This is such badly written advertising material it's comical.
> Through Outschool, he’s taken classes about superheroes and Afro-futurism, another about decolonizing Black history, and many about Lego building.
That we now pay platforms (that take a 30% cut) to tell our kids how to play with their own toys is beyond words. Add on the need for everything to be "educational" and we've definitely lost our way.
This is an advertisement written for / by Outschool I presume. But I think this sounds like an awful school, that seems to be almost more like letting kids go on youtube binges of quasi-educational topics than a school with a real curriculum.
>In June, my son started with an introductory ukulele class. There was an “Old Town Road” hip-hop dance class, an hour spent learning to speak in a British accent from a real actress, three weeks of WWII history, and a week of learning ninja moves.
Three weeks of WWII History sounds great, especially if its part of a larger History curriculum, otherwise its too shallow. But a week of ninja moves, come on. And the other topics aren't much better. I might be old fashioned but I would be pulling my children out of that school immediately.
I haven't found any of these new online education platforms to be good though, apart from Coursera (And Khan Academy) and that's because it's largely taught via a university. Udacity, Udemy, Lynda, Linkedin Learn, etc. all of the other ones I have tried have been extremely poor quality shallow courses. Maybe just creating a marketplace of "education" videos and throwing things at the wall doesn't work well?
Outschool is really hit or miss. There are basically no requirements for the "teachers" so it can be anyone. Which is as not a bad thing as it sounds. My daughter had an amazing high schooler that taught her some art, beyond my abilities. But we also had some, supposedly "qualified" per their bio to teach school, but they were horrible at using Zoom, technology illiterate, and had a aggressive, rude personality that I turned off the computer after listening to five minutes of her interactions. And then there are clueless, but harmless teachers that can't keep the zoom call on topic and so what winds up happening is a very shallow overview of the lesson topic - which could have been taught by the parent in like 2 minutes.
The best classes were run by legit teachers that had a very structured, fast moving class so the kids could anticipate what was going to happen next. The went over the rules and the basic structure at the beginning of the call so everyone was on the same page. But, in my experience, that happened with 2 out of like 50 teachers we tried.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
We have tried Outschool for our kids to learn English (ESL). As others have written, it's hit or miss. Outschool does not provide any form of curriculum. It's just a portal that organizes classes via Zoom. The teachers we tried were super-friendly, but the issue was always that they confused our kids a lot by using lots of words the kids did not understand yet. Maybe it would work better in-person, but on Zoom it didn't. Our kids were confused and then often stopped paying attention.
We're now using Novakid, which is more expensive, but works much better for ESL. They have a fixed curriculum and their platform is quite nice. Even more important, we found a fantastic teacher on Novakid.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] thread> Through Outschool, he’s taken classes about superheroes and Afro-futurism, another about decolonizing Black history, and many about Lego building.
That we now pay platforms (that take a 30% cut) to tell our kids how to play with their own toys is beyond words. Add on the need for everything to be "educational" and we've definitely lost our way.
Let your kid go play with other kids.
>In June, my son started with an introductory ukulele class. There was an “Old Town Road” hip-hop dance class, an hour spent learning to speak in a British accent from a real actress, three weeks of WWII history, and a week of learning ninja moves.
Three weeks of WWII History sounds great, especially if its part of a larger History curriculum, otherwise its too shallow. But a week of ninja moves, come on. And the other topics aren't much better. I might be old fashioned but I would be pulling my children out of that school immediately.
I haven't found any of these new online education platforms to be good though, apart from Coursera (And Khan Academy) and that's because it's largely taught via a university. Udacity, Udemy, Lynda, Linkedin Learn, etc. all of the other ones I have tried have been extremely poor quality shallow courses. Maybe just creating a marketplace of "education" videos and throwing things at the wall doesn't work well?
The best classes were run by legit teachers that had a very structured, fast moving class so the kids could anticipate what was going to happen next. The went over the rules and the basic structure at the beginning of the call so everyone was on the same page. But, in my experience, that happened with 2 out of like 50 teachers we tried.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We're now using Novakid, which is more expensive, but works much better for ESL. They have a fixed curriculum and their platform is quite nice. Even more important, we found a fantastic teacher on Novakid.