Category: Education

A lot of discussion in education today focuses on how to make certain concepts more palatable to students and more easily understandable. However, it seems that there isn’t enough emphasis on teaching people how to learn those concepts, especially when they come from suboptimal explanations. I conceptualize this as a difference between teaching content vs teaching process, and in general I’d argue both are incredibly important for students’ future success. In this post, I elaborate further on some aspects of teaching process that I think we should incorporate more deliberately in education.

Many subjects are cumulative. Mathematics by nature is; many sciences end up being practically cumulative, since even if a theory is proven wrong at some extreme limit and replaced by another theory there, typically the old theory is still applicable enough to the phenomena it adequately addresses that it is still useful. A typical example in physics is the continued importance of classical mechanics, despite the fact that it has shown limitations and has had to be replaced by theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics. History and analysis of literature by nature are cumulative, and even subjects that deal “mostly” with analysis of current snapshots can still benefit from learning from the past in order to make better judgments and decisions for the future, making them somewhat cumulative as well.

Before last year, online education was somewhat more of a Silicon Valley experiment in the ways tech could enhance aspects of education and address some common issues with it. With the advent of COVID-19, schools that ordinarily wouldn’t have considered such a radical proposal anytime soon have been forced to live and breathe it fully. It’s not a stretch, then, to say that the kinks are still being ironed out in delivering effective online education. But as it becomes more prevalent and important, we must address those issues now more than ever. Let’s talk about one of the long-standing arguments against online courses that has been continually invoked until recently: classroom interactivity.