The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).

When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.

Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.

Not op, but a few examples:

1. Test structures that reward good time management. The paper SAT is a good example of this. The early items in a section are (were?) easy, the middle items were medium difficulty, and the toughest items were towards the end. A good test take would manage their time so that they spent the most amount of time on questions that could improve their scores — later questions for high achievers, but the middle questions for folks who were missing a lot of questions in that range.

2. Test structures that reward endurance. Again, SAT is a good example. How often have examinees sat down in a multi-hour high-stakes testing situation before taking the SAT. “Not often enough to feel comfortable” is usually the answer. I have taken some foreign language proficiency tests that were also multi-hour long endeavors. I practiced answer old exam questions in a testing environment, so the tests were easy for me. Some of my peers did not, and fatigue seemed to be a part of their challenge.

3. I took some “issue spotter” tests in college. I had never heard of or seen an issue spotter test before. I bombed my first one. My professor kindly walked me through things he knew I knew the answers to that would what given me credit. I aced all future issue-spotter exams. Side note: familiarity with test/question format seems to matter for better students, but it largely doesn’t for unmotivated students. Many studies on familiarity with test/question format show no correlation, but my personal experience (as a test giver) is that this is due to lumping the unmotivated and ambivalent examinees with the folks who notice, care, and take action.

There are many more answers to your question, but the above are few decent examples.

If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).

I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.

Though I do believe schools need an edu version of YouTube. YouTube kids is too childish for older students. But regular YouTube has too much inappropriate stuff on it. That's a tough one.