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But "accessibility issues" could completely change the way people learn. What if each student could access the kind of instruction one gets at Philips Exeter or Princeton University? Or what if the tailored aspect of private instruction could be scaled up? For example, if you give a tough math problem to 1,000,000 students, and want to have a tutor walk them through the problem, you'd need to have 1,000,000 tutors. But there are probably only 20 types of mistake one can make on a given math problem. So if you had a "choose your own adventure" solution, one math teacher could, in a month, record lessons that reach a hundred million students at a personalized level. Or, one could make a cost-effective way to learn from the absolute top practitioners in a field. Most people cannot afford private basketball lessons with an NBA basketball coach, for example. But let's say such a coach watched 10,000 people play basketball for five minutes each, and recorded five minutes of feedback for each person (about one year of full-time work). Then, you could upload a video of you playing, you could algorithmically analyze the user's playing style, and match them to the person in the set of 10,000 that matches them best. The five minutes of feedback might be really useful to that person, and can be delivered at scale. |
Not quite. There may be 20 different types of mistake you could make on the problem (I would make a lower estimate, personally), but you can make them in several different places, and the influence of a mistake will be felt in the rest of the problem.
Udacity deals with this currently by never assigning complicated problems that might see a mistake in one step show up in a later step; this isn't quite ideal as instruction, but it makes it possible to automate handling the assignments.
Some relevant cartoons:
http://spikedmath.com/240.html
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3011