#7, Part 1 – 2025 in Review: Content Production
· 1 h 08 min
Episode #7, Part 1 – 2025 in Review: Content Production
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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