Tried it on mobile :> but still want to know / hear insights from you about how you differ from Motion e.g different approach, design tradeoffs, philosophy
Love the idea...having some trouble installing and have some skepticism about usability (because I have iBooks, Kindle etc. and the cross-platform thing kills me) but think it's really promising
I really love this idea but I'm having such a hard time using it. After hatching the egg with Ctrl + Shift + P, I have no idea how to "type" on that blank panel (I use Cursor). When I open new files, the egg disappears. Frustrating.
Ah, so since you usually need to ask 5-6 clarifying questions, you'd rather it be done in short bursts synchronously!
Right now with explanations.app, you can only follow-up with comments OR by posting new questions - asynchronously. I see that this might be a problem.
I look forward to you trying it this weekend :^) so I can also hear about your usage experience before deciding on the best way to solve this sync./async. trade-off
(perhaps the naive solution is voice chat - you post a question, your teacher happens to be free, you happen to be free, you just talk quickly back & forth)
Maybe you're right, but I'd challenge your middle paragraph.
When there are 10 students, they often have some common misundersetandings that can be addressed together e.g. they all want a review of Taylor's theorem needed to do electromagnetism, and they forgot it from high school. So I argue there is a lot of room for reusability of explanations.
>"pay $10 to watch another guy get tutoring"
The format async., so if person A asks a question, person B doesn't have to sit and watch. The same way it works on Stackoverflow - if someone asks a useful question that you wanted to ask, you can reap the rewards of the existing answer.
You're right, the blog talks about one thing, the product does another thing.
The reason I conducted those interviews was that I wanted to understand the good intentions behind instructors who I disagreed with, especially instructors who put an extraordinary effort to change things(even when it was unpopular). That's how I started to understand the strongest arguments for mandatory attendance, and a synchronous learning experience. That's also how I learnt first-hand that the key incentives problem "what's the reward for teaching well at a research university?"
Having said that, through talking to other students, especailly the busy ones, who live off campus, have a part-time job, and via my experience, I understand first-hand the need of efficient options that don't require commuting and waiting. explanations.app is async. and remote for that reason. There are lots of existing async remote options, but they are textbased. I hope providing a visual async remote option, means that it can attract students who genuinely wants to learn things properly but also efficiently.
Ah I'm sorry for that. That was a bug from an earlier version that saturated the javascript event loop and caused the microphone to not work properly. This should be fixed as of last month's version.
Thanks for the concrete feedback - OK I will make the price more visible. As for pricing/purchase, it might not necessarily make sense to students - from what I understand, they want to look for the right subject, then the teacher, before deciding to subscribe and pay.
Ah I didn't realize the Piazza post isn't publicly viewable, thanks for telling me. I recreated it as a screenshot now https://imgur.com/gallery/GtuF78M
This is a course 6 issue mainly. Course 8 and 18 I've had generally good experiences with (but I'm a course 6 major).
As for OCW, I think it "looks" complete, but it's actually not very useful because so much material is missing e.g. no pset, no solutions, only lectures but no notes, only lecture notes but no recitations, etc. etc. which is why I know Aayush and Ashay are working on https://mitsoul.org/
>The ability to communicate WHY we are doing what we are doing
I really resonate with what you said. The Why and the contextual motivation is what I'm always so starved for in classes that I don't understand.
This rings true "trying to be a good teacher in a university setting is extremely unrewarding". Thanks for sharing, and the students who make you feel bad despite you doing more than your fair share, can gtfo.
BTW, I didn't mention it, but I still remember vividly a lot of the TAs/profs. who gave a shit about helping me. So while I had a rough time, I remember some of of the good experiences.
And at the end of the day, we all want a place where we're rewarded for doing the right things, instead of punished.
Thanks for sharing. 100% - one of the downsides of focusing on attendance and in-person interactions is - simply the time cost, inflexibility and inconvenience for students who already have saturated schedules.
(I was first-exposed to this talking to students from community colleges, many working part-time jobs.)