📖Why Books Don't Work

every learning tool (books, lectures, note-taking, etc) have an underlying model of how humans learn (cognitive model)

• transmissionism: the cognitive model in which it’s enough for lecturer to say words for students to understand

  • the real learning, though, happens after the lecture when people try solving the problems

• to understand something, you must actively engage with it

books also implicitly assume transmissionism

textbooks (with exercises) have an explicit cognitive model

• that still leaves a lot of metacognitive burden on the students: evaluation which exercises are worth doing, whether student understands the underlying concept behind exercises

• courses help with metacognitive burden: provide feedback on exercises (group and/or individual), fine-grained help if students are stuck

• courses also have social and emotional parts

instead of trying to fix books, we can design new mediums altogether

people struggle to absorb new material when their working memory is already overloaded (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207727/)

• e.g., if you were just introduced a lot of new terms, you likely won’t absorb much from a sentence that uses many of those terms at once