#7, Part 1 – 2025 in Review: Content Production

February 10

1h 8m

Episode Description

0:00 - Introduction

3:57 - Added 115 “Missing Middle” topics to SAT Prep

6:06 - Integrating the SAT Missing Middle topics into other courses

9:42 - Added tens of thousands of free response questions

10:34 - Free response questions are useful because they don’t prime you

13:33 - When to use free response vs. multiple choice questions

14:54 - Too many free response questions taxes learners

16:39 - Limiting the length of free response answers

18:08 - Building infrastructure for free response questions was a beast

20:42 - SAT test prep course

22:22 - Machine Learning has been the hardest course to develop so far.

23:12 - People who know machine learning, math, and how to teach them are rare

25:06 - The Eurisko book was the best resource for developing the Machine Learning course

28:51 - Balancing repetition and computational load in Machine Learning problems

29:43 - Designing minimum viable problems for Machine Learning

33:53 - Building the infrastructure for dynamic select questions was a nightmare

36:12 - Dynamic select questions are good for proofs and university-level math

38:03 - The Differential Equations course is almost finished

40:23 - Iterating on course development to make better courses

42:00 - 2026 is the year of scaling up course production

43:03 - How to scale up the team without sacrificing course quality

44:39 - Learning the hard way about hiring too quickly

46:20 - Challenges of managing a fully remote, geographically dispersed team

48:54 - Building tools to measure company output

50:06 - Optimizing content writer performance is like optimizing student learning

52:31 - Incentivizing content creation to improve output

56:36 - Courses planned for the longer term

58:01 - You need to learn concrete computations before abstract proofs

59:32 - Why we separate university-level courses into computational vs proof-based

1:01:07 - The best textbooks for beginners are NOT the most complex

1:02:37 - Teaching proofs and computations at the same time overloads most students

1:04:16 - Intuition through repetition

1:04:49 - Wisdom is the abstract compression of lived experiences

1:07:39 - Mastering details before abstracting

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