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Request for Education Startups

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Education Startups

#131

Post by rtpg »

shanev wrote: post #106
graniter wrote: post #47

It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…

Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy thinks we should flip the classroom [1]. Students watch high quality lectures at home given by the best instructors on the topic, then do "homework" in class, with the teacher being there for assistance. Sounds like a worthy approach to me. The problem is, how can you get a school board to adopt something like this? Who leads the effort? How can you implement changes to such an en…

This is how my math classes in the early 2000s worked.

We show up to class. Teacher talked for maybe 5 minutes. Then we would sit down in groups of 4 and work on exercises. These exercises were very socratic method. Ex:

- Measure some right triangles

- calculate the squares of the lengths of the sides

- Do you notice anything?

- Here's some non-right triangles, does your hypothesis still stand?

Then some application of the introduced concepts.

Kids would help each other within the group, and a teacher would come in to help facilitate this.

This was all the math classes for about 3 years, and was great at helping kids learn to do math, explain solutions to others, and build basic social skills.

I've had a couple programming workshops like this as well, and they're invariably successful. Even the worst people can find help from either the teachers/coordinators or people who aren't having difficulties.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#132

Post by banachtarski »

alexashka wrote: post #130
shanev wrote: post #84

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…

The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim? This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess. Education is not in trouble - the economic model that makes it difficult to go study, learn and get to apply that knowledge and those skills to solving real problems is. Go ask enginee…

Sorry if this isn't super constructive, but I read your comment twice and don't have the foggiest idea of what you're trying to say. It feels like you're just being contrarian and ranting against, sort of everything?

Re: Request for Education Startups

#133

Post by rahimnathwani »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #118

I'm making my own learning materials for self-studying Chinese. https://pingtype.github.io VoiceTube is a similar startup company that scaled this up to help people learn English. http://www.voicetube.com I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business. I emailed 100 Chinese teachers in universities around Taiwan, but didn't get any replies. If someone wants to do the business and market…

> https://pingtype.github.io

> I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business.

A couple of suggestions:

1) Find someone learning Chinese who's physically near you (so you can be in the same room) but who you don't know personally, e.g. someone at a meetup. Open your site, and give them your laptop and observe what they do. (Don't ask them questions, until they get stuck and ask for help. Just observe.)

2) Try to answer these questions:

- What do you have now (data and/or functionality)?

- To what people could those be useful?

- In which contexts?

- What else would they need in order to get started using this?

3) Try out some other Chinese learning tools (ChinesePod, Popup Chinese, Decipher Chinese, Chairman's Bao, ...) and, for each one, make notes on paper about each thing that happens after you first visit the site (or open the app). That will help you understand onboarding flows.

My email is in my profile if you'd like to discuss in detail. I'm in Beijing, so same time zone as Taiwan.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#134

Post by Vinnl »

shanev wrote: post #84

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…

That's a very narrow definition of education. If all I learned was what's in the curriculum, then maybe, but being around peers at the same level, being able to make mistakes (in the broad sense of the word) in a safe environment, getting to learn how people work... It's going to be quite a bumpy ride before we'll be able to properly replicate that online.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#135

Post by akerr »

graniter wrote: post #127
matt4077 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> own "industrial revolution / doesn't seem to scale well / it's inefficient / improvements are [..] cost prohibitive / that parent pay for / can't we reward the best / We need tech / scale the classroom / deliver it cheaply / separation of concerns I'm not disagreeing that it's a good idea to always look for ways to improve schools. But i'd like to point out that you're framing these issues in almost exclusively eco…

Yes I used those terms intentionally because I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching. There are good teachers, but we don't have a good way to scale them. The industrial revolution provided a way to replicate and scale good manufacturing. So maybe we can learn from that. I don't mean that education should be done like manufacturing, just that the lessons of how to scale may app…

Scaling teachers is often called team-teaching and coaching, i.e. training more teachers to be more effective. Effective teacher-teacher relationships are a good predictor for effective teacher-student relationships. Broadcast one-to-many relationships aren’t effective for bidirectional factors crucial to education such as feedback or empathy (this is where people are different to mass production or say entertainment).

Re: Request for Education Startups

#136

Post by sannee »

KGIII wrote: post #100
untilHellbanned wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ycombinator doesn't care about credentials? Sam Alton - Stanford Drew Houston - mit Collision brothers - mit/harvard Airbnb guys - RISD We could go on, so let's do... Please tell me honestly if you think google Facebook Amazon Microsoft would be where they were without the "traditional credentials" of their founders? Stanford, harvard, Princeton, harvard, respectively. At this point all these SV demigods like Ravikan…

Do those folks really count as traditional credentials? Google founders suspended their Ph.D. programs. Bezos has a BS. Gates dropped out. Zuckerberg dropped out.

> Gates dropped out.

> Zuckerberg dropped out.

Both of them managed to get into Harvard, which is an academic achievement in itself though.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#137

Post by sannee »

germinalphrase wrote: post #57
randyrand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you closely followed this advice, I don't think Kahn academy would have been invented. What teachers want and what students needs are not the same.

Perhaps, but KA is a supplement - not a replacement for - more traditional in-person educational experiences.

KA lecture videos were much more in-depth and much more useful than any high school math lesson I ever received.

I mean, Khan is obviously a top teacher, if he wasn't, he'd get replaced by Johnie Academy or whatever pretty quickly. You can't really staff every high school with top teachers, especially if they earn below average wage (that's the case where I live).

It's also a feature of the whole digital format. The lecture can be bugfixed until there are no mistakes left. And have you ever tried telling your high school teacher to rewind 3 minutes and speak 2x times as quickly?

Re: Request for Education Startups

#138

Post by jansho »

shanev wrote: post #84

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…

Respectfully, I disagree with a lot of the points here.

School isn't just about credentialing or dishing out information. You learn a lot about interacting with others, getting a social life, developing relationships with different people, discovering more about yourself and the list goes on. Even a bad experience is still an experience.

I'm in the digital learning field and can get doe-eyed about the potential of tech. But the Internet will never replace teachers. Many online courses can be excellent alternatives to class-learning, but not everyone learns best from sole Internet use or auto-didacting. And of course, when you do have a good teacher, that's irreplaceable.

Credentials can be a form of an elitist badge - so if this is the problem, then perhaps the best way to tackle it is to change mindsets, rather than change the whole system. Many good employers seem to be aware of this already.

I sometimes lean towards meritocracy too but it is terribly dangerous to apply Darwinism to education. Education is a right. Everyone NEEDS education, regardless of who they are and their level of natural intelligence. If the system starts favouring a certain type of people, or worse, implement a Darwinist funnel, that would be tragic for the majority of people, and will have a dangerous impact on society overall.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#139

Post by franciscop »

shanev wrote: post #84

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…

I totally second this. I studied Industrial Engineering in the University (in one of the toughtest universities in Europe). However I didn't go to class most of the times, only to some mandatory ones. What I did instead was:

- Watch youtube lectures/tutorials of the hardest topics. These would be mostly from Latin-American universities or from Indian Universities. Study on my own and pass these subjects.

- Learn programming on my own. This has had huge benefits and that's what I do now for a living (and for fun).

- Create https://makersupv.com/ with a bunch of other high-drive students. We learned and taught so many things.

- Work and go as a Exchange Student to Tokyo University.

It took me a bit longer to finish. I almosy dropped out at some point since it felt a bit pointless but there are advantages of having a degree (applying for a visa for instance).

However, many of my classmates were studying the same degree because it is the one with high chance of getting a job afterwards. I would see them suffer everyday learning things they didn't care about just not to starve to death afterwards in Spain.

From these experiences, I would say that the desire to learn is quite high, however perverse incentives are easily mixed together, which also push people who want to learn away.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#140

Post by jamesrcole »

alexashka wrote: post #130
shanev wrote: post #84

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…

The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim? This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess. Education is not in trouble - the economic model that makes it difficult to go study, learn and get to apply that knowledge and those skills to solving real problems is. Go ask enginee…

> The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim?

Personally, I have no idea where the best teachers are, but you don't make any attempt to back up your claim.

> This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess.

First of all, the issue is never whether X will completely solve a problem. It's whether it can help, and how much it can help.

If you think about the last 500 years, there is no question that technology has helped make people, on the whole, less short sighted. The improvements it's helped enable in education, in our knowledge of the world, in the dissemination of knowledge. They have made us more aware of others, of consequences, and so forth.

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