Although I agree that professors were not accessible, and TAs were often not that helpful. But, I never felt like I didn't have the resources I needed. I just lacked enough time.
I did feel like i would have been able to _learn_ better from a smaller school with fewer students, and teachers hired for teaching instead of research. But I still don't think that would have outweighed the benefit of the MIT community and resources.
The goal is to map out the prerequisite structures among all subjects as knowledge is actually a continuous map, and let everyone have their own personalized learning path. It's visualized like this: https://afaik.io/nebula?category=brickset&id=VLlOnZLl&mode=d.... The learning unit (called brick, like Lego brick) is designed to be 10 minutes, questions are asked at the end to check understanding.
Don't get me wrong; I love OCW and I think it's still one of the best free resources online. But I do think great resources combined with AI can bring such innovative edtech solutions that everyone can have their own private tutor almost for free, and most importantly, without worrying about hallucination effects.
>incredibly open policy on working together Yes this was mostly the case - except for course 6. Also, I - sadly - didn't have study groups. For a combination of reasons, including my flaws, I just wasn't good at making friends in college.
As for how it's different from a job board with zoom - the key is to solve the "scarcity" issue, in my opinion. Teaching 1-on-1 for n students scales O(n). If there's a way to teach n students O(log(n)) i.e. address all overlapping needs with videos that can be replayed infinitely, then address remaining personalization problems, that's the approach I believe in
As an MIT alum myself ('89), I am surprised to hear your description of your experience at MIT. Did you experience this across all classes and departments or only for a few (e.g. 18.01 which is required for most freshman)? While certain professors were not the most helpful, I found most of the teaching staff to be incredibly helpful when I made the effort to engage them. No doubt the focus was on attendance in lectures.
In addition to lectures there were: - Recitations - each class of the larger classes had recitations with a TA to allow smaller groups the opportunity to ask specific questions. - Office hours with the lecturer. I did not avail myself of them as I considered them useful for bigger questions (should I be a physics major if I don't understand this) rather then review of homework questions. - Bibles. Each living group (I was in a fraternity but dorms had them as well) had a library of class notes, exams, quizzes, etc for each class assembled by people who previously took the class and did well. Often the Bible author was still available for questions. - Friends/Fellow Students. MIT has an incredibly open policy on working together. My recollection is some classes could not be reasonably completed by people working alone (e.g. Aero/Astro's Unified Engineering). A fellow student may simply have looked at a topic from a different perspective which drove their comprehension.
Today, MIT offers OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) which hosts complete courses online (video, lecture notes, syllabi, additional readings, quizzes). This is an incredible resource that I have found helps my lifetime learning goals.
Again, I am always excited for edtech. I think its development needs to be tempered with an understanding of why current systems are not working. What problem are you solving? Is your solution simply remote tutoring? If so, how is it different that a job board with zoom?