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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

I am really surprised that we haven't seen some high quality remote learning platforms. I expected that problem to have been aggressively solved over the past few months.

A lot more resources should have been put into that instead of 100 COVID tracker apps.

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A younger ages I don’t see it as a platform problem — humans rely on a plethora of non verbal social and environmental cues which are not replicable when every interaction is disintermediated by a screen.

Speaking as an ed-tech advocate and practitioner, having written games and platforms for kids, worked in schools, have kids who program- I can't align with this perspective enough.

We are biological/physical/chemical/etc embodied entities, with a spectrum of interactions, especially sub-teen- the range of which far exceeds present understanding.

Children need literal human contact, on real-life modalities, to survive and thrive. A child raised by screens would die.

For the later high school set, potential improvements within the limited screen modalities have some value, but still- this all reminds of early AI framings, where a machine playing chess was thought to be the sum total of human engagement capability. Those making the argument didn't even know how not-even-wrong they are.

Is it really a platform problem though. I took a workshop from MIT over the past few weeks. (They stretched a one week in-person to shorter stints over three weeks to deal with Zoom fatigue.) It worked pretty well.

But technical professionals != elementary school kids.

Until the last few weeks, most places in the U.S. were insisting that they were going back to in-person learning, at least partially. On top of that, whatever market opportunity exists now will likely (hopefully!) not exist for more than a year. I thought about trying to do something helpful here, but was concluding that if I did, it would have to be a charity project. I also don't think it's that easy of a problem to solve ...

In the US, when it’s school districts, state and federal governments paying for it, absolutely nobody who could build good platforms wants to touch that with a ten foot pole.

You get all the headaches of contracts and support agreements with government bodies as customers, all the headaches of oversight for a product that affects children, and none of the upside of a customer willing to pay a high price.

Governments are tragically slow to invest in infrastructure, and when they finally do it’s usually garbage built by a patchwork saga of contractors way over budget and behind schedule.

What good is a remote learning platform when a significant portion of households lack sufficient equipment and broadband to access it?

Grade schools are already heavily underfunded. The only way such a platform is being made is out of the goodness of someone's heart.

Most of the product that schools offer, is in teaching 'propriety'. This is their function as an obedience academy. This requires bodies in seats, and it requires a dissemination of what ignorances students are socially required to bear.

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