Beyond the adaptation to AI angle on this, the idea is compelling in its own right I'd say.
Anyone who's gone on to mark/grade or write assessments would probably attest to the perspective it provides.
Whatever your opinion of assessment in academia/schooling (I, for one, am generally negative), there is something to seeing the difference between someone who actually understands and someone who is spamming to get the best grade they can. There's also, maybe less controversially, great value in actually teaching a topic and then assessing your students to see how much they've understood. It all really clarifies a topic and prompts you to revisit and reevaluate it in edifying ways.
Taking all of that and using it as a form of learning and even assessment makes a lot of sense to me, where the aim of the education process is shifted to, you could say, making some sort of new teacher, not an assessment "hacker".
My personal bias here is that I always instinctively approached learning this way, not feeling that I've learnt something properly unless I felt I could teach it to someone else.
> not feeling that I've learnt something properly unless I felt I could teach it to someone else.
That's always been my gold-standard as well.
In presentations, I should be able to ask an intelligent question. If I can't do that, either I wasn't engaged enough or the material wasn't accessible.
In my own work, I should be able to teach someone else, or at least write a tutorial. I find that writing down an explanation forces me to research the boundaries of correctness, not just find a happy path down the middle.
In teaching, I should be able to know my student and what they're already familiar with, and draw accurate and useful analogies between that and the new material. I should be able to anticipate how analogies might be misinterpreted or overfit, and couch them in caveats as needed.
Ideally, ultimately, my student should be able to meet the same standard. But this will require work on their part and is not my sole responsibility.
Anyone who's gone on to mark/grade or write assessments would probably attest to the perspective it provides. Whatever your opinion of assessment in academia/schooling (I, for one, am generally negative), there is something to seeing the difference between someone who actually understands and someone who is spamming to get the best grade they can. There's also, maybe less controversially, great value in actually teaching a topic and then assessing your students to see how much they've understood. It all really clarifies a topic and prompts you to revisit and reevaluate it in edifying ways.
Taking all of that and using it as a form of learning and even assessment makes a lot of sense to me, where the aim of the education process is shifted to, you could say, making some sort of new teacher, not an assessment "hacker".
My personal bias here is that I always instinctively approached learning this way, not feeling that I've learnt something properly unless I felt I could teach it to someone else.