This is why I believe that MOOCS will not “disrupt” traditional education in any meaningful way. Learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Apart from a few genius auto didacts the vast majority of people learn in social settings. Even some of the geniuses were helped by social settings and peer groups that served as a constant source of ideas and feedback.

For years I’d tried to learn algorithms to clear big 4 style interviews. But for reasons ranging from subject matter difficulty to motivation I’d fail again and again. When I got an interview call I had a competitive programmer teach me over chat every night one problem at a time explaining his thinking.

I improved by leaps and bounds within weeks and also cleared the interview.

What’s being imparted isn’t just mere knowledge but an enthusiasm for the subject. The fact that it can be a lot of fun to work on such problems even though they’re not of any “practical” use. The journey of the instructor and how they themselves learned to overcome difficult topics. The multiple ways they have learned to look at a topic which are too long for a textbook to cover.

Customized feedback on how to improve, the right problems to work on, motivation when you’re losing interest. It’s very difficult to replace all of this.

Now to be fair a lot of real life teachers fail this bar and MOOCS can probably replace them but both are incomplete in any case.

This showed me once and for all that if you’re chasing true expertise then mere reading books or watching videos will never get you as far as people learning the subject from each other in a social setting with motivational instructors and incentives.