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Comment by battery423 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously right?

I mean look at the state of universities today: Around the globe every semester a professor is standing in front of a class, presenting material and they will do this again and again.

Every professor is doing it a little bit different but the main message is the same. In Math its probably even closer between universities while history or social studies might be further appart.

Where is our central / global learning platform? Which tracks all progress? Allows you to chose what professor explains to you certain topics? Tools to support you, nugget of wisdom explaining to you certain small parts of the lecture?

YouTube explained to me a few concepts i just didn't get while listing to the professor.

This is ridiculous!

Try to find lectures for free online which are above 101 curses. The video quality is shit, no exercises nothing.

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I think you have a fundamentally wrong conception of what it takes to learn advanced concepts. In most cases you can't autograde or award points for everything, it also isn't what University education should be about. It is sad enough that during the Bologna reforms in Europe University education was "industrialised" as much as possible (ECTS points, core modules, etc.).

In the best case a University education in a STEM field will lead you pretty quickly (within 3-5 years) to do research in a lab that does cutting edge work. Most of that lab work can't be distributed or done online, nor can any of the preparatory lab courses in small groups with constant supervision (which are a large part of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine degrees). Even in subjects such as math and computer science a huge part is exercises that are graded and then discussed in small groups of 10-20 people. This wouldn't easily translate to an online experience either.

Universities like Cambridge even offer 1:1 supervision in Math and Physics, this can be totally awesome and is non-replaceable by video chat or online forums.

I have studied for a year next to my job.

My biggest challenges was to find material which explained to me certain concepts. Stuff like 'why can you transform this mathematical notion to this short form? How do you know that? Oh i learned that in the gym' YouTube helped, other students helped but it was time consuming.

It would have helped me much more if i would have had a proper central source of high quality material. That would have allowed me to understand it easier and better and with less effort for others around me.

THIS then should free up those people to do more 1:1 supervisions (which might be common in Cambridge but is not everywhere the same). It should also allow those people to optimize how material is explained.

And this allow more people to get education which is key.

And i don't think this should just start at university level. Why not start with when you are baby for your parents?

Well these centralised resources are books. There are high quality (almost standard) books for most subjects. Want to learn Analysis at a Graduate level? Pick one of the popular books Rudin (for example) and work through it. Same goes for Quantum Field Theory (Peskin & Schroeder, Zee, Srednicki,...) and tons of other subjects.

The lectures are often only a guided tour through one of those books (at least at the undergraduate and early graduate level). In many ways lectures are still la huge advantage of course because most of these books are too long to be useful (I still have some guilt when I think about how little I absorbed of the 500+ pages experimental condensed matter book we used). Often the exercises then cover things that were not explicitly explained in the lecture but can be worked out with the help of the book.

Those are books you start reading one page and then you do research on this page until you got it.

The density is to high and there is no use of modern technology at all to link to explanations or guidance for it.

How would you scale assessment of exercises further than eg. coursera already does?

Coursera is not the central learning platform, its a course platform.

You don't log in to see your learning graph which will give you the CS Bachelors Degree. You need to choose a course which will give you a CS Bachelors Degree.

Imagine you log into Coursera and you want to have a comparable Degree. You would choose courses to learn 'nodes' of your learning graph. But you could choose which one. You could learn the security topic from a course from someone from harvard and you could learn security topic from someone in germany.

You choose your language, you choose your medium. Might be that a lot of text + 1-2 explain videos help you more then a 2h lecture.

Might be that you can choose between implementing a program or do a presentation.

It might even be required for you to listen to a presentation from other students. Or create your own small programming tasks for others.

This could become the best curated/crowd created biggest collection of educational material in the world.

I think your sentiment is great overall and I agree with it in essence. But realistically, there are way more obstacles to something like this than just creating a platform, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Especially when you mentioned above, "why not start when you're a baby" which I think you meant start at a young age. kinder-gardens, preschools, schools, are not only used as a place for education, unfortunately. Parents NEED their kids to be in someone else's care for a good part of the day. The current pandemic has made that even clearer if it already wasn't.

Additionally, the sheer number of people that need education is not only enormous, it's growing. Not only that, we are all different, with different needs. Some don't have computers, some don't have internet, or paper, or pens, or food. Some won't be able to learn how to read from home or learn math. Some are deaf or blind.

Again, that's all before getting to higher education. Universities, despite their bad record and resistance to change, are a place where a lot of research happens. I'm not talking only about the US. Let's forget about the US for a second since the scope of your comment goes beyond that. We are talking about identifying, recording, and distributing courses from professors from around the globe. How do you decide who's good enough? How to decide who's getting paid and who's not? Most Universities and Colleges have more than one professor per subject area.

Again, I agree with the sentiment but I wanted to share a larger perspective because I thought your comment was interesting and worth discussing.

I thought about this as well and the benefit of such a platform would be that depending on what your role is, the platform can do different things for you:

- You are a teacher -> you can make sure you teach related stuff like the rest of the world. You can share and exchange learning material, you can track your students - You are a parent -> you don't need it often but you might need to see early if your kid is struggling or you wanna have some extra material for your kid to exercise with - You are in a government position -> you can use it to get your curriculum - You are an help organization and you need stuff to print out for some remote village without internet

I'm not saying that i have fixed/analysed all issues coming from it but i do see a huge benefit if we as a society centralize it more then what it is right now.

And to add to my comment:

this platform could even have stuff like spaced repetition build in!

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