Efficient Education

High quality, end to end, self serve learning is all you need to achieve your goals in life.

Bahadir Balban

Started Tech Buzz

@buzz

If I was to pitch Tech Buzz in two words, it is “efficient education”.

Two insights made me start Tech Buzz:

  • High quality, end-to-end, self serve learning is all you need, to achieve what you want to achieve in life. Yet it is hard to come by.

  • Today’s learning sources are quite inefficient for many reasons.

Learning how to do something is very powerful. It opens new doors, enables you to achieve things you could not do before. It puts you at equals with others who have more resources. People don’t reach their full capacity in underdeveloped parts of the world only because they have lack of resources to get the insights and learnings they need.

While learning is very valuable, learning from an educator is oftentimes a less-than-ideal experience. There are many reasons; some obvious and some very subtle and therefore hard to address. The way content is designed and delivered can be made 10x better using certain principles.

Before sharing them here are some of the online comments we received from courses I built using these principles:

Pak Lik Siu

I am amazed how detailed and organized this video really is, this is probably the best Express.js & Node.js Tutorial on youtube

starmachines

Bahadir, this tutorial is exceptional. In particular, your explanations are very thorough and easily understood. Thanks for doing this.

Another course:


John Kaye

Incredibly helpful video! Please continue to produce content like this. Thank you!


Philip Hart

Superb tutorial. Very clean and clear, with no extraneous material. Many thanks for posting.

There are many more reviews where the learner is amazed with the content. How do we do this?

Learn and use immediately

If you are being taught a topic that you are not immediately going to need right after learning, your motivation to learn will be extremely low. This is natural since there is no good reason to spend the mind effort to get intricate details about a topic you will need “some time in the future” and will probably forget. It is the most rational thing that you have a low motivation in this case.

If you will need to use the knowledge right away, that is the right time to learn, and even a lazy person will be motivated at this moment. We designed Tech Buzz content to be immediately useful after you consume them.

Instructions from start to finish

If someone tells you “here is how X is done” and leaves gaps in the tools you need to buy, the tools you need to set up, then there is lots of ambiguity left out to you to resolve to make progress. You have to work those out yourself. Which makes the whole point of enabling you less effective.

Tech Buzz courses are designed to be applicable from beginning to end picking the right tools and setup to remove any doubt and ambiguity.

Practical versus theoretical

Theoretical education invokes the same question in one’s mind, when am I going to need to use this theory? To avoid this we advocate that theory needs to be delivered immediately before practice, and distilled into the key points that apply to the practical material that comes right after.

In a Tech Buzz course we deliver the required theory right before it is going to be used. This way it is highly relevant and motivational to learn the theory since it will be used right away. Furthermore, if you practice something and fail because you don’t know enough theory about it, you will go and read the theory - this is the right way to motivate for curiosity about theory, learning the theory that supports the practical achievement.

Only teach

When an educator teaches a topic, it creates a power dynamic between the educator and the learner since the educator is the one with the knowledge. Naturally the educator can use the opportunity of an audience to sell an idea, market themselves, satisfy their ego, or simply take too much time to explain the topic at hand, because they can and it is ok. This results in delivery inefficiencies, wasted time and frustration by the learner. While the learner is solely interested in learning he/she often has to actively skip material to get to the real part.

At Tech Buzz the courses only have teaching content and there is no place for other motivations like influencing.

Every second counts

Tying to the previous idea, often educator uses the opportunity of having a valuable educational material and an audience to their benefit by adding an intro music, title sequence, or content that don’t relate to the actual learning. This is at the expense of the learner’s time.

5 seconds of stalling time in a video for the learner x 10,000 learners = 13.8 hours of wasted time at the learners’ expense.

At Tech Buzz videos immediately start, edited to skip excessive pauses, and solely focus on the teaching material.

End Result

The end result we aim to achieve and feedback strongly suggests towards this achievement is to create a high impact and delightful learning experience for the learner in the shortest time possible. Come join us at Tech Buzz to learn with this experience.

"The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

Charlie Munger Berkshire Annual Meeting 2010

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world" - Nelson Mandela




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