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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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This is counter-acted by the fact that you provide everyone the same content. Typically, after a teacher explained something, some of the students understood it and some didn't. Now the teacher has to make a decision: continue with the lesson and lose the kids that didn't understand, or go over the same topic again (maybe in a different or more detailed way) and lose the kids that already got it and are now getting bored and not learning anything new.

The advantage of the video at least is that the experience can be tailored to the individual's needs. Students can pause, replay or skip over parts depending on how well they understood the material. And it's not necessarily repeating content verbatim: interactive courses can include optional exercises, in-depth explanations, etc. similar to what a teacher might provide.

The fundamental limitation of group-based teaching is that it goes only at a single speed, so at best it's optimized for the average student, and doesn't cater to either the under- or over-performing student. In practice, it's optimized for the below-average student, because if kids are failing classes that's considered bad (“no child left behind”) but if smart students aren't learning as much as they could have, nobody gives a crap.

Is this something that LLMs could help with? You could get one to rephrase the same definition over and over again, with more and more examples and it wouldn't get irritated. Neural networks can reportedly already analyze which students are disengaged by reading their faces, so a robot-TA that pops up and tirelessly tries to help the student with their problem would be the next logical step.