MITx: Can Higher Learning Be Made Habit Forming? | Hacker News Reader

MITx: Can Higher Learning Be Made Habit Forming?

forbes.com

41 pointsFluidDjango7 comments

Once we have a well-indexed high quality video and course material archive (not fully there yet), there is a lot of potential for learning centers where students can go for immersion into a study environment. These centers can offer services like meeting places for study groups to meet up, tutoring from people who have already mastered the course, and advice on what to study. Software can be used to coordinate the learning needs with expertise. The software will probably be independent of the learning center, so that students can move to different places and still continue their existing learning tracks.

These centers could provide the environment that this article talks about - essentially, many of the services that a university used to, but in cheaper and more flexible ways. Many constraints in traditional systems would become artificial in the new environment. Students could be of different ages, learn at their own pace and fit things into their own schedule. New courses could be designed based on local expertise and interest.

This reminds me of a relative's experience with Montessori (it was a happy one). Children prepare their individual objectives for the week, and work on them independently, using the school's resources.

I'd love to see these learning centers have certificate programs so that you can get the piece of paper that we still need these days.

Yes, a place to take exams could be one of the important services the center provides. There could be an independent exam standards organization, which would check that the exams at center are fairly conducted.

Interestingly, since a distributed model is now possible, the content of the exams and grading procedures could be decided by the course designer. The center and exam standards body would just administer it. And the course designer could be anybody just as anybody can write a book. The only constraints would be students should be willing to take the course, which in turn could depend on the ability for the course to count as credit in a virtual major(apart from other factors like student intrinsic interest and usefulness of the course). There would probably be different organizations with different criterion for including a course in a major. A single course could be in many such major programs. So course design, physical infrastructure, exam/grading standards and formal accumulation of course into a virtual degree could all be handled independently, though I guess, in practice, some of them will be handled by one organization. Some of this has already happened.

I hope once the platforms offered by Stanford and MIT have been around for a while they publish data on how often people continue using the platforms after completing at least one course.

I'm convinced that the delivery systems just need to improve. I was lukewarm on audiobooks and podcasts when I needed to manage syncing them in iTunes - with Audible's excellent app and a solid podcast app (Instacast), I've been consuming both voraciously.

iTunes U is awkward, buried in that monstrosity of a program that most of us avoid using when possible. "iTunes" is even slow and convoluted on the iPhone - you need to download the course (and, no, you're not notified when new courses come out) and play the video in a separate app.

Something simple along the lines of the better podcasting apps (maybe with some means of attaching/tracking homework?) would make this much more addictive. They don't need gimmicks, they need to stop sucking.

This is why you should not read or work while lying down in bed. now that I think about it. The most productive years of my life were done in dedicated work areas where I encoded "focused agile work time" into a specific monitor and keyboard and room. I was able to focus for 10 hours at a time there without caffeine or stimulant.

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