I don't expect you to solve it, but since you're looking for problems... I'm kind of a perfectionist (not in a good way) and whenever I want to learn something new, I spend days and days beforehand just searching for the p.e.r.f.e.c.t. books, video lectures and what not. For example, I'd like to get back into physics, especially quantum mechanics. A website that, given any scientific field, gives me a list of the most important books and papers per difficulty level would save me a lot of time. However, this service should only list the best of the best. I don't know if this is a common problem or how you could monetize such service...
Find a good community! The highest quality communities I've seen will always post some sort of learning track or syllabus, particularly for newcomers. Recently, I've been utitizing /r/reddit, but my favorite subreddit of this type is /r/hiphopheads. They have one of the most well thought out wikis I've ever seen (http://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/wiki/index). I've also used the University of Texas's J-School Curriculum for learning more about Journalism (http://journalism.utexas.edu/undergraduate/curriculum).
Funny you mention this, I have just started building a site to help with this exact problem. Seems like there is so much good content out there, but it is hard to find the good evergreen content once it leaves the front pages of social media sites. I am not starting with scientific subjects (I'm starting with history, sociology, and general life issues). The difficultly will be that there is a lot of content to get through, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to crowdsource the curation, somehow.
Open source courses would be cool. Not open source like mit's ocw or coursera, but a platform where everyone collectively decides on the material. So, for an algorithms course, maybe MIT's hashing lectures are second to none, but some guy on YouTube has better explanations for divide and conquer algorithms. The idea would be to find the best material for each lecture and compile it into a class
How it can be resolved if there is a conflict? Like, for hashing, some are suggesting for Video A and some for Video B. So you ask them to vote? And then who is eligible to vote?
I have the same problem , i always take days to look for perfect learning path and most of the time end up not using or learning anything , this problem is destroying my life (i am 20 years EECS student ) , any help or solution , and i will be thankful for you until the day i die .
Another "me too". I spend way too much time figuring out the optimal material and order for approaching new subjects. I'm trying to work on it, but it's tough. At the heart of it, I think, is a fear of wasting time, which is funny considering how much time I've wasted on it.
Having lived some time before the Web was around, and some time more before it was quite the resource that it is now, I think this is a problem that is, if not caused by the Web, at least severely aggravated by it. For as useful as it is, I can't shake the feeling that if I could entirely abandon the modern information world for a set of traditional media and the Real World for a few years I'd come out on the other side both better educated and far happier that I will if I don't, but it's so hard to live anything like a normal life without the 'net, and there aren't many (any?) jobs as all-around nice as working as a programmer that let you disconnect like that.
Probably I'd have made a good monk.
Also, to add to the problems-to-solve list: I'd like an Anki-alike that lets me type and/or freely draw on both sides of the card when I'm creating one on a device with a touch screen. I realized after ~3 hours of collecting images for some flash cards I didn't end up creating that if I could have just drawn my cards on a tablet and saved them directly—no stupid, slow shuffling between a graphics editor and the flash card app—I'd have already been done, and, not finding such a program, I abandoned my project. At that point I (obviously) considered using real notecards but I doubted I'd carry them around enough.
