Peer-to-peer “knowledge exchanges”
I wonder if anyone has thought about setting up an online community dedicated to peer-to-peer tutoring. The idea is that if I want to learn “Differential Geometry” and know “Python programming”, and you want to learn “Python programming” and know “Differential geometry,” then we can agree to tutor each other online. The features of the community would be to support peer-to-peer tutoring by:
Facilitating matchups between compatible tutors
Allowing for more than two people to participate in a tutoring arrangement
Providing reputation-based incentives to honor tutoring agreements and putting effort into tutoring
Allowing other members to “sit in” on tutoring sessions, if they are made public
Allowing the option to record tutoring sessions
Providing members with access to such recorded sessions and “course materials”
Providing a forum to arrange other events
Where should we host the community? (e.g. Google groups?)
What are some basic ground rules to ensure the integrity of the community and ensure safety?
Where can we provide a place for people to list which subjects they want to learn and which subjects they can teach?
Which software should we use for tutoring?
How can people publicize their tutoring schedule in case others want to “sit in”?
How can people record their tutoring sessions if they wish, and how can they make these available?
How should the community be administrated? Who should be put in charge of organizing the development of the community?
How should we recruit new members?
Ok, I’m about to sound hypercritical and rambly. What I’m actually doing is running through the mental models in my head for “how businesses work” and trying to come up with possible failure points and solutions. I think you’ve jumped ahead to the “how can we create this thing” stage without first running through the “how can we make this a viable, sustainable sytem” part.
Incentives: One thing you might run into is the typical problems with bartering systems—you have to find two people who have exactly equal knowledge that’s worth the same to each other, that takes the same amount of time to teach, and is exactly the knowledge that the other wants—otherwise, the trade will not be worth it for one of the people.
One way you could fix this is to have a “time currency”—If you tutor someone for one hour, you than have one hour that you can use to “pay” another tutor.
The problem then becomes quality of the tutors—because there’s no form of quality checking in the system/pay for performance, so there’s no incentive to improve your tutoring. One way to get around that would be to make a rating system that tied in with the “hours pay”, so that for instance if they get five stars, you multiplied the hours by 1.25, if you got four stars, you multiplied by 1, three stars, by .75, two stars, by .5, and one star, by .25. This would incentivize people to actually be good tutors so they got “paid” more.
Network Effect: This is a network, so the typical chicken and egg problem occurs with the network effect—it only works if you have a ton of people who can tutor in a variety of fields, but you’re not going to attract that ton of people if there’s not already tutors there that want to tutor them. There’s a few ways to deal with this, and I think that you should use all the strategies if you want this to work:
You can preseed the network. Get a bunch of your friends who believe in the project to agree to put in x hours of time per week, so that you start with a good amount of tutors and then draw other people in to what already seems to be a vibrant community. (this is how reddit did it).
You can create a prelaunch campaign and email list so that on launch, you have a bunch of people all coming at the same time, instead o a steady trickle of people who come, see that no one else is active, and leave. (most network effect startups try to do this.
You can add some extra value to the system that works solo—eg a self study curriculum that’s on top of the extra tutoring system. This means that the initial people stay for that self study curriculum, then as the network grows, they start to see the extra value from the tutoring system (this is how tumblr did it).
You can start with a tiny niche, such as only people who want to learn and teach math related to rationality. This means you have to cover a much smaller base of what people want to learn and teach, and then you can expand slowly based on “peripheral interests” that you see a lot of your network has (this is how Facebook did it.)
Double Sided Market:
This is a two sided market, so you run into a similar problem of the network effect. You need tutors to draw in tutees—but you need tutees to draw in tutors. Now, this is a weird double sided market in that you’re expecting your buyers are also your sellers… this might seem to solve the whole problem, but in my mind it actually makes it harder. You’re assuming that there will be an exact symmetry in how much people are willing to tutor others vs. be tutored, but I would assume there will be a vast difference in how much people are willing to be tutored vs. tutor others. This in my mind is probably the biggest “what-if” in this scenario : If I’m right, and people are not willing(or able) to tutor somone for an hour to get an hour of tutoring, the idea becomes unworkable.
MVP: To me, going through the whole model, that assumption of symmetry between tutored and tutoring is the riskiest assumption, and the riskiest assumption should always be what you test in your MVP (minimum viable product). The simplest way to test this would just be to go on craigslist and put up an ad that says “Looking to be tutored in XYZ, willing to trade for tutoring in A,B, or C subject.”
If you get say, 5 legitimately interested responses, that’s enough to contact those people, talk to them about your idea, and see if they’ll tutor someone. If they will, you can go on to the next step and start creating your launch list.
People: The first failure point that comes up in any startup is not usually getting a good idea, it’s executing on it. The tone of your post seemed like it was saying “here’s a cool idea I have” vs. “Here’s something I’m going to do.” But my model of this is that if you don’t make it happen, it won’t get done. No one else is going to execute this for you.
Perhaps it would make sense to have people comment on the essential content of a course before the tutor and the student shake hands? It might be hard to guess the amount of knowledge one has to impart/consume in just the way that both parties agree on it and it is actually useful. And improvising in the middle of a session is clearly suboptimal. OTOH, students can help each other, too.
Is there an online test to learn one’s preferred method of learning new material (listening vs reading)? I know that for me, reading about math in Russian is far less tiring than in English, and listening to an English explanation is still more demanding. Perhaps, when people are offered options to choose, they would be able to read stuff in their own time and then come online to review their understanding?
(Sorry for answering your comment instead of the OP, I just can’t copypaste much text when on my phone, and I started typing with some other idea:( I’ll try to avoid it in future)
Thanks—this is a great analysis. It sounds like you would be much more convinced if even a few people already agreed to tutor each other—we can try this as a first step.
It would be great if LW could scrounge up enough resources to help people studying for the careers recommended by the 80000 hours. Starting with a list of the needed, but not covered in college, subjects.
LW itself doesn’t “scrounge up resources”. Individual people have time and can spend it. If you think that a thread about a particular subject should exists go ahead and open it.
List of participants:
What topics might you be able to teach others about?
Undergraduate mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, Intro to Apache Spark, Intro to Cloud Computing with Amazon
Physics, quantum mechanics, related math concepts like linear algebra, abstract vector spaces, differential equations, calculus.
Much of the material in the LW sequences.
Optimization and machine learning. Also, shell scripting, python, perl, matlab, computability, numerical methods, basic data structures and algorithms.
More randomly: electrochemical energy storage, Li-ion batteries, distance running, dog training, Christian theology, Latin, English/American literature, poetry.
Perhaps more people would sign up if ‘teaching’ was relaxed into ‘guided discussion’? In that case, for example, the vegetarians could hang out together in Skype or just download instructions/videoes, each teaching the others some new dish to make their cooking more robust? I would then brew some vegetarian borsch (although it isn’t supposed to be so).
Also, there is a difference between teaching a skill and teaching information. I could, for example, help people study Russian and Ukrainian, though I have never taught language before.
What would you like to learn about?
Sociology, political science and international politics, economics (graduate level), psychology, psychiatry, medicine.
Meditation (empirical/practical emphasis), and more broadly the psychology associated with executive function and attentional control.
Set theory, topology, deep learning. Probably most math/computer science topics.
Anything that someone thinks they have a really good intuitive explanation for. Omniscience was one of my life goals when I was growing up.
Given your strengths, you might find First concepts of topology by Chinn and Steenrod a nice introduction.
Introductory Game Theory
Mathematical modelling in ecology.
Fossilized pterydophytes (just an ordered list of scientific articles would do.)
MADS-box genes in plants (especially not connected with flowering).
Perhaps some tutoring in German.
http://skillshare.im/
What would be the advantage of bartering tutoring compared to the flexibility of simply selling and buying?
Some people have abundant resources in time but not in money. That’s the one advantage of such a system.
I like this idea. There are lots of things that I know and even more things that I’m interested in knowing, but I’m not sure I understand how it would play out.
How much tutoring experience do you have? What sorts of resources would there be for tutors? How long do you see tutor relationships lasting? What does it look like to tutor someone in Python Programming. Is this person trying to learn python on their own? Are they following a guide I’m familiar with? I know calculus like the back of my hand, but that doesn’t mean I have lesson plans mapped out. Tutoring is typically done in-addition to some other form of education.
I’m not sure that every student can be a teacher, and if you want people to be good teachers, I think it will require giving them access to a lot more resources than a GoogleGroups page and webcam.
I like the concept, I’d be interested in seeing a more fleshed out description.
This is a different but related project by someone loosely affiliated with the Bay Area community, definitely worth talking to if you want to go further with this.
This was a startup; I think there was also one that focussed on language-swaps (google that for your local group). If it’s not famous by now there are probably reasons why it didn’t work. MattG below probably covered them.
Papora comes to mind.
In the formal sense “university” is a synonym for “community”. That is what the wheel is called.
This app has a similar model, however, not based on mutual teaching, but on the concept that everybody mentors someone who is less advanced: http://www.understudyapp.com/ As far as I know, it didn’t take off though.
Great idea! But I am crap at tutoring, any knowledge exchange would be very unequal.
That’s OK, you can get better. And you can use any medium which suits you. It could be as simple as assigning problems and reading, then giving feedback.
I have seen that before, I think was a lw rationalist project but I’m not sure. From what I remember the web page was pretty dull, so maybe that make it fail(or prevent it to grow).
P.S. I will post a link If I can find the site.
I don’t remember the exact project but I think it was an Effective Altruism project. Potentially done by .impact.
Are you thinking of Cognito?
Could it be a more targeted additional function of the lw study hall?
I do think that it’s an idea that warrants further exploration.