What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.

Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they feed.

When information is cheap

Use a familiar Wi-Fi problem to distinguish a correct answer from evidence of understanding, with explanations and activities you can work through independently.

Week 1 · 22 February 2027

The feeling of understanding

Use a zip fastener and an adapted rate, explain and re-rate protocol to separate confidence from performance, and to see what a fluent explanation can still conceal.

Week 2 · 1 March 2027

Reconstruction

Study a supplied explanation of a pin tumbler lock, close it, rebuild the mechanism from memory, then restore the source and read the annotated difference as evidence.

Week 3 · 8 March 2027

Evidence changes with conditions

Read one fictional person's three accounts of the same lock, produced under three different conditions, and find out why intuitive judgements of understanding stop agreeing with each other.

Week 4 · 15 March 2027

Build the first instrument

Construct the course's seven-rung ladder from performances you have already read, find out where it cannot decide a case, and locate the assumption it quietly makes.

Week 5 · 22 March 2027

What are you allowed to use?

Follow a fictional cyclist across a city using turn-by-turn navigation, and test whether needing a resource ever tells us, by itself, that someone does not understand.

Week 6 · 29 March 2027

Change the form

Watch one fictional explanation of compound interest get produced for a new audience and a new problem, and use the transfer-of-learning literature to ask when a different form is better evidence of understanding.

Week 7 · 5 April 2027

What if you didn't know the test?

Watch a fictional baker's prepared explanation meet an unannounced follow-up question, and find out what surprise can reveal about a causal model that rehearsal cannot.

Week 8 · 12 April 2027

The prior state

Use a fictional gardener's plant diagnosis and Fischhoff's hindsight-bias study to explain why a prediction recorded before checking the answer is different evidence from a claim about what you "already knew."

Week 9 · 19 April 2027

Knowledge with a collaborator

Repeat the Week 2 knowledge paper-swap with a live AI collaborator this time, and test whether a careful record of who said what can settle whose understanding a performance demonstrates.

Week 10 · 26 April 2027

Administering an examination

Design a short instrument from the course's ladder, resources and notice decisions, then administer it to a real person and interpret what the record does and does not establish.

Week 11 · 3 May 2027

Defending the inference

Watch a fictional examinee pass every rung of the course's own instrument cleanly, then find out why that clean pass still cannot settle what it was built to settle.

Week 12 · 10 May 2027