Skip to main content

Thoughts on Education

I feel a bit down when getting informed that one of my mid-term test is below average. Honestly, I didn't master that course solidly. I know roughly how it works, but the lack of practice make the foundation very vulnerable.

I recall one of the courses I am currently taking online, a machine learning course taught by Stanford. Surprisely, I master that material much better than the school courses though the difficulty levels between these two courses are similar.Two very important aspects worth highlighting is the weekly online tutorial sets&programming exercises+ the active peer forum learning. I feel uncomfortable if I didn't finish the tutorials&programming exercises with 100% accuracy. This feeling never occurs in the university tutorial classes as I didn't get timely feedback on how well I am doing in the tutorials. But this feeling came very often when I was still in high school in China. Teachers will announce tutorials after each class and we'll have to finish them before the deadline and then get feedback in the next class. This feedback system works efficiently.  However, one problem with this feedback system is that it is highly dependent on the responsibility &efficiency of teachers and this system is not customized for every student.

Doing the supplemental exercises and getting timely feedback seem to be essential for mastering the course materials. I remember one of the seniors in the CS3216 pitch session told us about his experiment of gamifying the learning experience for his secondary students. It works extremely good. The news about Prof.Ben's JFDI Academy also makes me think further on how the web can positively change our ways of learning.  Feedback can come from peers, oneself, teachers, anyone else. The more efficient the feedback system is, the better the learning outcome it would get. For the traditional approach, the role of teachers will have a higher weight than self-feedback+peers feedback. However, I think a better model would be self>reliable resources>peers>teachers>others. The question here is how can we gather all the reliable resources for customization. It reminds me of Google/Quora/Wikipedia. However, these systems are still too generic. A secondary school student will hardly trust these systems if they can find direct help from peers/teachers. A more customized learning community is need to be created for customized groups of people

Education is important and it is a long-term project. I'll probably pick a education-related start-up company in Israel to work with. 路漫漫其修远兮

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Imagine I will read it in 5 years(part II)

It is a war and those who fight and survive might become heroes of tomorrow. Top inspirations I learned from this crisis are as follows: 1. As a company or a government, risk management is super important. Those who manage the risks well and planned ahead could possibly overcome hard times and survive strong. One of the key principles for risk management is to distribute the risks over multiple buckets. To a B2B business or country, the key competitiveness would lie in supply chain management, getting the right suppliers and deliver to the end buyers. In the past, the key decision will be primarily influenced by the cost factor. In a low-risk environment, it would be fine. However, in a high-risk environment, this may break, and cost could be much less a factor than the following two factors: The reliability of the supplier The alternative choices in case of the supply chain breakdown. This reminds me of the fruits suppliers in SG's supermarkets. Even for oranges, it c...

IPAD/FB Seminar- Thoughts on Pulse News

Monday's presentation was full of interesting sparks. Of all the eleven teams, only one chose to present FB app, which is Sims Social. The others all chose to present ipad apps. That's not so surprising as Ipad(Tablets) is the most recent platform and there are a lot of blank spaces for us to fill in. The ten ipad apps shared in the seminar covers various fields like e-payment, news-media, education. What surprised me most is that many of us find education a very promising area for mobile app development...As ipads are being utilized as an educational tools in various educational levels, education is really going to be a great pie. Wait, I need to finish comments for my assigned app first. Pulse News, a news media app with good social features. News media are getting more social and mobile and probably "cloudy" in the recently years. Organizing news media contents can be a promising area since there are always interesting things happening around and people just have...

Pause and Retrospect

I recently enjoyed a swift lunch with an old friend, who was once my roommate during our school years. We had an in-depth conversation about life and career. To my mind, his thought process is far more mature than mine, and his decisions seem more future-oriented. Although our conversation was private, I believe certain insights should be shared with a broader audience. 1. The Role of Luck in Life.  His life experiences have significantly highlighted the impact of luck. While I'm not ready to accept this fully, similar sentiments have been echoed by other successful and wise individuals I've interacted with. I also recently watched an informative video that lucidly explains the 80/20 rule and the principle of luck. The video demonstrates through "agent-based modelling" how the wealthiest person isn't necessarily the most talented but is usually someone of average talent who encounters multiple lucky events in life.  I agreed that luck indeed plays a vital role and...