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Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by cjrd on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @11:49PM (#8146203)
Roger Grosse and I (Colorado Reed) were just chatting about this article: we created http://www.metacademy.org with this goal in mind.

Recently, we've been discussing the future of Metacademy and how we can better work towards building an open, flexible, and modular educational system. I'd love to hear any ideas (if you're in Berkeley, I'm also open for a coffee-chat on this topic!)

Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by incision on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:36AM (#8146297)
Very nice. I'll be using this.

* At a glance, some sort of automated progress tracker would be my first request. I'm certain that I'll end up missing sections and/or losing my place and drifting away as long as it's manual.

* Offering an estimate time to completion is great. Leveraging those estimates to give me an option to select 'something that will fit in 5/15/60 minutes' from my current topics would be even better.

* The site snaps, that's great.

* Creating a TOC of the off-site content (video, books) in the overview of each roadmap would be nice. If I decide that I'm going to commit to follow one of these roads I'm going to be looking to source the books and download the videos so that I can watch them on the subway.

* Interactive 'exercises' where possible. This is a major plus of the EdX courses I've done - submitting results or complete Python code and getting instant feedback.

* Suggested background / prerequisites for a roadmap would be nice as well.

Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by cjrd on Thursday August 07, 2014 @11:58AM (#8148388)
Great feedback, thank you. I agree that better progress tracking would be quite helpful. Also, we hadn't thought of giving people learning material based on the amount of time that they have to study -- really interesting idea.
Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by biohax2015 on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:37AM (#8146299)
Any plans on implementing business lessons as well? Searching 'marketing','finance', and 'accounting' came up with nothing. As much as I love studying the hard sciences, I feel that at least some degree of familiarity with the domain of business could significantly help the scientist or engineer when they are out looking for jobs, working within a large company, or trying to start their own thing.

A good business curriculum (or even just a series of classes) is something that I find lacking online, as well as within the STEM majors at my university.

Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by cjrd on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:00PM (#8148398)
We're currently discussing whether to aim for breadth or depth with metacademy, i.e. whether we want to work towards becoming the "ultimate AI resource" or a differently structured wikipedia. If you, or someone you know, has the necessary knowledge/interest to contribute business content, we'd love to work with them to add it to metacademy.
Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by hliyan on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:17AM (#8146260)
This is great. I was wondering whether it's possible to have a more formal way of scheduling studying and marking progress (beyond the checkmark, I mean) -- like the ability to create a prioritized list of concepts, set some dates and track completion. And maybe maintain my own little summary notes and maybe even check others' publicly shared notes?
Re:The future of MIT education looks more global, modular, a... by cjrd on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:21AM (#8146269)
Great point - the checkmark is a trivial attempt: quizzes would be better, and as you mentioned, a review schedule. And the "notes" idea is fantastic (or maybe even flashcards with an Anki-like review schedule); we discussed it several months ago but it fell off the radar. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!