Structuring Competency-Based Courses Through Skill Trees
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
> Subskills cover skills
Isn't this requirement a common fallacy in education?
First, just because you know skill A and skill B does not mean you can automatically do both A and B together. (Of course it helps!)
Assume you're learning a to play piece of music. If you learn a given sequence [A, B] and start with individually learning the parts A and B you'd still have to practice the transition.
Second, just because you know a composite skill does not mean you can do each part individually.
Again assume you've learned to play a part of a piece of music and the notes constituting this part can be decomposed as [A, B]. Then you'd not directly know how to play B on it's own because you've propably learnt to enter B transitioning from A.
Still: I think the overvall approach is interesting. Just the details might be a bit off.
Whole careers have been built on being one of only a few people in the world who can perform A and B together. Like that physics guy who can also write good sci-fi.
There are 3 skills actually. A, B, and A u B. That intersection is often the hardest.
Stephen Baxter? Or someone else?
Jaaaaames Baaaaxter!
If you're in the top 10-20% at two different things, you might be in the top 1% of people who can do both.
[A, B]
[A, A->B, B]The kneejerk reaction of most businesses seems to be either metrics that don't really work or relying on hypercompetent individuals in the higher parts of the management tree. Neither approach works particularly well. But I haven't seen a skill tree style competency training & testing approach and I suspect it'd work better than the apparent status quo. At least on paper the managers have been trained to do something instead of just dumping smart people into the role and hoping that they figure it out.
For example someone can get certified in Agile and that is ... in some sense a bit silly because then they just spend the rest of their life noticing that most people don't use Agile. But a skill-based approach to the components of Agile development and training them to raise hackles in particular situations where people make common bad architectural decisions would cause productive cultural shifts. I suppose the sort of training that gets done doesn't go far enough.
That is, Kanban + Continuous Integration >> Scrum by a lot. Seen from that viewpoint sprints are not something that speeds anything up (seductive name there!) but rather a bunch of phony deadlines and needless meanings (you really think people feel psychologically safe in a retrospective meeting that was scheduled just to have a meeting? is there really something worth talking about in an every two week one-on-one in your manager which isn't important enough to knock on their door and ask about right now?)
If I was evaluating a manager I'd probably get them to give me a list of practices that they say their team is following and then check to for conformance against that. I am less bothered with do they do code reviews or not but rather "did they tell me that they enforce five conventions in the code and looking at the code I find they rarely do... Lets sit in on a code review"
In competitive athletics you will not sprint more than 400m, because sprint is anaerobic.
The fastest 400m ever run was 43.03 seconds.
I wonder which fields of knowledge are resistant to being structured like this from a learning perspective.
Universities employ this on a larger scale - degrees require classes that require passing grades and prerequisites. I like the idea of using it for smaller-scale learning like lessons, classes, and job training.
As a side note, I'm thinking about pursuing an MSc at Georgia Tech OMSC. I wonder if the online nature of it takes into account this kind of skill tree, or if it's more traditional.
There is no greater skill in computer science, science or mathematics than a deep understanding of theory. It is the understanding of how distinct things fit together, nothing could be as helpful. Yes, even when developing a JS web app.
I like how the paper lays out clearly the steps to create a skill tree, and some general guidelines.
The paper is perfect for use as part of an LLM prompt, e.g.
Using the approach detailed in the attached paper, create a skill tree for writing a magical realism novela.
Turn this into mermaid code. Don't use parentheses in labels.