I loved kindergarten and first and second grades which mostly seemed to be play. I think it was effective for me as far as creativity and socialization goes.

From third grade through high school I was bored with most of the material. A lot of it was not interesting and sometimes the pace was too slow.

At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot better off. Too often I didn’t have the time to really dig into the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material.

Like Andy, I think an AI-powered course of learning could be great. The strength, I think, would be its adaptability. If while learning topic A I stumble across an interesting idea, it would have no problem with changing course and running down topic B.

As an MIT alum myself ('89), I am surprised to hear your description of your experience at MIT. Did you experience this across all classes and departments or only for a few (e.g. 18.01 which is required for most freshman)? While certain professors were not the most helpful, I found most of the teaching staff to be incredibly helpful when I made the effort to engage them. No doubt the focus was on attendance in lectures.

In addition to lectures there were: - Recitations - each class of the larger classes had recitations with a TA to allow smaller groups the opportunity to ask specific questions. - Office hours with the lecturer. I did not avail myself of them as I considered them useful for bigger questions (should I be a physics major if I don't understand this) rather then review of homework questions. - Bibles. Each living group (I was in a fraternity but dorms had them as well) had a library of class notes, exams, quizzes, etc for each class assembled by people who previously took the class and did well. Often the Bible author was still available for questions. - Friends/Fellow Students. MIT has an incredibly open policy on working together. My recollection is some classes could not be reasonably completed by people working alone (e.g. Aero/Astro's Unified Engineering). A fellow student may simply have looked at a topic from a different perspective which drove their comprehension.

Today, MIT offers OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) which hosts complete courses online (video, lecture notes, syllabi, additional readings, quizzes). This is an incredible resource that I have found helps my lifetime learning goals.

Again, I am always excited for edtech. I think its development needs to be tempered with an understanding of why current systems are not working. What problem are you solving? Is your solution simply remote tutoring? If so, how is it different that a job board with zoom?

I assume it means such a graph connects the topics together as "pre-requisites". To understand A you need to already understand B and C, and to understand B you need to understand D and ... etc.

But the thing about such a graph is that really it must be a tree, not just a directed graph. Why? Because there cannot be cycles in it. If to understand A you need to understand B, and to understand B you would need to understand A, you could never understand either of them. Right?