Afternoon Must-Read: Sam Gerstenzang: Knowledge Units

…Preparatory knowledge, in the form of course-based video-delivered teachings: Coursera, Udacity, Thinkful, etc. On demand knowledge: Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Genius, etc. Of the two, the latter has been much more widely spread and far more influential… pull based… in digestible chunks… Wikipedia and StackOverflow are the knowledge you need, now…. Khan Academy fits somewhere in between… original[ly]… each video solved the problem at hand…. The platforms that lean towards smaller on demand units of knowledge are the ones that are created collaboratively…. There is, of course, something fundamentally missing when we only have on demand knowledge…. We do not want engineers whose only mode problem solving is searching StackOverflow instead of working from their own understanding of the data structures. This is the difference between an education… and… the solution…. A really great model would be one that combined small on-demand knowledge units with a laddered system. Khan Academy is the closest to this that I’ve seen, but I think they have gone too far down the class model…