Only when the lesson for life is "how to get stuff done when you've got unlimited access to far more interesting things that nobody will reward you for".
For actually learning things? It's like pet food packaging.
What do I mean by that? The pets don't buy the food, their owners do; the result is the packaging is designed to appeal to the owners. Does a cat care about the bright colours their retinas can't see, the metaphors they don't have the language comprehension to process? Or do they seem like picky eaters because they're put off food when it has subtle odours that their owners can't perceive? Likewise, are dogs meat-obsessed like pop culture tells us, or are they omnivores that will joyfully wolf down just about anything and wait for their digestive tract to figure out afterwards if it needs to be rapidly expelled?
Parents and schools buy stuff to teach with, it's sold to the adults because the kids have neither the budget nor the judgement to decide what they ought to learn. But how good are those things at teaching? We only find out much later, at first when the kids take exams and we see how well they learned, and later when we look at the same people in the workforce and find out if that exam itself is representative of the skills we care about.
Learning as an adult, I get to see if online courses teach me; I've gone from being a heavy user of Duolingo, even paying for a subscription, to giving up on it entirely as it morphed from lessons into an annoying kids cartoon.
I'm worried that I'm seeing similar from Brilliant.org, too. The older courses on e.g. using Q# to program quantum computers is still good — hard, yes, but good, it's actually pushing me to learn more, and in this it reminds me of when I started learning programming on a Commodore 64 from the user manual when I was aged about 5 or 6 — but the newer course updates over the last year or so have focussed on unskippable "cute" cartoons and the absolute beginner level content that parents and teachers will pay for, not filling in the gaps with the hard stuff that brings in the most educational value.
For actually learning things? It's like pet food packaging.
What do I mean by that? The pets don't buy the food, their owners do; the result is the packaging is designed to appeal to the owners. Does a cat care about the bright colours their retinas can't see, the metaphors they don't have the language comprehension to process? Or do they seem like picky eaters because they're put off food when it has subtle odours that their owners can't perceive? Likewise, are dogs meat-obsessed like pop culture tells us, or are they omnivores that will joyfully wolf down just about anything and wait for their digestive tract to figure out afterwards if it needs to be rapidly expelled?
Parents and schools buy stuff to teach with, it's sold to the adults because the kids have neither the budget nor the judgement to decide what they ought to learn. But how good are those things at teaching? We only find out much later, at first when the kids take exams and we see how well they learned, and later when we look at the same people in the workforce and find out if that exam itself is representative of the skills we care about.
Learning as an adult, I get to see if online courses teach me; I've gone from being a heavy user of Duolingo, even paying for a subscription, to giving up on it entirely as it morphed from lessons into an annoying kids cartoon.
I'm worried that I'm seeing similar from Brilliant.org, too. The older courses on e.g. using Q# to program quantum computers is still good — hard, yes, but good, it's actually pushing me to learn more, and in this it reminds me of when I started learning programming on a Commodore 64 from the user manual when I was aged about 5 or 6 — but the newer course updates over the last year or so have focussed on unskippable "cute" cartoons and the absolute beginner level content that parents and teachers will pay for, not filling in the gaps with the hard stuff that brings in the most educational value.