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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

It depends. I have a thick skull, even with the best teacher I probably wouldn't "understood" the advices until my own intuition about things was matching them. I took years to learn some stuff, that I could have found in a one afternoon if I asked the right questions. But I couldn't. Now I know that I am capable of finding them, and that I can also communicate to share point of views and ideas. Also, teachers could be wrong too. There's a lot of stuff in my understanding of music that I find no trace of in theory (except for the "swing it" tag on a score).

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That is the thing about (good) teachers: they have a lot of pedagogical content knowledge (Fachdidaktik). They know what questions to ask to what student at what time in her learning process. They know what examples, metaphors, strategies, and so on, might work for certain students or situations. They understand the individual nature of a student's learning process and are able to fit their teaching to best guide a student towards deepening their understanding and reaching a learning goal. That is also what makes teaching hard and it is not easily learned or taught either. A teacher not only needs a good understanding of the topic herself, but she also needs expertise teaching the topic, and manage the students and the classroom pedagogically sound to boot.

This is what I worry about the MOOC's: a lot of the best teachers I've had personally, and observed (with children), drew a vast tree of pedagogical techniques, but used their evaluation of a student's individual personality/psychology to inform them of which node/branch to select next. The most sophisticated MOOC's ever get is to brute-force try one node after another, if they support presenting the same material in a different way at all. And there isn't a classification system that I'm aware of to organize all the branches, especially around annotations that say "this branch appropriate if personality/psychology tends towards <this>" (yet another ontological terra incognita, I'm not aware of any classification system to describe students' pedagogical personality/psychology, which can change even depending upon context like subject matter, mood, etc.).

MOOC's are a step in the right direction, but far, far from a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer idealized vision that I would like to see.

If I may add my 2 cents, I almost never interacted positively with teachers at the College level. Mostly because I became borderline sociophobic tbh. MOOCs removed a big barrier between teacher judgement and politics (they're human, they can be prejudiced). Also gave me way more opportunity to collaborate and exchange with other students (mostly through IRC channels).

Very good point. I strongly suspect as an individual's autodidactic capabilities increase, the need for highly-attuned teachers decreases, and by college-level academics MOOCs may be far more effective in that context. I think ironically however, that the need for high-attuned mentors comes up later, as the academics segues into field practice.

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