These sorts of media are pretty good for learning simple course content but quite hard for teaching habits of thought. It’s kind of like how it’s hard to learn breakdancing from a textbook: the textbook doesn’t know how to breakdance, and you can’t watch it breakdance.
In order to really get the new habits, you need to practice them with good feedback (and ideally, watch them in action) and it’s hard to do this through virtual courses. Not entirely impossible, just very hard! The sequences, for instance, have changed peoples’ mental habits.
The other challenge is that this sort of approach gives way slower feedback to the instructors who are trying to iterate rapidly on their explanations. I expect that as CFAR begins converging on “this is a really effective way to teach skill X” we’ll start seeing more of their content posted online. But it might be several years before that seems more worthwhile than the workshops, given their benefits in social ties and in increased information value regarding how to teach things.
These sorts of media are pretty good for learning simple course content but quite hard for teaching habits of thought. It’s kind of like how it’s hard to learn breakdancing from a textbook: the textbook doesn’t know how to breakdance, and you can’t watch it breakdance.
In order to really get the new habits, you need to practice them with good feedback (and ideally, watch them in action) and it’s hard to do this through virtual courses. Not entirely impossible, just very hard! The sequences, for instance, have changed peoples’ mental habits.
The other challenge is that this sort of approach gives way slower feedback to the instructors who are trying to iterate rapidly on their explanations. I expect that as CFAR begins converging on “this is a really effective way to teach skill X” we’ll start seeing more of their content posted online. But it might be several years before that seems more worthwhile than the workshops, given their benefits in social ties and in increased information value regarding how to teach things.