Major educational project needs funding

June 16, 2016 - PRLog -- The ultimate objective of the project that is described next is to transform as many people as possible into better learners, even since they are young, while also planting in their mind the seeds of solid reasoning and argumentation. It needs investors, and the fund raising is being done through IndieGoGo, here: https://igg.me/at/HowToImproveMemory

These people have helped in the evolution of this model until now:

From Mensa: Trish Loehrer and Sebastian Grünenwald

From /r/education: svetoa, legit_free_candy and others

The theoretical model of the project:

Open source web application that teaches how to learn almost any body of knowledge using a workflow suited for retention and comprehension (using context changing, generation, forced retrieval, mnemonics, reflection, elaboration, etc.). It does it through a one-day lesson (followed by a few emails for spaced repetition) - accessible for free to anyone in multiple languages - but obviously highly recommended to people in their youth, as the rest of their lives' learning will be defined by it. The lesson will be interleaved and will teach all or some of these:

• why it teaches the way it teaches (meta!)
• a prescriptive version of the cooperative principle (Paul Grice)
• two or three of the most prevalent cognitive biases
• two or three of the most prevalent logical fallacies
• basic skepticism
• the scientific method
• the existence of peer-reviewed journals, the type of publications that they admit and how to use scholar.google.com

A learning workflow is a set of steps that you go through when acquiring new knowledge. For example: reading, then reading again while highlighting, is a very bad learning workflow that assures you won't be able to apply any of that information a year later. There are better ways, and the application will teach those, while also putting them in practice for understanding what's above from a) to g).

Besides the fact that's it's open-source, the application will have some huge positives in the multiple ways in which it allows collaboration for the purpose of perfecting it:

• Its back-end will allow collection of statistics, setting up feedback requests at any step in the workflow, setting up A/B type experiments and modifying easily the steps of the workflow (including the time between them) in order to constantly optimize the learning process.
• As new research comes in from the cognitive sciences, new workflow steps might be set up or existing ones removed.
• Through "Suggest change" buttons, anybody will be able to argument for changes in the text of the application or something else, at any stage.
• I will create a simple-to-follow tutorial for anyone who wants to translate everything and, in doing so, add an entirely new language.

Other notes:

• All the statistics will be public.
• Any psychologist, neuroscientist, linguist or philosopher will be able to gain access to the backend, where for example he'll be able to set up new A/B experiments. Other people might as well, if they make a good case for it; if not, they can simply send an email with the changes that they would implement, or publish them on GitHub, or post them on the app's subreddit.
• Game elements will be added to make it more viral and facilitate learning: the quizzes will reveal retention and comprehension scores, later quizzes sent through email will do the same thing, there will be multiple leaderboards based on a factors such as age and location, there will be the possibility of sharing or challenging someone though social media, etc. (more ideas here are needed to make it fun)

When the learning process will start, the web application will ask for certain personal data that, when the user base will be high enough, will be used to personalize the learning experience and the experiments by the factors that matter. These might be: native language, age, gender, location, income. (To explain one more time: multiple versions of the optimal workflow will exist and each student will get the one that fits him best, based on his native language, age and other factors.)

If you like the project, make it known and help however you can. This will be huge and all the donors and the people that have helped in other ways will remain forever mentioned on the main website of the project.