Education Bookcast

I've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt. In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials. The Fundamental Duality is that we use our content to measure our students / users (e.g. what they know), but we also use our users to measure our content (e.g. how difficult it is). This leads to a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, where all we see is the interaction of the users with the content, but from that single fact we have to somehow extract information about the two different interacting entities. For example, suppose that a user gets a question wrong. This could mean one of a number of things: Is the question difficult? Does the user not know this area very well? There is also a third possibility: Is this question faulty? i.e. did the user actually answer the