Roadmaps

The core of Metacademy is the concept graph, which has structured information about relationships between different concepts and how to learn about them. If the user has something in particular they're hoping to understand, they can hopefully find what they're looking for by searching for the concept. But often our learning goals are more nebulous: we know we want to learn about a general area because it's relevant to something we've just read, or to a problem we're trying to solve, but it's not clear where to start.

This is where roadmaps come in. A roadmap is basically a document which gives the reader an overview of some topic, with links to relevant concepts and outside resources. Here are some hypothetical examples we have in mind:

• An overview of a broad research area, such as deep learning. This would include Metacademy concepts, research papers and review articles which explain the important results, and a discussion of current open questions. For each of the academic papers, it would give the set of concepts you should learn first in order to make sense of the paper. (example)
• A lecture-by-lecture guide to supplement another course. (example)
• A list of background materials for a single academic paper. (example)
• A hands-on tutorial geared towards an application area, such as "build a recommendation system." The tutorial would guide the reader through a project in a series of steps, with pointers to Metacademy concepts as they're needed. The first step, for instance, might be to learn about and implement vanilla linear regression. Then in the next step, you observe that it's overfitting, learn about regularization, and fix the problem.
• A guide to a particular problem solving strategy, such as dynamic programming or structural induction. There would links to the background needed to understand why the trick works, as well as a number of key examples, each of which might have their own set of prerequisites. (This is inspired by the Tricki.)
• Something to teach a particular style of thinking, e.g. "Think like a computer scientist."

There's nothing technologically fancy here: in our current conception, roadmaps are just wiki pages. So what value are we adding? Imagine trying to put together something from the above list using existing resources. Chances are, you'd be spending most of your time doing thankless tasks like tracking down readings or videos on the Internet, or finding yet another way to explain a basic concept. Our concept graph should provide a flexible foundation which abstracts away the boring part, and allows you to focus instead on the more creative aspects.

We're currently working on a feature where users can create roadmaps. Of course, as an author, you could just as well write the same thing independently and host it on your own site. We certainly encourage this, as we intend Metacademy to be a fully open platform which allows free remixing of educational content. But doing it through Metacademy will enable certain features:

• Make it available in a central location along with other roadmaps
• Customize the view for individual users based on what they already know, e.g. by giving time estimates for each of the concepts.
• Automatically fix the concept URLs whenever concepts are renamed, split, or merged

We're still trying to figure out exactly where to go with roadmaps, but we hope it will be an opportunity to build something really useful on top of the concept graph.