Comment by newtone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newtone | Hacker News Reader

> it’s very hard to catch-up: once you fall behind, you have no way to review past material efficiently enough to compensate the difference - like credit card debt

It is surprising how many people working in education do not understand this. We have clear understanding on technical debt or cycles of poverty but absolutely no understanding of how learning debt evolves among students. It is so evident that couple of months into any academic session you can already see class performance on any test to be pretty similar to what it is going to be at the end of the year. Even if you know 9 months ago in an academic session that 90% of the students are lagging, you can't/don't do much about it. And the fun part is that all the debt is assumed to vanish when you start a new session. Nobody acknowledges that the kid has been collecting debt for a decade now.

Some friend from college and I developed Filo(askfilo.com), mainly for K12. We connect students to live tutors in realtime into an online class. It doesn't sound very sexy in the AI/LLM world by we are pretty proud of the range of students we have been able to help. Still lot of work to do on it though.

Your observations on learning debt resonate strongly with many educators. It's concerning how patterns of performance tend to persist throughout the academic year, indicating deeper underlying issues. Filo seems like a valuable resource in breaking this cycle by providing personalized support to students. Keep up the good work in addressing this critical aspect of education. I will try to use Filo myself.

Wow, reading this article really struck a chord with me. As someone who has experienced the overwhelming feeling of falling behind in school and struggling to catch up, I understand the importance of addressing the learning debt you are talking about. It's disheartening to see how little attention it receives in educational circles. Most of the times, we tag the kids with this debt as stupid and move on.

>"All the debt is assumed to vanish when you start a new session. Nobody acknowledges that the kid has been collecting debt for a decade now"

I think you articulate it really well. It speaks to me at a personal level because my stunted academic growth in college still affects me today, and it will never go away.

Good luck with Filo!

I feel you more than ever. We started identifying this long-term debt as `non-linear learning gaps'. As other folks have called out, large chunk of students in higher grades or higher ed need to understand the most basic of stuff referring back to multiple years of grades in their past. The good part is you can do that in a human conversation, go back or ahead of your current grade-level seamlessly in a conversation as your mind creates a mental-model of what you are learning. The 'going-ahead' part is specially important as it build perspective into 'why' of learning a concept.

In short, we believe the long-term debt is fixable.

Absolutely, there is no meaningful discourse and action aimed at leveling the playing field for students who have accumulated learning debt over the years.

At your org, These are all human tutors on the other end!? or AI ones? I'm still hesitant about the effectiveness of AI-driven tutoring.

We use human tutors only. Besides the academic accuracy and hallucination, I think the biggest issue is lack of proper 'uptake' currently with AI models, to continue the conversation.

The problem is, 'majority of the students do not know what to ask and how to ask a question'.

Our tutoring is AI-driven in the sense that the entire engine from matching to pedagogy-detection in a session relies on some AI model.

We should teach people how to learn to learn. Learning to learn.

How to ask questions. This leads to how to form search queries and now how to write prompts.

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