Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#1

Post by lifeisstillgood » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

My kids are in lockdown homeschooling, and sitting in on some of the live lessons you can see the cracks - very slow, kids moving at different paces, and much much harder for teacher to see who is keeping up and not.

Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.

There is quality "content" out there - but how do we ensure "mastery" is achieved (ie the concepts understood). It seems quite feasible but who is working on it? What are the impacts when we go back to normal?

What as time constrained parent should I look at? (beside spending "quality" time with them. They don't like that :-)

PS There are seemingly complete areas like thenational.academy or khanacademy but I am not sure how they linknsubjects to syllabus (especially US/UK syllabuses)

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#2

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:02 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#3

Post by abdullahkhalids » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:31 PM UTC

> Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.

Lots of people think they learn better from eloquent teachers (on Youtube or otherwise), and while that helps, it is far from sufficient to attain mastery of a subject. Mastery is achieved when you do; do practice problems, do timed tests, discuss concepts with those better, equal or worse than you, etc.

The value add of teachers at your school/university is that they assign problems to you at the average skill level of the class, and they give space for discussions, but most importantly change the difficulty of the course, or go over stuff in a different way if you fail to understand.

If you want to create good remote education, you will have to at least create these values as well.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#4

Post by aminozuur » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

If you don't care about credentials, then it is largely already here. I've been learning javascript online from the worlds best teachers.

Though this doesn't work if you're learning microbiology and need access to a $1M laboratory.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#5

Post by dave_sid » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

I think there’s a React component.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#6

Post by prohobo » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:36 PM UTC

Sorry, I don't have an answer but this is an interesting problem. For one, kids haven't been taught to teach themselves - and most kids aren't interested in learning anyways because they don't see any incentive.

Schooling has traditionally used social pressure and a present authority figure to ensure students actually participate. Online, both of those are basically gone.

Technically, there's actually potential benefit to guiding a student into becoming self-reliant in terms of schooling (and so, obviously, in work & life). Also, we're all aware that there are countless great resources for learning online. The crux of the problem is really how to incentivize it.

I think the solution involves:

1) Getting a curriculum (solved by the school)

2) Finding good resources for learning it (takes some digging)

3) Incentivizing the learning

4) Keeping track (some kind of online tool like Notion maybe?)

Maybe a good incentive is to simply have suitable rewards for completing tasks and getting good grades. Pair that with embellishments to the curriculum - like say, you get to learn some extra stuff by watching Bill Nye - and I think you can get a kid to want to learn.

I learned Calculus entirely online and aced my exam, but that was after failing it and becoming desperate to move on. Negative incentive clearly worked for me, but I don't recommend it.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#7

Post by cernocky » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:37 PM UTC

I will give you a very partial answer. It's not about any concrete syllabuses but the whole approach to life and world. The answer varies a lot based on their age, school year, level etc. But in general, I would recommend you to plant a seed of self-education abilities in their life, if haven’t already. By those abilities I mean mostly self-reflection but also others which result from self-reflection: self-assessment, self-directed learning and going further even self-determined learning. These are abilities that will help them to understand how they stand in any situation and adapt to unpredictable changes in the fast-changing world we indeed live in. Of course, the journey of life-long learning is a long run. I can elaborate more on this if it helps you.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#8

Post by qsort » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

If remote or partially remote education is to become the default, you have to scrap the teacher-students-classroom model; it hardly works in real life and it's even worse when not happening in a physical space.

Moving to a fully asynchronous model is the only way you can maintain any semblance of educational standards. Put content online, have the students access it at their own leisure. Use the saved time to arrange live QA/interactive sessions for the teachers to unblock the students if they need that (it is also a nice excuse to silently check everyone's progress). Quit the cheating/surveillance arms race, fully embrace open-book tests and oral exams.

I'd also say, try really hard not to go full remote, at least for middle school and below. There are advantages to both approaches, and a completely remote education is much harder to make work.

What individuals can do, I'm not really sure, I guess it depends on what your local school is doing/allows at the moment. Fighting the bureaucracy hardly worth anybody's time.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#9

Post by TruffleMuffin » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

I work in this area and the answer to some of your questions are really already available. Rubrics/CASE/CLR/Learning Outcomes etc are known within the teaching community. Their implementation in the digital space is where you are seeing the gap. A traditional classroom environment doesn't always translate into a digital one for the reasons you specify, but thats not the only way to do it.

Re: Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system

#10

Post by joshmlewis » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

One would think teaching 20 5-year olds online would be an insurmountable task but it's actually been my wife's best year teaching after 6 years of in person teaching at one of the best schools in the county. The parents have been extraordinarily nice and have gone out of their way to share gratitude and one family even sent a bottle of wine.

She went from in person teaching kindergarten last year to doing the districts virtual program this year. The district has 72,000 students in K-12 and around 15% of them signed up to do all virtual this year. To give you an idea of scale, just the kindergarten teachers the virtual program has would've been more teachers than an entire traditional school would have (over 40). Most elementary schools have around 4-5 K5 teachers. The teachers still had a similar number of students as normal (around 20) and they primarily use Google Meet for live classes and Seesaw for assigning and turning in work.

Most of her students have shown improvements throughout the year so far during assessments which is promising and means teaching small children online is actually possible. She meets with the whole class at 7:45 for around 15 minutes and then does small groups from 8-10 with groups of 3-4 kids. Sometimes that goes into individual instruction as well while she gives a task to the small group and then meets 1on1 with a student individually. She meets back up with all the kids at 10 for another class lesson. From around 10:30 - 12:30 the students have PE/Art/Music with another teacher and then she does another group lesson, and then small groups, etc. until 1:30 when instruction is done for the day.

There was a learning curve at first but now most of the students are able to login to their correct classes at the right times which blows me away. The fact 5-year olds are able to more or less keep their own schedule and do assignments on their Chromebook should not be a surprise I guess but it still blows my mind.

This format has really allowed her to get way more done than she normally would during a regular school day. In person she would be at school from 7am-3pm most days plus a 20 minute commute. Having breaks during the day to do planning has been a great gift that would normally be taken up by other things in person. I can also get into the curriculum and how that worked going from 0 but this is already getting long. Happy to answer any questions if there are any.