Austin Scholar #146: How Stanford convinced me students can learn better with apps than with teachers
& online apps wrapped (2024)
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: How Stanford convinced me students can learn better with apps than with teachers
Online apps wrapped (2024)
Scholar’s Sources: My 5-star reads of 2024
Everyone (some of my classmates included) was worried about how Alpha High students would perform in college. Learning with a teacher for the first time in years has to come with some challenges, right?
What if we didn’t actually learn anything with the apps? Are we really prepared for college-level coursework?
Well, I’m happy to report that I got straight A’s in my first quarter and have a 4.0 GPA. The rest of my friends (all at different schools) had the same story – all A’s and a 4.0 GPA. I guess online apps do work, huh?
While I’ll be taking next week off from newsletter writing for Christmas, get ready for a super punchy, controversial, and fascinating newsletter for the first week of January. I plan to start off with a bang!
Austin’s Anecdote: How Stanford convinced me students can learn better with apps than with teachers
One comment I’ve gotten on a multitude of my posts on X is that I don’t really know if apps are better than teachers because I haven’t really experienced learning any other way. Since starting at Alpha in the fourth grade, all of my learning has been through online apps. Which means my critics are right – it’s true that (before college) I hadn’t learned from a teacher in eight years.
However, I did just complete my first quarter at Stanford – which is the best educational institute in the world, which makes it the perfect place to compare with adaptive apps.
And in the competition between the professors at Stanford and online apps, I’m happy (or sad?) to report that online apps still win.
I have a few reasons for this:
Your success in a class should not depend on your teacher
Whether you can’t understand a teacher’s accent or you got stuck with a teacher notorious for grading more harshly than average, there are thousands of different ways that your teacher impacts your understanding (and grades) in a class.
The TA for my math class said that a lot of the grading of our exams depends on the mood of the TA who’s grading our paper.
On the other hand, with apps, education is standardized. Every student gets the same high quality explanation of concepts and the same level of intensity in grading.
Every student is given the same chance to succeed in the class.
Content is not adaptive
I’ve talked about this extensively in previous newsletters, but I’ve finally gotten to see this concept play out.
It is a fact that every single person in a classroom has a different knowledge base and has different gaps in their learning.
Thus, it is impossible to effectively teach every student.
During my math class, for example, there were people who didn’t fully understand integration by parts and had a multitude of questions surrounding this idea. However, this was not the point of our lesson – we were instead learning about finding integrals to infinity.
So the professor had two options:
Ignore the questions and move on with the lesson
Explain integration by parts and not have enough time to get to the original lesson of finding integrals to infinity
In either case, some students would not be able to learn what they need to.
That is why I love apps. Every student can learn the content at their own pace and the adaptability allows the students who don’t understand previous concepts to get supplemental material while the students who are ready for new material can get started.
Human error
In multiple scenarios, my math professor received a question from a student asking her to explain something she’d written on the board and when she looked to explain it, she realized she’d written something incorrectly and had to go back and re-explain the problem.
One of my friends asked the professor about a question she had on the homework, and the professor said her answer was correct. When my friend got her homework graded, she did not, in fact, get that question correct.
I hate to say it, but humans are, unfortunately, subject to making mistakes.
And while some of those mistakes might not mean much, some of those mistakes could end up in a student getting told the exact opposite of the correct solution and ruin their understanding of a concept.
I’m not blaming humans for making mistakes, I’m just stating the unfortunate consequences of them – and when compared with an online app, it’s really no contest.
I have enjoyed my education at Stanford so far and I know I’m incredibly lucky to be at such an institution, but I do have to say that online apps remain my favorite way to learn.
Online apps wrapped (2024)
I thought I’d take space here to talk about the apps that I – and other Alpha students – have used this year and recommend some for you!
Apps (& online resources) I used: