I believe that (some form of) digital education would improve education tremendously, simply because the existing system does not scale well. The more people you want to teach, the more teachers you need, and at some moment you run out of competent teachers, and then we all know what happens. Furthermore, education competes for the competent people with industry, which is inevitable because we need people to teach stuff, but also people to actually do stuff.
With digital education, the marginal cost of the additional student is much smaller. Even translating the resources to a minority language is cheaper and simpler than producing the original, and only needs to be done once per language. So, just like today everyone can use Firefox, for free (assuming they already have a computer, and ignoring the costs of electric power), in their own language, perhaps one day the same could be said about Math, as explained by the best teachers, with the best visual tools, optimized for kids, etc. One can dream.
On the other hand, digital education brings its own problems. And it is great to know that someone already addressed them seriously… and even successfully, to some degree.
One note in the paper that I found obscure is that the paper claimed the Direct Tutor “is, at present, expensive to use for instruction.” What does this mean? Once the thing is built, besides the tutors/teachers—which you would need for any course of study, what makes it expensive at present?
I am only guessing here, but I assume the human interventions were 1:1, so if a student would spend about 5% of their time talking to a tutor, you would need one tutor per 20 students, which is the same ratio you would have in an ordinary classroom. The tutors would have to be familiar with the digital system, so you couldn’t replace them with a random teacher, and they would be more expensive. (Plus you need the proctor.)
In long term, I assume that if the topic is IT-related, the lessons would have to be updated relatively often. Twice so for IT security.
I still wonder what would happen if we tried the same system to teach e.g. high-school math. My hope is that with wider user base the frequency of human interventions (per student) could be reduced, simply because the same problems would appear repeatedly, so the system could adapt by adding extra explanations created the same way (record what human tutors do during interventions, make a new video).
Thank you, this is awesome!
I believe that (some form of) digital education would improve education tremendously, simply because the existing system does not scale well. The more people you want to teach, the more teachers you need, and at some moment you run out of competent teachers, and then we all know what happens. Furthermore, education competes for the competent people with industry, which is inevitable because we need people to teach stuff, but also people to actually do stuff.
With digital education, the marginal cost of the additional student is much smaller. Even translating the resources to a minority language is cheaper and simpler than producing the original, and only needs to be done once per language. So, just like today everyone can use Firefox, for free (assuming they already have a computer, and ignoring the costs of electric power), in their own language, perhaps one day the same could be said about Math, as explained by the best teachers, with the best visual tools, optimized for kids, etc. One can dream.
On the other hand, digital education brings its own problems. And it is great to know that someone already addressed them seriously… and even successfully, to some degree.
I am only guessing here, but I assume the human interventions were 1:1, so if a student would spend about 5% of their time talking to a tutor, you would need one tutor per 20 students, which is the same ratio you would have in an ordinary classroom. The tutors would have to be familiar with the digital system, so you couldn’t replace them with a random teacher, and they would be more expensive. (Plus you need the proctor.)
In long term, I assume that if the topic is IT-related, the lessons would have to be updated relatively often. Twice so for IT security.
I still wonder what would happen if we tried the same system to teach e.g. high-school math. My hope is that with wider user base the frequency of human interventions (per student) could be reduced, simply because the same problems would appear repeatedly, so the system could adapt by adding extra explanations created the same way (record what human tutors do during interventions, make a new video).