Metacademy
metacademy.orgCo-creator of Metacademy here. Colorado and I are intending Metacademy to be a “package manager for knowledge,” where you can easily find the particular thing you want to learn about (e.g. deep neural nets) without having to track down all the prerequisites (e.g. gradient descent) yourself. Basically, we’ve annotated a dependency graph for the core concepts in the field, and it uses the graph to produce step-by-step learning plans geared directly towards your goals.
Sorry if you can't reach the site. We’re both doing this as volunteers, and I guess we weren’t prepared for the level of traffic we’re getting. In the meantime, you can find more details about our high-level goals here: http://hunch.net/?p=2714
If you don’t have a particular goal in mind and just want a general overview, check out the roadmaps, e.g. http://www.metacademy.org/roadmaps/rgrosse/bayesian_machine_...
This is great, but it could be so much more. For example, you could split the project in 2 (or perhaps simply clone it) with the other half working on the K-12 market.
You see, this would be the ideal learning tool for a teacher-student tutoring situation: by looking for the precise point where a student becomes stuck, it is then possible to see what skill-set or knowledge area needs more work and practice, and then adjust the lesson plan accordingly.
Metacademy is of course the natural place for such a "market" in education products to form.
Great work! I've been contemplating a service much like this for months. A site that lets you start with a subject or concept and generates a precise list of reading material and subject matter to bring you up to speed. It is essentially answering the question, "What should I read next?"
I look forward to seeing how far this database extends!
Was it the two of you who added all the content? Did you do it all manually? How long did it take?
Submitter here, thanks for creating metacademy. it's helped me a lot in school.
Glad to hear that! We'd love to get your feedback -- you can contact us at feedback@metacademy.org.
Awesome site, and want to support any way we can. Great context around content sources both free and paid are really promising.
Let me know if we can be at all of help: darrell [at] thinkful.com
IMHO, the dependency graph is pure gold! I think it should be the core focus of this project as it will be quite difficult to aggregate, clean and present all the needed information about a given topic (unless we're rebuilding wikipedia). It will be easier to link to credible resources available across the web through the dependency graph. Maintenance wise it would be much more interesting not to mention easier.
Nice work! I've been working on something very similar. My project still needs a lot of work (and talent, I started working on this site when I first learned html/css/js 2 years ago) but you can check it out at: http://subjectflow.com , or for a full tree: http://www.subjectflow.com/viewer.htm?=mewvzl2i6bt97gnjf9i4 (click on the white dots to expand the tree).
I really hope to see this type of idea take off. I would love to see this sort of thing combined with simplified git related operations to make it easy to improve education content. Additionally I think it would be great to add in a comment system where you can leave a question connected to the exact text that is confusing you.
Been clicking around for 20 minutes. This is like TV Tropes for knowledge.
How is "x hours to learn" measured? If I search for logistic regression, I get this page: http://www.metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/logistic_regressio... stating 1.7 hours - is that the estimated time to work through "Core resources", the "read" time + video length or something else?
Really exciting project, and very useful to me personally.
This is what wikiveristy should've been.
Good job guys.
If you look on the left, the learning plan shows that it would take 22 hours to complete from the bottom up. Logistic regression page just assumes you know all prior knowledge.
this seem like an interesting idea, but it lacks some "high level structure", or possibly a better search.
For example, I am sure there are general topics for "classification", "recommendation", or "similarity", but I wouldn't know where to start.
Is there a way to view the DAG of concepts itself?
Not sure if you can see the whole thing, but you can see big chunks of it by selecting an advanced concept and clicking the graph button in the sidebar.
Example: http://www.metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/sequential_monte_c...
NB: Metacademy is open source: https://github.com/metacademy/metacademy-application
The site is not accessible (not responding to http requests)
I can confirm the same.
I like the approach! I feel that search could use an improvement. I'm using k-means++ at the moment for something and searched for "k-means" which yield no results [1]. I clicked on the link to look at the full-list and found k-means mentioned 3 times, to my surprise.
Works with quotes: http://www.metacademy.org/search?q=%22k-means%22
Nice! This is the first time I've seen the dependency graph implemented in e-learning! Actually I started a programming site in spanish a while ago with the same idea (there is a dependency graph underlying the content). If you are curious: http://www.minidosis.org.
Doesn't the Khan Academy use dependency graphs? I had some fu Ngoing through highschool calculus on their site. Raking in the achievements and unlocking next lessons.
I think this is fantastic. Obviously stuff to be ironed out, tidied up and better organised but genuinely think this is a great idea, how does one go about developing something like the dependency graph? Would love to implement it in a site I am building while learning Rails.
This deserves to exist and flourish. We built something similar (skilldom.org) but it hasn't yet deserved the love it should have... :) partly due to me not being disciplined enough to dedicate time to it.
The DAG of concepts is brilliant. I've manually made my own DAG for interesting branches of mathematics over the years and used it as a guide for self study. This could be big for education.
Metacademy looks like a great source for learning, one which preserves most of the associativity benefit of learning through e.g. wikipedia, but which allows for much more focus.
Thank you so much for doing this!
love this. i've wanted something like this for a long time. Kahn Academy mind maps are awesome but limited in terms of subject matter. having an open database of this is amazing; enables self learning while eliminating the problem of not knowing what you don't know.
I've been using this. It's extremely useful. I wish they did this for every subject.
This is awesome. I can see this, if it gets larger, being a ton of help throughout college.
Nice way to organize major sources for learning Machine learning topics.
This is a dream, thank you.
This is really cool. I wish I could give it more upvotes than the one I gave it.
Thanks for building something cool and useful. I love the idea and hope you develop it more.
HFT?