Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
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Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
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Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#2The Khan Academy is A Future of Education.
Talented educators (non-traditional and traditional) and technology are going to keep coming together in new and interesting ways. There will be lots of failures, but Khan Academy will not be the only success. The article doesn't mention things like MIT's effort in this field that predate Khan's efforts etc.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#3Yes, the Khan Academy IS the Future of Education."
Then:
There are no guarantees, of course.
Maybe, then, it's time to pull back on the hype machine for Khan Academy. I've used it before, and it's wonderful as a student aid, but it basically boils down to free instructional videos. It's a great help, but it's hardly the revolution that the headline makes it out to be.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#4I really can't express how inspirational Khan is. The way he is able to break down difficult concepts into bite sized chunks is amazing.
It was really inevitable that someone with his abilities would change the way education is delivered by using tools like YouTube. Of course, his teaching style may not be for everyone, but the mere fact that the Khan Academy exists, and is free, gives me great hope for humanity.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#5I haven't exactly been as amazed by the Khan Academy as everyone else has. After watching a few videos, I decided that we need to focus more on the material that we are teaching - rather than the methods we go about doing it. They will obviously go hand by hand, but in my opinion the material that we are teaching is our biggest weakness and therefore needs the most reform.
A video that everyone should take the time to watch is Conrad Wolfram's TED talk on teaching students with computers (http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m...). While we may use computers now to enhance the learning methods, we haven't taken advantage of the content/knowledge computers have and can supply for us. The majority of what is taught in grades K-12 in science and math could be done by a computer in almost no time with increased accuracy. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that?
The gist of Wolfram's talk is that we are teaching students mechanics (which computers can do more efficiently) when we should be teaching them the higher orders of thinking and problem solving.
Against popular belief, concepts can be understood without learning the nitty-gritty mechanics. One could solve a quadratic word problem without solving the quadratic equation themselves, and still understand the problem just as well. Think about it: do you need to learn how the engine of a car works before you can drive it?
While all of this is not entirely relevant to the article, I humbly believe that the future of education should be and will be (if everything goes right) orders of magnitudes higher in efficiency as students will spend more time learning the right material. I'm not sure how much the Khan Academy will play a role in that...
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#6I haven't exactly been as amazed by the Khan Academy as everyone else has. After watching a few videos, I decided that we need to focus more on the material that we are teaching - rather than the methods we go about doing it. They will obviously go hand by hand, but in my opinion the material that we are teaching is our biggest weakness and therefore needs the most reform. A video that everyone should take the time t…
Thats a tricky thing to do though, where do you draw the line?
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#7Yes, the Khan Academy IS the Future of Education." Then: There are no guarantees, of course. Maybe, then, it's time to pull back on the hype machine for Khan Academy. I've used it before, and it's wonderful as a student aid, but it basically boils down to free instructional videos. It's a great help, but it's hardly the revolution that the headline makes it out to be.
What about exercises with game mechanics?
I think Khan Academy is becoming a whole system of learning rather than just a very large library of free instruction videos.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#8I haven't exactly been as amazed by the Khan Academy as everyone else has. After watching a few videos, I decided that we need to focus more on the material that we are teaching - rather than the methods we go about doing it. They will obviously go hand by hand, but in my opinion the material that we are teaching is our biggest weakness and therefore needs the most reform. A video that everyone should take the time t…
Thats a tricky thing to do though, where do you draw the line?
That's a good question. We need to keep in mind that computers are never going to go backwards in innovation. Once a computer is capable of some calculation, students will never need to have to do it by themselves again. However, they will still need to know how to interact with that calculation and understand the variables/relationships in order to set up the calculation.
Where do you draw the line?
Instead of just one line, you have to draw two lines. One would be on the more elementary end of the spectrum. Students have to learn the rudimentary basic calculations (or memorization) in order to function well in everyday life and higher levels of education. Simple addition, subtract, division, multiplication, estimation, understanding of relationships would be necessary. As much as I adore algebra, it could be left to the computer. Therefore the first line would be drawn at a point where the material does not show up in everyday scenarios.
The next line would be drawn at the opposite end of the spectrum where humans need to come in and do the higher orders of thinking. Given the right software, students would be able to visualize and understand the basics of the calculations and their relationships without actually calculating them. They would therefore be able to use computers in more applied problems - ones that they would be confronted in their careers later on in life. A few experiments could be conducted to find exactly where this line would be drawn. It would be at the point where humans do the smallest amount of calculation work while still having a solid understanding. Computers may be able to work past this line, but they would end up assisting the students to the point where the students lose the understanding of the concepts.
If the US and other countries truly put the time, money, and effort into this reform, I'm sure they could be quite successful.
However, another tricky thing to think about would be transitioning into this new and reformed type of education...
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#9The Khan Academy is A Future of Education. Talented educators (non-traditional and traditional) and technology are going to keep coming together in new and interesting ways. There will be lots of failures, but Khan Academy will not be the only success. The article doesn't mention things like MIT's effort in this field that predate Khan's efforts etc.
The article doesn't mention MIT, but it does mention other efforts such as Mathletics. What makes Khan Academy and Mathletics stand out from MIT is that they are MUCH more than just a collection of videos. Khan and Mathletics increasingly represent entire ecosystems with points systems, competitions, tracking of your performance, and so on. That is why Khan exemplifies the future of education vs simple collections of videos like MIT.
Re: Yes, The Khan Academy is the Future of Education
#10I haven't exactly been as amazed by the Khan Academy as everyone else has. After watching a few videos, I decided that we need to focus more on the material that we are teaching - rather than the methods we go about doing it. They will obviously go hand by hand, but in my opinion the material that we are teaching is our biggest weakness and therefore needs the most reform. A video that everyone should take the time t…
That too much emphasis is put on manual computation is obvious. But taking the opposite tack is an overcorrection. Computing and solving by hand is a font of endless insight in mathematics at any level and should not be left to computers.
Take an elementary matter such as convergence of infinite series. If you've never hand-computed a truncated power series for e^x term by term and noted its rapid convergence rate for positive x, I dare say your understanding of basic calculus is impoverished. Once you've seen the convergence first hand for particular values of x, the proof of its general convergence immediately suggests itself. But if you've only seen the abstract proof, you would probably never have realized that the e^x power series has extremely initial poor convergence for negative x. (Try it for x = -10 to see what I mean. Poor convergence and massive cancellation. That's why numerical analysts always evaluate e^x as 1/e^(-x) for negative x.)