However I refer to something different, as FCC is a great platform but uses a standard, sort of traditional concept-exercise-reward system.
Many people tend to learn in different ways, and most websites still use quite old paradigms of learning.
But this is improving, no doubt.
I am curious how people think about building resources for education, for example, do you normally use theories from psychology to build the platforms ?
I’d be interested in building small projects for education in the area of mathematics and chemistry, at some point.
Are there people interested in this topic ?
Particularly I am interested in learning platforms for children 6-12 yo
I presume VR, or fully immersed envs are best but I lack this. If you know any such websites or projects or have any comments I’d be please to read.
A paradigm is a way to look at something, a bit a like a philosophy.
For example, there is the Montessori method, there are theories that align more to Piaget’s research, or to Vygotsky (search for scaffolding theory.)
There is so much that I’d even think of doing something a bit more abstract, like a site with implementations of exercises using different theories - or more aligned to.
There is also something called successive approximations, and there is learning where people emphasize more in using what the student has at hand etc.
There are ideas of a different kind as well like using a flipped classroom but that is more on the set up level, than in the types of exercises selected or created.
Would it work to have an educational model based not on lessons but on whatever the students choose to pick up?
For instance, in language study, with which I am most familiar, there are those who love memorizing vocab lists and those who retain vocabulary through interactive games, music, and reading.
Yes, that is an interesting aspect. So a platform that adapts to the students preferences to some extent. Yes. That is why I was looking for examples first, as it would be difficult to do it.
I don’t know any already extant sites, however, we could build a site in theory that works according to this idea.
We would need to find the students preference at some point, so we could do that by asking for the students preferences at sign-up, with an option to change at any time so they can try different styles.
Or we can log their course choices and structure their learning around that, though building a website with that degree of responsivity might be difficult, or possibly illegal, depending on legislation dealing with data logging.
Building a learning platform takes a lot of work, for freeCodeCamp things were focused primarily on the overall concept and less on the execution. The idea of a “free learn to code platform that is built around a curriculum that actually teaches you how to build the platform itself, that is funded by donations” is enough of a concept to build from that it didn’t necessarily need or want to focus on the “is this the best way to learn”?
There’s a lot of other challenges that need to be dealt with that usually come up before focusing on the more domain-specific topics of just teaching.
There are some platforms that leverage more than less, but building a platform around the theories themselves may or may-not work depending on the topics being taught and goals of the platform. This is due to technical limitations and the overall limitation of the medium.
Take for example freeCodeCamp, it has a very high drop-out rate simply due to the fact it’s accessible by anyone, anywhere online and is free.
A VR+fully immersed learning environment might be highly effective, but limited by a number of technical aspects, such as not many people having VR headsets, to more practical limitations such as how practical is it to make an “immersive learning environment” when Facebook threw down 10 billion dollars to make a terrible looking virtual world?
FCC itself is built around a number of limited factors, and uses a similar pattern as another of other pre-existing learning platforms such as gamification and visual based learning. Both of these are easy to implement practically, but it doesn’t mean it’s the best way to learn. To this point FCC is currently redoing some of the curriculum (the Responseive Web Design cert) to follow along with other patterns, specifically “project based” rather than “challenge based”.
I am not sure starting off with a complex project is a good idea. But start with an extremely simple idea and some solid concepts behind could do.
I have checked khanacademy in the past, apart from FCC. They have very robust learning resources with good explanations but quite bad strategies for presenting a topic and making people learn, I think. There may be the need to scan a bit the landscape before coding anything.
I am up for the languages’ learning exercises, being myself also interested in it. It could be necessary to use some ML for this user-specific evolution of the exercises.
