People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
There is only one thing that can truly motivate you to make good materials: becoming famous.
Strive for that. Make good materials. Publish them. Get good reviews. Loop.
This generates a virtuous loop, which makes you produce better and better material.
If you give a course in a classroom, you reach 10 people (the others were sleeping).
If you make a perfect course online, and answer questions online, you reach 10 thousand.
Not doing things online is a waste of time.
You are a highly trained professional, and your time is extremely valuable.
Even if it takes twice as long to create the material than giving course, you are still more efficient by a factor of 500.
It is as if there were 500 little copies of you working full time. It is a superpower.
Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.
This means:
- whenever you walk into a classroom, give students a link to the materialThen ask them if they want to talk about anything.Then leave the classroom and go produce more good material instead of wasting your time there :-)
- whenever someone asks as question on an online forum, answer it, and link to the section of your material that also answers that question.The material will answer many of their future questions.
- after you've done something awesome, Google possible relevant keywords that should hit it.This will lead you to other websites that talk about the same content.Then, leave comments on those pages linking to your stuff, or email the authors of those pages.It is borderline spam, but if the subject is closely related, it is a win for everyone.
Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.
Official archive: dilbert.com/
He got so old from 2012 to 2021 :-)
This dude did well. If only he had written a hyperlinked wiki rather than making videos! It would allow people to jump in at any point and just click back. It would be Godlike.
mathdoctorbob.org/About.html says:
Robert Donley received his doctorate in Mathematics from Stony Brook University and has over two decades of teaching experience at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels.
The website system that runs OurBigBook.com. For further information see:Relies on the OurBigBook Library to compile OurBigBook Markup.
- OurBigBook.com: rationale
- cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-web: project documentation
See: Section "Exam".
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:
The Moonshots in Education project also has a fantastic related quote:
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
Other people with similar philosophies:
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.