When I was studying at MIT, I often had to wait 40-60 minutes in line just to get 5 minutes of “help” from a TA - when I needed 1-2 hours. I understood that TAs can’t spend all their time helping me. That’s understandable. But what made me bitter was that, the school went the extra mile to ensure I don’t have the resources to learn on my own,
1. Blocking access to solutions for past problems (to prevent cheating)
2. Purposely not recording explanations to increase attendance: https://piazza.com/class/ky0jj3k89mz5d2/post/9
3. Insisting that Office Hours is a 1-by-1 format even when crowded (to prevent solutions from leaking)
These policies have good intentions - it’s to encourage a synchronous, in-person learning experience. But in practice, it had side-effects:
1. Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours
2. Because help resources are inefficient, 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
3.Every day, I’d wake up, go to a lecture I don’t understand, go to Office Hours so I can hopefully ask for a review (which’d would take a few hours), realize TAs aren’t willing to do that, then realize there is nothing I can do to recover. I fell into a depression for many years, and my bitterness fueled me to work on the early versions of explanations.app
It turns out that universities succeed by being prestigious, not by teaching well. To win at prestige, be highly selective (by keeping supply low), keep a huge endowment (because it affects school rankings), and hire the best researchers (not teachers). This is actually the fundamental reason for the odd incentives in higher education, and something felt wrong.
So explanations.app is completely inspired by KhanAcademy and Youtube. The mystery to me was - why weren’t there more Youtube teachers & KhanAcademy videos? I believe it’s a combination of:
1. People who teach college subjects well often have better opportunities e.g. work, research
2. Lack of rewards: even Youtubers with 100K views and 10K subscribers would have at most 1-5 paying members on Patreon
On the one hand, there are all these free resources, where teachers changed the world way more than they ever got rewarded for. Then on the other hand, there is private tutoring - very effective - but very expensive e.g. $100/hour for college level subjects.
I believe the balanced solution is a system where lots of students pay $10/week to a few teachers who make videos, like a paid, Q&A Youtube/KhanAcademy, so it’s personalized, effective, but still affordable.
There are currently 2 teachers on explanations.app - Ben & Esther - both MIT grads, teaching physics & math for subjects like linear algebra and electromagnetism. 3 students - Laquazia, Lidija and Chandra from US, Serbia and Korea joined this month following r/physicsStudents launch: [https://www.reddit.com/r/PhysicsStudents/comments/1b2t5u6/i_started_a_program_where_mit_grads_do_physics/]
While explanations.app is focused on college-level math and physics, the platform is completely open for anyone to learn and/or teach. I hope you can try it :^) and give me the chance to work with you.