High-cost monthly recurring fees is not right. Compare this with buying a book. You get a high-quality resource which you own, forever.
Generally, I love one-time payments for information products.
Math academy is definitely not what I'd call an information product.
Most of the difficulty in learning math is going through enough problem sets and getting feedback that you can use to iterate on your understanding. Mathacademy does this VERY well. I think one of the challenges of being an autodidect is in plotting the course of what you want to learn and then assembling the materials. Tnen you need a large amount of worked problems to test your understanding. I've taught myself a lot of subjects and there's a lot of time investment in just getting the lay of the land.
With mathacademy, I don't have to do any of that. I just sit down and do the problems. I don't think about the end goal. if I get it right, I do the next one. if I get it wrong, I read the feedback. figure out where I messed up and go to the next problem. Just the fact that those hours I would have spent figuing out what to learn before I could start actually drilling into the subject is worth the $50/month.
> And I don't think that comparing it to a personal tutor is fair.
agreed. they are not the same thing and they have different value propositions. a tutor's value will be listening to your understanding of the problem and explaining it to you in a way that might make more sense. It would be exorbitantly expensive to expect a tutor to generate problem set after problem set every day for you to go through and provide instant feedback while iterating on the problems presented to you based on how you're doing.
> Math Academy's pricing is obscene
Its higher than competing offerrings like Brilliant. but I've used Brilliant and I think mathacademy's approach is more effective.
- A math major
Without office hours and lectures, I would be completely lost. Math texts are a great starting point, but if you are of average or even above-average intelligence, you still need a qualified guide to navigate the textbook.
Can they achieve equal or better results than a tutor? That's a separate question, but that's the market they're in.
Normally you'd have to pay a tutor $50/hour. Multiply by 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, you're at $13,000/year. Bringing that down to $499/year (26x cheaper) makes mathematical talent development accessible to many, many more people. Sure, that's not everyone, and there are still people who are priced out. But to me at least, providing a 26x cheaper option feels like a good starting point towards a goal of making mathematical talent development accessible to more and more people.
Of course, the following question still remains: "Why do you even need the learning experience to feel like working with a personal trainer? What is the benefit over a textbook, Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc.?"
The answer to that question: learning efficiency.
Let me tell you about my own experience. I self-studied a bunch of math subjects on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) when I was in high school. OCW is a good resource and I came a long way with it, but for the amount of effort that I put into learning on OCW, I could have gone a lot further if my time were used more efficiently. Just to name a handful of inefficiencies in OCW:
- not super scaffolded → you periodically run into situations where you bang your head on a wall thinking "how the heck did they get from here to there?" and it takes a long time to figure out what kind of logical leap is happening (if you figure it out at all)
- doesn't track your knowledge / make sure you've mastered the prerequisites for anything new you're supposed to learn → you often feel a large gap between your level of knowledge and the new material, which leads to more banging your head on a wall trying to figure out what prerequisite knowledge you're missing and how to learn it
- no spaced review → you quickly get rusty on a lot of what you learn, which not only means you come out of the course having forgotten a lot of content, but even during the course, you're constantly forgetting prerequisites
- doesn't adapt to your level of performance → you waste a lot of your time doing the wrong amount of work. Sometimes you grasp a topic quickly and end up doing way more practice problems than you need; other times you struggle with a topic and don't do enough practice problems to reach mastery
- leaves the definition of "mastery" open to interpretation by the learner → as a learner, it's hard to know when you've mastered something well enough to continue moving forward. You often think you've learned something well enough, when you actually haven't -- but you won't know unless there's an expert who is evaluating your knowledge. On the flipside, you can also take things too far being a perfectionist, spinning your wheels on the same topic for a week over some minor point that doesn't make perfect intuitive sense to you, when it would be more productive to just keep moving forward and solidify your understanding by building on top of it.
I could keep going with this list (happy to do so if you're interested, just let me know), but by now you probably get the point: all of these things introduce unproductive friction into the learning process, leading you to make less educational progress per unit time/effort that you put towards learning.
That's one reason why I've been so motivated to help build Math Academy. We take away as much of this learning friction as possible and maximize your learning efficiency. We address all the above issues and more.
That's our main value proposition: sure, it's possible to learn math elsewhere, but it's way more efficient with us.
Efficiency is important not only because you make faster progress, but also because you're less likely to quit.
In practice, people get off the train and stop learning math once it begins to feel too inefficient. In anything you do, once the progress-to-work ratio gets too low, you're going to lose interest and focus on other endeavors where your progress-to-work ratio is higher.
Efficiency keeps that progress-to-work ratio as high as possible, keeping you on the math learning train as long as possible.
I realize that tutoring is typically done at a lower frequency, but I don't agree that the lower frequency is ideal. At least in my mind, when I imagine the Platonic ideal of an education, there is no real difference between "lesson" and "homework" -- minimum effective doses of instruction are interspersed with minimum effective doses of active problem-solving, where every single problem is carefully selected in response to the learner's performance on the previous problem(s).
If this characterization of the Platonic ideal accurate, then achieving it would require a tutor continually sitting next to the student, analyzing their performance on every single problem that they do, and deciding the exact moment to move the student on to a new topic or problem type. Of course, that is infeasible with human tutors, so we settle for one or two days per week where the tutor tries to get the student prepared enough to tackle the homework without being completely overwhelmed.
I would argue that, while 1-2 tutoring sessions per week can really make a difference in a student's education, a lot of learning efficiency is still left unrealized (compared to 5 tutoring sessions per week).