Millions to one
Every way we scaled teaching made it less personal. A book or a video reaches a crowd and learns nothing back. The Learning Harness reverses that trade. One source, the one person in front of it, and a line back.
Books and the public internet reach millions and know none of them. A course reaches twenty and paces for the middle. The harness reaches one, and checks that you understood each piece before it moves on.
This page has the four tiers of reach, the line between them, and the five-step loop that one-to-one makes possible.
How far each way of teaching reaches
Four ways to be taught, from the widest reach to the narrowest. Each figure shows one source on the left and the people it reaches on the right.
Broadcast, one to many
Books
1 : 1,000,000
One source, printed once, read by people the author will never meet. A book reaches further than any other teacher and knows nothing about the person reading it.
one source to tens of thousands or millions of readers
Broadcast, one to many
The public internet
1 : 1,000,000+
Blogs, videos, docs and wikis. Free, searchable, and written for the average stranger rather than for you.
one source to thousands or millions of viewers
Cohort, one to few
Courses
1 : 20
A paid room. The teacher can see you, but one source still teaches twenty people at once, paced for the middle of the group.
one source to tens, sometimes a hundred, at a time
Personal, one to one
The Learning Harness
1 : 1
One source, one learner, and a line that runs both ways. It teaches the person in front of it, one question at a time, and checks that you understood each piece before it moves on.
one source, exactly you, and a line back
Everything above the line teaches the average.
The Learning Harness teaches you.
What one-to-one does
One-to-one is not a chat window. It is a short, repeating loop that turns a new idea into knowledge you keep, and it tests at every step whether you kept it.
DAY ONERecognize
A quick multiple-choice quiz on the lesson you just read. Recognition comes before recall. The quiz is fast and visual, and it confirms that you can pick the right answer out of a list.
NEXT DAYRecall in your own words
The explain-back. Explain the idea back from memory, after a night of sleep. You type it or dictate it. Dictating often shows the gaps that neat writing hides. The harness grades it against the lesson and marks the mechanism, not the vocabulary.
THENExplain the gaps
When a concept fails the explain-back, the harness re-teaches that exact gap on the spot, and asks for the explain-back again the next day.
ONCE IT PASSESWrite the cards
Once a concept passes both tests, the harness writes two to four cards for it into its built-in spaced-repetition system.
ONGOINGReview
The card reviews keep testing the idea for months, and each one shows whether it is still there. The quiz and the explain-back measure the first two days. The reviews measure everything after that.
Twenty to forty minutes in the app for a lesson and its quiz, about five minutes per explain-back, and about ten minutes on your cards. Miss a day, never make it two. The schedule only works if you review the cards on the day they come due.
The Learning Harness is in a closed beta and not yet available.