On the other hand, material in a medium to large lecture is rarely custom tailored to individual students. If half of the class doesn't understand what slope represents in a supply curve, the experience is ruined for the more gifted students desiring to learn the finer points of economics. Once a lecture regresses into basic concepts you already know, at the loss of interesting finer points, it's quite easy to zone out and lose focus. When the "instructor" to student ratio is 1:1, custom tailoring can really benefit those outside the norm.
Even more, the student is driving the educational vehicle. It's quite empowering to be able to skip over videos about concepts I already know, especially when I can confirm my thoughts with a basic exercise (e.g., a multiple choice question, or short code prompt).
Where does this idea come from that the title should be the same? Granted, the current title isn't quite perfect either -- "Study Reports Software Speeds Up Teaching" would be more accurate -- but it's at least more informative, and certainly no more editorial, than "Score One for the Robo-Tutors".
It is suggested although not mandated by the Hacker News guidelines:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
. . . .
"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."
The retitling in this case seems to have been effective for eliciting more discussion, and I appreciate the various interesting comments here. I regret cases where I submit an article with an original title, only to find out that the same article was submitted hours before with a retitled submission title, one that is missed by Hacker News participants and does not elicit discussion. Most professionally published articles have well written headlines, and it is often hard for HN participants to improve upon those.
Headlines may be professionally written, but they are written with incentives which don't favor HN readers. Most of the time, I'd prefer to hear why the submitter thinks I should read something rather than why the author does.
Honestly, I would be more interested in seeing the comparison between variation in time/scores for hybrid + traditional formats. My hunch is that the smartest people are significantly dragging up the hybrid scores. My personal experience in class is that professors tend to teach at a rate acceptable to the top ~75% of the class, leaving the top ~5% feeling like class is moving like a glacier. And then there's the fact that each student typically gets stuck at slightly different points, so if a lecturer is to clarify each of these points, there's a LOT of redundancy being thrown around.
Secondly, this is an interesting result, but not too surprising. Working through exercises on your own with software that presumably identifies and targets area of weakness ought to put the onus of learning on the student.
On the other hand, many college students sitting in a lecture don't engage the material themselves to the same degree and instead rely on the professor to "teach" them instead attempting to learn it on their own.
In fact, I'm sort-of surprised the machine-learning students didn't do better than the lecture-listening ones.