
and compare them to classroom enrollment, and that's crazy. It's like
comparing Facebook signups to private plane purchases. If they had been
bragging about completion numbers (not ratios, obviously) all along, they'd be
fine. Anyway, my point here is that the focus on the completion rates isn't
the worst part of this article, it's pretty near the best part.

The next chunk talks about K-12. Obviously most of the MOOCs were never aimed
at K-12, so it's an evasion. If you look at the forum conversations or the
StackExchange sites or whatever, there are obviously lots of students who are
adults from eastern Europe, or Asia (and lots who appear to be middle-class
Americans, of course). That's access to education, baby.

The rhetorical deceit here actually enrages me. I might make a perfectly-
parallel criticism of Tutorspree: "[Harris's] company states that its mission
is connect students with great private tutors. So who is getting those tutors?
Certainly not Tamil-speaking children in Sri Lanka." What a stupid argument I
just made. Just like akharris's argument, that because 7-year-olds aren't
benefiting from Sebastian Thrun's robotics courses, he's therefore not living
up to Udacity's lofty mission statement.

And of course, Khan Academy IS improving access to education. Not in some
ideal future, but in the present and in the past. Without one-to-one tutoring,
which by the way is obviously beyond the budget of, you know, most families
(average price for tutors in my Zip: $88/h). So where's your access now?
Admittedly Khan requires an internet connection, but $50/month for internet
that the whole family can share, plus a $250 computer, sounds better than
$88/h to me.

Though it is nice that akharris isn't duplicitous enough to grossly
misrepresent Sal Khan's vision for an ideal classroom. Nice work there.

The weird part is that the thesis that he's trying to weave, about the value
of human contact and personalized teaching, is kind of a no-brainer. And
although I think he overstates the awesomeness of his business, I'm willing to
assume it's more part-of-the-solution that part-of-the-problem. So why did he
have to stoop to all these dodgy half-truths and misdirections? Maybe he needs
to hire a composition tutor.

