Announcing Learnforeverybody.com
I’m teaching statistics to the FYBSc students at the Gokhale Institute this year.
Teaching is its own reward, and the fact that I’m teaching statistics as opposed to principles of economics makes for a pleasant change. Plus, it is fun to slowly but surely see trepidation give way to something approaching enjoyment. Long may that feeling last!
So anyways, just this past week, we started on the topic of sampling distributions. I’d just finished explaining something, and I could see two students, sitting on the same bench, engage in a deep but hush-hush conversation.
If you are a prof, this is a bittersweet moment that you have experienced. It is sweet because you can see that your explanation has worked for at least one of those students. Said student now has one, and only one mission in life for the next minute or so. That mission being helping her neighbor see the light too.
But why is it bitter?
Because much as you’d like to wait, and make the whole class wait until this endearing little scene plays out, you cannot afford to. Time is at a premium, and if you stopped every time you saw a student explain something to their neighbor, you wouldn’t get much done.
And so, of the two choices you can make as a teacher right at that moment (let that magical learning moment continue unabated, or focus on the fact that you have 45 minutes left to finish what you planned to in that class), you make the more sensible one, and magic goes away, thwarted once again.
But what if you could build a world in which the professor and all the other students in class, had but one mission in mind? That mission being to help you learn better.
What would such a world look like?
That world, Ansh and I hope, is LFE.
Introducing LearnForEverybody
When do you finally and truly understand a concept?
Is it when you read about it for the first time? Or is it when your professor explains it in class? Or maybe it is when your neighbor whispers an additional explanation while the professor indulgently waits for you to finish? Do you prefer a direct, to-the-point explanation, or are you the kind of student who prefers analogies and metaphors? Does it finally click when your best friend messages you at 11 at night with a doubt, and you end up explaining the concept at length… only to realize that explaining it to them is when you really understood it?
LFE is our attempt at allowing every single person the ability to have the opportunity to experience each of these moments for each concept that they learn.
Shrinking a classroom down and fitting it into your pocket doesn’t just mean having a magical genie that knows everything, and is able to answer whatever questions you may have. That is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for a bonsai classroom.
You also need to shrink down your classmates, and not just your prof. Because learning isn’t something that happens only when you listen to your prof drone on endlessly. It also happens at all those other times we spoke about above.
Meet the LFE Classroom
Once you upload a PDF of your choice (I went with this one, if you’re curious), LFE chunks it up for you. It adds an introductory section to the “left” of the chunks, and adds a revise and recap session at the end. Say “Hi!”, or something along those lines, and the whole classroom gets going on their mission: help you learn better.
As you continue chatting, you can call upon any one of your classmates to help you understand a point better. If the Prof’s explanation is not your style, moan about it to Meera. She’ll help you understand the same point, but explained in a different fashion.
And if that doesn’t work, ask Major Metaphor to explain it using analogies. If you want to make sure you’ve understood it, ask Dr. Drill to quiz you about it. If it involves coding, Captain Code is on hand to help you get over that particular hill. (Yes, the names are impossibly dorky. Why do you ask?)
The point is that this is a class where no one is impatient with you for not getting it right away. Everybody in this class has infinite patience, and infinite time. And they’ll keep trying to explain it until you get it.
If you find an explanation that you particularly like, click on the little muscle icon to save it:
All your notes, across all of the PDFs that you read in LFE, are saved, but the “Muskal” notes are special: they count towards spaced repetition. You can go over these notes again, but at spaced intervals, so that you can remember them better.
Chat About, or Read Along
Chatting endlessly with your entire classroom about the topic your learning is great, but what if you could read the PDF itself with your entire classroom?
If that’s the road you’d like to take, try Read Along Mode:
Select a passage that you need help with, and ask either the prof or the student to help you out.
Depending on who you ask, you’ll get appropriately tailored chats about the specific portions you’ve highlighted. Colors indicate which type of explanation you chose, and of course, all of your chats are saved and can be exported.
LFE is Live, Please Go Try It Out
Ansh Masand, my co-founder and I would love for you to try out LFE.
There are a hajjar bugs that we’ve ironed out, and we hope you’ll find a million more for us to work upon. These are early days, and we hope you can help us improve this product!
Latency is an issue we’re aware of, for example, and we know that you’ll want to upload much more than just PDFs, and we’re working on just that. A mobile app is also in the works, as are additional features that we hope to launch soon.
But the thing that drives us both is the desire to see how learning in the age of AI can be made better for as many people as possible, and at as low a cost as possible.
Try it Out, and Please Let Us Know What You Think
We have some plans for pricing and rate limits, but for now, anybody can sign up and try three lessons per week for free – and we hope that you’ll kick the tires and take her out for a spin.
Let us know what works and what doesn’t, and we promise to make things better (ashish at learnforeverybody dot com, and ansh at learnforeverybody dot com).
We’re very much going to to build this out in public, and we hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Help us help the world learn better, and as always, thank you for your time!
(A huge thank you to our first bunch of beta testers – none of this would have been possible with your help!)