Introducing the Collins Institute: Revolutionizing Education as We Know It

Free Login: https://parrhesia.io/student-signup Join our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92 In this video, discover the groundbreaking Collins Institute, a revolutionary educational platform designed to compete with traditional schools. Learn how this tool functions as a directed learning engine akin to Wikipedia, but organized into an interactive skill tree. Find out how to navigate the interface, take assessments, and benefit from features like free tutoring and AI grading. Explore the theory behind the design decisions, including making education more engaging and self-paced while eliminating biases. Join us at the forefront of transforming education for students of all ages and backgrounds.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone! I am so excited to be here with you with Simone today. This is going to be an explanational video.

First on how to use the Collins Institute, our hopefully sort of competitor to existing educational models. And then the theory behind how we built it and why we made the design decisions we did, because what is coming to the public is evolved a lot as a model from what we originally thought we were going to make.

So the first thing before we go into the school system itself, if you're like, okay, what is this? Is this a replacement for public? Cool. Is this a teaching aid for people who are already in the school system? Is this just for kids, or is it also for adult learners? The answer is, in terms of how you contextualize it, the role it's filling in your head, is sort of all of those.

Think of it like Wikipedia. But transformed into more of a [00:01:00] directed learning engine. So a question with something like Wikipedia. Is Wikipedia you know, something that helps people who are already in school? Yes, of course. You know, is Wikipedia something that would help a homeschooler? Of course. Could a person realistically educate themselves to quite a high level using Wikipedia?

Yeah, they could. It's just not really designed to be used that way. So you can think of this as us redesigning a Wikipedia like system, or collation of all human knowledge, so that it can be used in a directed way. And we have tried to include everything in this. You know, from how to lay drywall, to aquaculture pharmacology, To tax policy as it relates to investments, to what you would study in a subject from when you can read in that subject to midway through a PhD in that subject.

Simone Collins: I'm just incredibly excited about this tool. And both Malcolm and I wish that we had access to this when we were kids.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, yeah. No, as somebody with an MBA from Stanford and an undergraduate degree from [00:02:00] St. Andrews, which are two really good schools I would have So, I was actually being so much better educated had I been using this platform than the educational system I actually went through.

Simone Collins: Yeah, to a great extent, it combines a textbook with Wikipedia in the sense that when I used to study, I would go through a textbook's quizzes before I would go through a chapter because I found that I was a little bit more attentive in my learning when I was wondering if I got questions right or if I got a question wrong.

And that is something you can do with this tool,

Our goal was the Collins Institute was to divide all human knowledge into a skill tree. Like you might see in a video game. You progress through this skill tree unlocking nodes, which gives you the ability to tackle more advanced nodes. Here, you can see the classic vertical style skill tree.

Like you might see any video game. However, if you prefer other form factors that we also have a radial view where the skills all radiate out from a central node. And a collapsible view. Where you can collapse all of a.

Single [00:03:00] skill tree path using this double arrows or specific pathways using this single arrow here. Today we will be focused on the vertical view because, well, frankly, I find it to be the easiest to use.

To navigate this tree, you can click and hold to drag up or down. You can scroll in and out using your middle mouse button. And if you are on a tablet, you can use this. At the bottom right of the screen to control how far zoomed in and out you are. And on the far left bottom of the screen, you can use this thumb joystick. When you see a skill you want to attempt to master, you can click the skill and then click see more to go into the scale. Within the skill that you will see a description of what you need to know to pass the skill and below it, you will see a list of the best sources online for studying this subject. If you click add a source right here, you can add your own.

You can upvote and downvote sources here. If you notice that any of these sources have issues with them and should be reviewed, [00:04:00] you can click right here and flags the source for our admin team. You can also offer yourself as a tutor in this particular subject, David. And it's something you like talking to others about?

When you are ready to take the assessment, you can click the, take the assessment button up here at the upper, right.

It will give you eight questions. That is not meant as an absolute test of your skill, but more to keep you honest with yourself about whether or not you actually took the time to study this particular skill. Right here. There is a question bank button. This can be used if you wanted to edit the question bank for this skill.

, and up here, there is an edit button which can be used if you want to edit the mastery requirements for the skill. Note, if you are a student. Your edits will be put in a queue and then an admin will review them and approve them if they are good. However, if you would like to become an admin, you can always just reach out to us and join our team that is helping to improve this tree.

If you want to, you have the ability to review skills that you haven't unlocked yet. [00:05:00]

However, when you open one of these skills, instead of seeing an option to take the test, you will see an option to go to the nearest unlockable skill. Just click this and it will take you to the nearest unlockable skill within this test street.

Here you can take the assessment and eventually unlocks the skill that you were looking at.

You will notice a few different types of skill pathways. Some are simple, like the ones we just looked at, but occasionally you will get to skills that are called cluster nodes. Cluster nodes are when a skill involves a number of sub skills to pass. Here's some good examples here of the Roman Republic. So when you get to a cluster node, you will notice this.dot dot line that leads to the central cluster node.

And then the outer cluster nodes to pass a cluster node. You actually need to pass it the outer cluster nodes before you can pass the inner cluster node, which will include questions from all of the outer cluster node tests.

This becomes particularly relevant when a cluster node must be passed to [00:06:00] pass a nodes above it. As we see right here with physics and chemistry, one. Here you would need to pass the properties of water. It states of matter. matter. basic concepts, basic reactions, volume, mass weight, simple machines, and measuring systems.

Before you could take a test that that covers all of those subjects and moves you to the physics and chemistry. Two section. Right here. Once those are done, you can then unlock the center of the cluster node here, which then unlocks the next stage of this particular subject physics and chemistry. Three. Occasionally, you will come to a section in the tree where there is no node right here. You can see this at the branching point of physical science.

When you reach one of these, the. It can be thought of as nodes that are automatically passed and use mostly to help sort things. For example, right here, you can see this sorts down into repair building and maintenance. , which goes into things like mechanical drawings, cutting things in electrical circuits. But it's still technically under the physics tree. However it doesn't need basic physics, like the [00:07:00] properties of water at the states of matter to move forward with it.

So we separated it out.

 Alright, we're excited to have you guys back. I hope you enjoyed learning about how to use the product. There really isn't anything else to it right now, unless you're an admin or an editor, in which case the User interface is a little different, but you're gonna have to a few extra tools, but it's just as intuitive of what we just showed you.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I'm sure as we went through that, you're like, I could have figured all of this out just by looking at it, and that's what we were trying to do in terms of building this the big design changes that happened as we were building it were a few fold in the initial system. We had tried to build out something that was very good at measuring a student's actual progress in the moment.

So by that, what I mean is like school when, when you get a test at a school, right, it's meant to judge your ability at that particular subject. However, what we realized is that these are very not fun tests to take, [00:08:00] like a 50 question test or something like that, or a long written assessment is just not very fun.

fun if we're treating this as a game loop. Then the second problem is, is they're super cheatable on. Even if we use like an integrated camera on a student's computer, which first of all felt like a huge invasion of privacy, the student could just use AI to cheat on them. And they're moving into a academic environment where that's going to be increasingly common.

And so I sort of took a step back and said, Hey, We're now in a world where it's very hard to judge somebody's objective understanding of a subject. What if instead we made the test more about keeping a student honest with themselves, about whether or not they actually know the content of a node, instead of Us checking if they know the content of a node.

And then I realized that this completely changes the student's relation to the educational system. It's not adversarial. It's not checking if they're constantly lying, basically, or trying [00:09:00] to deceive it. It is there to help them. And the relationship, the cognitive relationship, that is going to lead them to fail.

Form to education as a process is going to be quite different. Also, it allowed us to narrow these tests down into like short eight question tests. That flexibility now makes the game loop of the testing process much more fun for students as we have seen in our own usage of this and much more viable for adult learners as well, because now for an adult learner, you're not dedicating your time.

You know, 20 to 45 minutes on a test for every individual node you want to fill out on the original system. We also had a decay feature where the nodes, which actually sort of you'd lose them. If you didn't keep working on nodes was in that tree or revisit them occasionally. And this, again, just was not very fun from like a game design perspective.

There was a game recently I was looking at Vampire, something that had a [00:10:00] similar feature with base building, and it was just incredibly unfun because you felt like your accomplishments were not tangible? Like they just, they just fell away as time went on, and I didn't want that feeling for students.

If students want to re do a nodal tree, they can might we add some voluntary decay feature eventually that Teachers or students can add themselves. Sure. But

Simone Collins: I think we also found that like making, making accomplishment ephemeral doesn't necessarily help, especially if someone's still advancing, because if you're advancing, you need to know foundational knowledge anyway.

It's not like if you get really far along in Roman history, you're going to forget the very basics. Cause they're going to be so solidified in your understanding of more complex subjects. So, because most of the knowledge that you're developing through a Is going to be building on the more foundational elements.

You don't have to worry about decay as long as there's advancement.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Simone. Another, another big thing that changed as we're going through [00:11:00] this is we initially planned for students to have like a bank of paid tutors that they could access through the site.

And then the tutors are ranked based on how much they helped students within an individual test. We moved away from this model to the free tutoring model for two reasons, right? So right now, the way it works is you can just sign up as a tutor and people can reach out to you until you want to take your name off as a tutor, and they can also upvote and downvote you.

So other people can see this is 1, because you actually do help learn more through tutoring other people to an extent, but I suspect the primary way that people are going to interact with teachers. Who are using this platform is twofold. One, they're going to be challenged by something and go to their parents or whoever is in any way, moderating their learning.

So it might be you know, they might be in a teaching group or something like that. They might be in a homeschooling group or pod or something like that. Or they might go ask their friends who know a lot about a subject. And that to me felt much more organic. Or, They may ask an [00:12:00] AI. And when I look at the speed to which AIs are developing right now, I kept thinking to myself, like, is a student going to get better instruction from an AI like perplexity even today than they are from a low cost teacher that, you know, we were able to find and Book at, you know, on demand on a platform like this.

And it was just like, obviously they will. And better yet, the ais are, are on demand, right? Like, the teacher, you'd have to wait a day maybe for a reply. Whereas the ai, you don't need to organize anything, you know, and it, and it's consistently getting better. So we decided to lean more heavily on.

Students will figure out how to access instructors. And then we also thought, but that's also an important part of the learning process. Like it gives students a lot more agency. If there isn't a, this is obviously what you do. If you're struggling with something instead of a, you need to figure it out yourself because you know, that's what we're teaching in an educational system.

Simone Collins: And we also found that a lot of the advisors that we worked [00:13:00] with. Really found most of the students they tutored and learned by teaching themselves. So the tutoring that we offer is almost more as a helping you learn a subject kind of option than it is a, here's how you're going to learn this subject.

Obviously the tutoring is going to help both people involved in most cases, but we've discovered that teaching people something you've just learned is also a really important element of something to build into this, this platform.

Malcolm Collins: And if you are somebody who teaches like a pod of students or a group of students, and you want to use this platform, we actually have a special type of account for you that allows you to monitor all of the students in your pod, and you will be able to check yes on certain tests for them, because while a lot of the tests are multiple choice, some are written answered, and some are picture based, like the food ones, Or the making friends ones.

And so they need you to approve those particular answers. One of the first updates that we're going to be dropping after after launch, and we're working on this right now, is to [00:14:00] have an AI that can handle grading of the written answers and the picture based answers. So, if a student wants to approach this without any training, Any form of teacher they can right now when they get to those types of questions.

If they don't have a teacher assigned to their account, they can just create one, basically reach out to a parent, use their email. Or if you're an adult learner, use your own email to create your own basically teacher account. But we want to move away from that and have the whole system be automated as soon as possible.

But that doesn't mean that the system isn't going to work with outside instructors or that you as an outside instructor aren't going to be able to see what students are doing. Another thing that we moved to is it's much more self generating than we had originally planned. Whenever a student takes a test, they get an opportunity to suggest a new question for that test, which also sort of test their knowledge on something eventually will be giving students and secondary grade based on the questions they're suggesting as well as the edits they submit.

So, unlike Wikipedia. What you do [00:15:00] is if you want to make an edit or you are uncomfortable with something there, there is a flagging feature and there is a Editing feature, and then it just needs to be approved by an admin. So we don't do the whole, you have to have a source for everything here. We try to keep a competent enough pool of admins within every subject domain, and feel free to reach out if that is something you're interested in participating in that you will be able to know if the students changes are good or not.

Originally I was going to hire PhDs. To fill out all of these trees and all of these questions, but we moved to doing it with AI because I just feel that the user generated feedback that we're going to get is going to so quickly get to you know, a, a, Quality of content that we would have gotten from PhDs, but at a much lower cost and I think much higher readability content because the problem with traditional PhDs.

And I know this because I was going down the academic path is you learn to write descriptions and everything like that, like an academic, like you're writing [00:16:00] research papers. And that can be very hard for a lay person to read. And I wanted to ensure that we didn't have that style of writing on this stuff, which is why we moved to a.

public collection mindset. Another thing that we moved away from was the banding thing. We initially wanted to have a system in here that prevented students from becoming non well rounded. So basically you needed to get a certain number of points to stay in the school every quarter, and those points were determined by how far behind you were within a branch of the tree.

As to why we threw this out basically, The only people who wanted this were the people who didn't want to use our system. So it was like existing public school educators who were like, well, how are you going to deal with students not being well rounded? When we actually went towards the type of people who were like, public school isn't working anymore.

I want something else for my kid. And we mentioned this system. They're like, I hope you can turn that off because I don't want that for my kid. Like, I don't want somebody telling my kid what they should and shouldn't be learning. I just want a system that's going to completely allow them to go with their [00:17:00] passions because we're moving into a world where well rounded is the first thing that gets around automated.

Well rounded is the first thing that gets outsourced. It's the lumpy skill sets that ensure employability in a post AI post outsourcing future. And I was like, you know, you got a really good point there. What was I thinking?

Another thing that we have thrown out is at first, we were really afraid of, like, bias. I was like, well, you know, we want to have, like, true impeachability on bias. So we'll have students compete in prediction marketplaces, or do real world tests like post. A story, a scary story on reddit or something like that at the judgment of their English skills to see how many upvotes they got and then use that to modify which questions we were keeping in in which questions we were keeping out.

And then I had this realization of 1 day. We might build a system like that. But there's so many negative externalities that could accidentally work their way into the system due to this, and it's just incredibly heavier to build a system like this than to just [00:18:00] have editors and a version history like you have with Wikipedia.

And so I was like, why am I adding all of this complication when it's really. Mostly an aesthetic difference. And so I, I decided I was like, yeah, that's, that's a waste of time for everyone. So, and also you can't automate it as much. By that, what I mean is, you know, you would need some sort of person to go and check how they were doing on Reddit, to review the topics that they were suggesting, to review the authentic tests they were suggesting, to create the prediction markets.

And I was just like, It's so much better if you don't have that because then it's so much lower cost to operate like if we can get to cost zero operation per student, you have created such an astronomically better system because one, it's operating on demand for every student. They don't need to wait for like a cohort of students to reach a particular stage in a tree to then access a prediction market to gate them moving forwards.

Simone Collins: Well, and we're also, you know, as parents of four children. For kids, hopefully soon more, we [00:19:00] understand that the simpler, something is the better. And that while it can be nice to think of all these elaborate, lovely things you can do for your children in the end, what will get done is what is simplest. And sometimes you can go above and beyond and sometimes you can make authentic assessments for your kids.

Sometimes you can encourage that, but that is the icing on the cake and something that you can do on your own really well and very easily. Whereas what we want to make sure we deliver is something that works without extra intervention, and it doesn't give you or students a lot of unnecessary busy work.

So that is important.

Malcolm Collins: And then somebody's like, well, what if, what if I, as a parent, think that something in the tree is really biased, right? Fortunately, I still have a solution for that. You can just censor those skills. You know, if you're going through and you're like, super progressive, and you don't like that at the end of the civil rights chain on the tree, there's one on the scams that were run using the Black Lives Matter movement, and you're like, I don't want my student to see that.

You can just check that off. Or, you know, if you don't want to see, like, the evolution of human sexuality, you could just check that off, [00:20:00] right? , and then, and then you'll know, based on what you've checked off, what you need to personally teach the student that could have introduced some bias to the student.

And so there's, there's just not the same risk of bias from the perspective of a parent because there's only so many subjects that can really introduce sort of systemic bias to a student. And those you can search for yourself and, and remove.

Perfect.

The, the final thing is if you're like, Oh, I, I hate all this AI text here and stuff like that. Then. Work on it yourself. And as AI gets better, we'll replace chunks of it. We could really use admins for this. So anyone who's like, I really am dedicated to doing lots of edits for this we'll look over your edit suggestion history.

And if it's good, then we can make you an admin. Because I, I, I do want this to grow on its own. I want this to be fully operational for my kids by the time that they're fully reading and can engage with a platform like this. And if you're using it and you're like, Oh this node should be here, or you should have a lot more nodes on this [00:21:00] subject.

Every year we're going to be doing a thing where we add a lot of nodes and prune some nodes. We'll call it like the pruning, the yearly pruning. That will be made. It's sort of an executive level decision based on feedback that we're getting. We may come up with a more organized way to do feedback or even vote on this stuff.

We just don't know what that's going to look like right now. If you are an existing educational institution and you want to use this system, we are happy to work with you to white label it or anything like that. You let us know and if you're somebody who wants to donate to keep this free, because right now we're trying to launch it free.

Like, I, I, at first we had this goal. We're like, we can turn this in. To an alternate source of income. And then we're not going to have to worry about, you know, being fired from our jobs for, you know, saying things that are against the current political or social establishment or too controversial. And we basically got to a point where I was like, yeah, but.

I really want this to be free and I'll find [00:22:00] another way to support myself if things go wrong. But if you want to donate to ensure that this stays free to people you can always reach out to us about how to do that. Or if you want to put the foundation in your will, that's always a nice thing.

I'm going to start suggesting that more because that's A good way to, without burdening you today, help keep this free for future generations. Anyway I absolutely appreciate all of you so much who have made this happen. I have been working on this for years. I wanted to ensure that the product that got to you was something that is. High quality and usable in its alpha form. But keep in mind, you know, this is an alpha, it is an active development.

Parts of the UI are going to be changing. Parts of the system are going to be changing. Features are going to get added pretty much constantly over the course of the next few years. And so, you know, you're seeing now it took us about two years of development time to put together. Imagine where it's going to be in two more [00:23:00] years of development time.

This isn't like a. work on it and finish it game. This is something I want to constantly, constantly, constantly be developing and making better because I think it's the only way we can really protect the next generation is to protect them from the types of brainwashing that goes on in the existing school system.

Were there any other major features that we dropped someone?

Simone Collins: I think the most important thing is if anyone has feedback. That they would like to provide to us, or they want to discuss this with other people. There is a part of our discord server associated with our podcast where you can talk about the Collins Institute specifically this platform Parisia.

On the discord server, we'll include a link to the discord server in the description of this video. So if you want to chat with people about it as you're exploring it, that's a good place to go. If you want to provide feedback directly to us, you can email us at partners at Collins Institute dot org.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, and I was going to add the one other thing that we removed. One other thing that we had dreamed [00:24:00] about putting together was when we had actually put it together, a democratize nepotism, which is to say a network of high profile individuals that you can pitch to and work with in various fields.

If you got really far within any branch of the tree that network still exists. I just couldn't find it easy and automated way to work it into the system. The way the network works now is if you have a student who has worked their way to the end of any of the branches of the tree, just reach out to us.

We'll be able to see their user history. We'll be able to talk with them, get a brief vetting of them. And then if they are extremely precocious, connect them with people in most fields that can be useful to them. So that feature is still there. It's now just part of the free version of the software.

So until we get so big that I need to find some other system for doing that. As a bonus, because the launch has taken so long, we actually got a few new features working. One of them that I'm very excited about is now we have an AI that will grade written [00:25:00] answers, as well as picture based answers, which are common on things like the food test, like make eggs in four different ways, or Learn to make fried rice or you know, things like that, as well as the friendship based ones, which is like, you know, show a picture of you and a new friend that you made.

So very excited that we got that working before it goes live, because that means that anyone can pass you the entire skill suit without an instructor to be attached to their account. If they want to, they can, of course, attach instructors.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe