The Future of Online Learning for Knowledge Work
Online learning has become the engine that drives knowledge work. But online learning sites aren’t built for knowledge workers.
We’re building Learney — a learning platform created for knowledge workers that:
- Maps knowledge in a network of concepts and dependencies, accumulated from the best online learning resources
- Learns to tailor content for you based on your knowledge, interests and aims
- Engages learners with question-answer format, ensuring long-term memory through spaced repetition
If you want this to exist, register interest here
Why is this needed?
Historically, educational content has been structured as linear, one-size-fits-all courses. The “sage on the stage” model was the only way to teach. But this inherited model of learning in factory-like batches means individual learners lose out. Who hasn’t sat in a lecture in which they were lost from minute 5 on? Or that they wished would hurry up?*
You may think that online courses have solved this as you can set your own pace. Yet the course model keeps the individual concepts covered and their order fixed.** This is fine if you’re looking for a general overview of a topic or for giving certificates. But typically knowledge workers have specific aims and aren’t interested in certificates. Also, they differ in their backgrounds, interests and aims — their learning platform should reflect this.
Why does this matter?
Sub-optimal challenges blunt the learning process. Psychological research on the flow-state explains why.*** If what you’re doing is too easy, you get bored; too difficult and you become anxious. To get ‘in the zone’, you must autonomously tackle optimally difficult challenges which give instant feedback.
When learning, optimal challenges are to be found just beyond your existing abilities. Skipping known concepts and revealing the dependencies for unknown concepts is key to effective education. Instant feedback means that material should be presented interactively. And the requirement for autonomy means you must be able to choose your own path and aims.
Current approaches aren’t optimised for flow. Search engines offer autonomy but lack the context of your aims and knowledge base to tailor results to you. Meanwhile, courses’ one-size-fits-all really means one-size-fits-none as flow is constantly disrupted.
Learney
It has now become possible to be radically different. That’s why we’re building Learney, a learning platform that applies the latest in psychology, neuroscience and machine learning to online education.
Learney is structured as a network, with nodes representing concepts and edges showing dependencies — what you need to know to understand a new idea. Each node is associated with the best educational content from the wealth of freely available content from across the internet. This structure saves time for knowledge workers. Revealing the dependencies means you can immediately see how to best learn what you want.
We can then build up a representation of your knowledge-base through interactive question-answer content. Not only is this more engaging than a lecture, but it makes long-term memory a choice by using spaced repetition of questions on the concepts that matter to you. [1][2]
The best part? This means Learney can adapt to you and recommend a path through the network to achieve your aims. And the more you use it, the better it will get — providing increasing ongoing value to users, unlike any other education platform.
What’s more, the way Learney is structured — the map-like structure of content — matches how the brain structures new information. The spatial environment is critical to survival, so over millions of years brains evolved to build spatial maps. Subsequently, these maps were hijacked by conceptual cognition. We think spatially, and Learney is built to reflect this. [3]
Together, this means we’re building a unique platform, what we think is the future of online education: a platform based on the latest in psychology, neuroscience and machine learning.
Tell us what you think — is this a vision for better online education? [4] If so, show your support by registering interest here: learney.me
References:
- https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
- http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
- https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaat6766/tab-pdf
- https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-vision-of-ai-for-joyful-education/
Footnotes
* These aren’t our only problems with lectures — they’re largely non-interactive and are usually longer than most of us can concentrate for
** Cohort-based courses bring the benefits of community and accountability, but lead to the same flow-stifling problems of one-to-many teaching.
*** Flow is being ‘in the zone’. It’s a universal experience, well-studied in psychology with the distinguishing characteristics of meaning, enjoyment and productivity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work was foundational. Here’s an introduction: https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/
