Yeah, current LLM aren’t tuned for it. Not to say there’s not advantage to using one of them while in an online class. Under the general training, there’s no telling what it’s sourcing from. You could be getting an incomplete or misleading picture. If you’re teaching, you should be pulling information from teaching grade materials.

IMO, there are real and serious advantages from not using live classes. Firstly, you don’t want people to be forced to a specific class time. Let the early birds take it when they wake, let the night owls take it at 2am. Whenever people are on top their game. If a parent needs to watch the kids 9-5, let them take their classes from 6-10. Forget all these fixed timeframes. If you get sick, or go on vacation, pause the class. When you get back, have it talk to you about the finer points of the material you might have forgotten and see if you still understand the material. You need something that’s capable of gauging if a response is close enough to the source material. LLM can already do this to an extent, but it’s source material can be unreliable and if they screw with the general training it could have adverse effects on your system. You want something bottled, pinned at your version so you can provide consistent results and properly QA changes.

I tested GPT the other week making some open questions about IT support then I wrote it answers with varied responses. It was able to tell me which answers were proper and which were not great. I asked it to tell me if the responses indicated knowledge of the given topic and it was able to answer correctly in my short test. It not only told me which answers were good and why, but it conveyed concerns about the bad answers. I’d want to see it more thoroughly tested and probably have a separate process wrapped around and watching grading.

What I’d like to see is a class given by a super good instructor. You know those superstars out there that make it interesting and fun, Feynman kinds of people. If you don’t interrupt it, after every new concept or maybe a couple (maybe you tune that to an indication of how well they’re doing) you throw them a couple of open-ish questions about the content to gauge how well they understand it. As the person watches the course, it tracks their knowledge on each section. When it detects a section where they don’t get it, or could get it better it spends a couple minutes trying different approaches. Maybe it cues up a different short video if it’s a common point of confusion or maybe it flags them to work with a human tutor on a specific topic. If the tutor finds a deficiency, the next time someone has a problem right there, before it throws in the towel, it make sure that the student doesn’t have the same deficiency. If it’s a common problem, they throw in an appendix entry and have the user go through it.

As it sits now, a lot of people perform marginally in school because of fixed hours or because they don’t want to stop the class for 5 minutes because they missed a concept three chapters ago when they had to take an emergency phone call or use the facilities. Some are just bad at test taking stress. You could make testing continuous and as easy a having a conversation. Someone who lives in the middle of rural Wisconsin could have access to the same level and care of teaching as someone in the suburbs. Kids with learning challenges currently get dumped into classes of kids with learning challenges. The higher functioning ones get kinda screwed as the ones with lower skills eat up the time. Hell, even my first CompSci class, the first three classes were full of people that couldn’t understand variables. The second the professor moved on to endianness the hands shot up and nothing else was done for the class period. He literally just repeated himself all class long assigned us to do all the class training at home.

The tools to do all this are already here, just not in a state to do the job. Some place like the Gates Foundation could just go, you know, yeah, let’s do this.

The thing that guides them along won’t even be AI, it’ll just be a structured program, the AI comes in to prompt them to answer ongoing questions and to figure out if they were right or to help them understand something they don’t get and gauge their competency.

I think the platform it sellable. I think if anyone had access to something that did this (perhaps without accreditation) it would be a boon to humanity