Ever changing learning paradigms

This semester I have the unique opportunity to act as a Teaching Assistant at VinUni. It was fun.

But it was also an important exercise.

Not the first time I’ve been involved in a teaching role (Becoming the mentor I needed when I was younger and Project Chiron from 2023). But this time it was different. The main reason is timing: This is the first time I have to confront the latest shift in learning paradigms.

---

From the learner’s standpoint: learning paradigms (and by extension, human communication and knowledge distribution) have been intertwined with advances in language “technologies”. The first philosophers communicated via spoken language (i.e voice), learning was predominantly face-to-face and oral. And then, writing “technologies” got better (from clay tablets to papyrus to parchment), so learners can “save” their master’s teachings and spread the knowledge as far as they go. Then came the printing press. And knowledge exploded because information can be printed and spread at scale. Books became cheaper, more people became literate. The Scientific Revolution age came some time afterwards.

Throughout history the teacher-learner roles stayed largely the same. The master with the wealth of knowledge, passing it down to the student. The curious apprentice listens attentively, and jots it down so that they may remember. In other words, the learner is heavily reliant upon the teacher to acquire knowledge. The relationship between the learner and the school, by extension, was the same. [Self-learners existed, especially with the advent of printed books, but they were rare.]

And this was the case all the way up to the 21st century. When I was born. But within my lifetime, there have been three other major shifts that vastly changed the way learners interacted with knowledge.

First is the commoditization of the internet and search engines.

It used to be that access to high-quality knowledge remained limited in the hands of a select few who (1) are close to a library or (2) can afford to buy books.

But when the internet became popular, the physical barrier (and to some extent, the cost barrier) to knowledge was removed. In other words, information was democratized.

The second shift was perhaps less felt by most people, but it was significant to me. It was the opening of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

If the internet opened access to raw information, MOOCs opened large-scale access to teachers, tutors and explainers. They also paved the way for easily learning practical, applicable skills.

And last, and most certainly not least, is the advent of the generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

Whereas search engines required users to know what keywords they were searching for, and MOOCs were rigid in the sense that one teacher had to fit the style of numerous learners, the LLM did away with both. A question is all it needs, and then it will spill out the rigorous answer as if absorbed through the whole of human knowledge. (This is vastly overstated, but, it sure feels that way). To add to that, it adapts its answers to the skill level of the users.

---

As a learner, my first moment of epiphany came at the start of the pandemic. When I (and many friends) came home for Tet holiday without bringing my printed textbooks, I needed to find a way to access them. Then I quickly realized I could “download” PDF copies of literally any book. And if I can download any book, it logically follows that I can learn literally anything.

Can you grasp the significance of that statement? The access to knowledge meant I could learn anything and become anyone. Never again would I be restricted by the field on my degree or origin of my birth.

This is the one thought that empowers me to this very day.

My second life-changing moment involved MOOCs. At first, it was just a cheap and effective way (at that time) for me to learn programming. I ended up taking more than 50 of them and became proficient enough in coding and data analysis to get a job. All of my later achievements followed from there. It could be said that easy access to a human teacher helped me create a career out of thin air.

---

It is the third and possibly most tectonic paradigm shift that I now face as a tutor.

The best teachers show students how to think and provide context about a subject. The bare minimum teachers merely pass on information. And that used to be enough. Throughout history, the dependent learner-teacher dynamic has largely arisen from the concentration of knowledge (and ways of thinking about it) in the hands of a small group of academics.

But now that every student has access to an all-knowing, hyper-personalized teacher…

I ask: What, then, is the role of the teacher in this newest paradigm of learning?

When I was in school, I was notorious for skipping classes. Yes, I was one of the laziest students, but that is only half the truth. The other half has to my download-any-book epiphany. Once I realized I could self-study by downloading textbooks, I started to skip lots of classes where I was dissatisfied with the lecturer. Especially the lecturers who regurgitate exactly what the textbook say and nothing more. In other words, I replaced some of my teachers with books. It worked out wonderfully for me and my grades.

So, if I were to become a run-of-the-mill TA who spells out the content of textbooks, or repeats what ChatGPT has to say, what good would I be? What is to stop students from replacing me (or the professors) with their favorite AI chatbots?

I don’t accept that. So I spent extra efforts to be just a little better.

---

It is hard to explain a semester’s worth of stories in just a few paragraphs. But I’ll try anyway.

I spent a significant portion of time talking to students: in countless office hours sessions, via direct messages, and in spontaneous encounters on campus. I think this is where most of the magic happened.

I did this, because I firmly believe that the best thing I can offer students is authentic and emotional human interactions. To feel that their voices are being heard by a real human and that a real human understands and speaks back is a more satisfying experience than people realize.

And I try to make myself relatable, and at times, vulnerable too. I tell a lot of stories from my experience, stories so personal and unique that they could only ever come from me.

I also brought a lot of personal contexts. No textbooks (or ChatGPT) can ever explain to me why I, specifically I and not any other human, have to study a subject or where I might apply it, because they don’t know me or my contexts.

But I do know these students: I know exactly why the course is in their curriculum and where the concepts are applied in the real-world. Because I’ve been there and done that. And so I tried to contextualize the concepts in a way that is directly relevant to these students (and these students alone).

And maybe it helps that I have a very special connection to this cohort of students: they are non-STEM students learning CS courses. Sounds familiar? I was one of them. I speak their language, and so I try to explain concepts through their lenses instead of mine or the professor’s. And I am one of the rare people that can acknowledge how confusing it must have felt for them and reassure them that all will be okay.

In my position, I tried very hard to help students to learn to think. First, to adapt their perspectives to a more computational or data-driven lens. Second, to learn how to learn in the new paradigm, which means I encouraged students to self-learn and think critically about the subjects before coming to me for help (to their credit, they mostly succeeded at thinking critically without me ever intervening).

And last, to shift their thinking towards learning itself. This might be controversial to say: but I never truly believe grades and attendance are important. For the students, the focus should be their learning and their growth, which I have made very clear to them from the first day to the last.

---

My efforts received a warm reception from the professors and especially the students. I appreciate it a lot, I really do.

But it was not the high praises that I was after.

It was the growth that students have undergone throughout the semester. It was the delight in their eyes when they grasp what was previously scarily incomprehensible concepts. It was their appreciation for a subject that was once so distant to them.

Those, I think, are my greatest gifts this year.

And out all the things I have done in the past decade, this would have been one of my most profoundly rewarding experiences.

And for once, I am very proud indeed.