This is what I get for trying out a clickbaity headline for once…the majority of the article is about cohort-based platforms like Maven and immersive tools like Replit. I give one short-form example because I do think it has a place in education going forward but if you read the whole article you’d see there’s more than that there.
Have you tried something like Superpeer before? I think 1:1 instruction is going to continue to grow as a space as there are quite a few people who feel the same as you!
You deserve an answer, and I apologize if my tone was overly harsh. There is always a human at the other end of everything...
So, your article reads like an "X is great" piece that fails to mention all of the previous times the same sentiment was spouted and shown to not be true, because something human-centric was missing from the techno-centric solution X.
This same sentiment "the future of education is X" has been espoused with X ∈ {radio, television, internet, MOOCs, AR/VR/metaverse, ...} yet it keeps eluding us, and I don't think I can articulate it better than the former director of Microsoft Research Asia:
"Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years."
The one-sided way you wrote your post fails to mention anything of the other dimensions that would have to be tackled by modern media in order to succeed where others have failed (another comment here mentioned Postman's "Amused to Death", and I recommend it to you as well). You omit discussion of any weaknesses inherent in these media (and how to possibly tackle them). If you even outlined these aspects, it would really strengthen your essay as something valuable to read and learn from.
I hope the above was somewhat more constructive and actionable feedback than my initial (admittedly harsh) comment.
This is super helpful context and great feedback on my writing in general. I tend to paint almost all of my articles in a fully positive light (mainly due to that being my personality) but I absolutely understand how that could lead to a one-sided piece that doesn’t capture the full picture. The title on here definitely didn’t do me any favors either. In the actual article, it reads “virtual learning != zoom lectures” but HN doesn’t allow special characters in titles so here we are…
But truly, I appreciate the follow-up and will work on adding some counterpoints / historical context to future posts.
There’s one example of short-form in this entire article. In fact, right after mentioning CS50, I started discussing cohort-based, long-form content (Maven, Skillshare, and Superpeer). There’s no binary “short-form is the only way” here.
The way we work is changing. Less people are going into a physical location. More people are doing knowledge work or creative work at home by themselves. The office is moving online.
But for some reason, when things go online everyone becomes obsessed with data and productivity. Are you transcribing your meetings? Did you optimize your note-taking workflow? What keyboard shortcuts are you using? This leads to the sterile, generic software tools popping up every day optimized for eking out that last bit of output. Humanity is completely traded for efficiency.
Over the last year and a half, it's become apparent to me (and to the team here at Macro) that what we need more authentic, human connection not ultra-productive work streams. We need more people feeling like they can bring their full selves to work. We need to realize that burnout is a much bigger problem than remote workers not getting things done. We need to bring empathy and emotion into the virtual world we now work in.
We completely rebuilt Macro over the past year to focus on doing just that. It's a Zoom client (so you can join any Zoom meeting with it) that is completely redesigned for expression and inclusion. We subtly show you how much you're talking so you can pull in people who have trouble joining in the conversation. We let you change the shape and color of your video stream to feel more comfortable with people staring at your face every day. We let you organize your window that way you want so you can feel most at home in a meeting with your team. We optimize for fun and hopefully help reduce some Zoom fatigue.
It's been a tough road technically to build Macro with the level of reliability and feature parity people expect from a new videoconferencing client. We've been frantically writing Typescript, Obj-C, Swift, and everything in the middle to bring a client that delights without sacrificing functionality. Because of that, we're macOS only for now (let's just say there's a lot of native code that has to be written for each platform) but we're actively working on adding more support! I'd love to hear your feedback :)
We don't use any traditional third-party user tracking software so we do indeed use Slack webhooks to allow the leadership team to be notified about certain events (onboardings, uninstalls, etc.). No meeting data (name, attendees, or otherwise) are included in these requests.
If you've got any suggestions on how to debug client-side issues with more transparency in mind, I'd love to hear them!
Hey folks! My name is John and I’m one of the creators of Macro (https://macro.io). We allow Zoom users to customize their meeting interface with different UI modes, real-time airtime visualization, and dynamically synced note-taking.
My co-founder Ankith and I both realized how unproductive most meetings were while working everywhere from startups to Fortune 500 companies. As engineers, we thought we could use technology to fix that. We started gathering data around meeting effectiveness last year using a Slack integration at over 250 companies and found that people were having the most problems in virtual meetings (and this was before COVID and before the entire world was WFH!). Specifically, people felt like their voice wasn’t heard and they were missing next steps (or the entire point of the meeting). They felt that video meetings were frankly getting in the way of work instead of augmenting it.
We decided in December 2019 that we should use these customer learnings to build a new video interface that would fix the biggest issues. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we chose to build on top of the new Zoom SDK so we could piggyback on the best audio / video infrastructure around. Our initial launch focuses on showing airtime distribution in real time, giving users the ability to take GDoc-synced notes directly from the Zoom UI, and allowing users to pick different video modes for different meetings (like a mode with small bubbles at the top to pair program or design on Figma together).
It’s our first day live to the public and we’re excited to share the product with HN without any recently popularized ‘exclusive waitlist’. You can check us out and download (macOS only at the moment) at https://macro.io or just see more on Product Hunt and TechCrunch. We’re a small company of 5 and we’re rapidly iterating on the product every week so we’d love any and all feedback from the HN community!
Great work John. I have about 500 students learning programming remotely and have been looking for better remote presence alternatives. So far the issue is that other products reinventing the wheel are more resource intensive than Zoom (machine, internet). Working on top of Zoom is much smarter.
I know it's early, but my only other obstacle is that those students are mostly Windows or Ubuntu :/ Although I totally understand focusing on MacOS
The issue is for whatever reason even data-driven people don’t measure anything around meetings. Since almost no one has had proper training and have no feedback loop, it becomes very difficult to identify what is necessary v. what isn’t. Meetings shouldn’t be removed altogether, they should be measured for effectiveness and then tools can be implemented to run them properly.
At Marlo, we are building software tools to bring meetings into the 21st century. From our Net Meeting Score algorithm to diagnose unproductive meetings to NLP models giving custom recommendations for meeting facilitators, we are shipping exciting new features to our customers every week. We are looking for a full-time backend developer to join us in our quest to make meetings the best they've ever been.
What You'll Do
-Work directly with the CTO on building new features for our many microservices
-Develop new endpoints and backend functionality for our web applications
-Build for reliability and uptime as we quickly scale our product to thousands of users
-Have the opportunity to work on infrastructure, DevOps, and/or data pipelining if interested
About You
-You love learning. You enjoy experimenting with new technology, including areas with which you might not have experience with yet.
-You have experience in Python web development. Our entire stack is Python-based (Django and Flask) and we want to make sure you can hit the ground running.
-You feel comfortable working as a full-time contributor and can be successful with significant autonomy.
-You want to rid the world of meetings that suck.
Why Marlo?
As Marlo originated out of the MS/MBA program at Harvard, the team has a solid technical base on top of significant business talent. We will always be an innovation-focused organization and will continue to build the best software tools to quantify and improve the meeting space. If you're interested in joining a fast-growing startup that will change the way people view meetings, Marlo is the place for you!
Apply here: https://angel.co/l/2gU2rq or apply directly by emailing your GitHub link or a piece of interesting code to info (at) getmarlo (dot) com
At Marlo, we are building software tools to bring meetings into the 21st century. From our Net Meeting Score algorithm to diagnose unproductive meetings to new third-party integrations for data collection, we are shipping exciting new features to our customers every week. We are looking for our first full-time engineering hires to join us in our quest to make meetings the best they've ever been.
We're a venture-funded startup out of Harvard's MS/MBA program and are looking for a senior frontend engineer and senior backend engineer to help us build out the tech team. These roles would have the ability to morph into tech leads / engineering managers very quickly as we hire more junior developer.
