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Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

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Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#221

Post by e40 »

bnralt wrote: post #125
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

In my experience, in-person educators often do a rather poor job with online education. There's often a lot of effort to emulate in-person learning, instead of an acceptance that online education is its own thing. They also often approach online education with a bias against it, which I doubt helps things. In-person educators trying to do online learning, getting poor results, and then saying it's the fault of online…

> In my experience, in-person educators often do a rather poor job with online education.

This 1000x. My son is at UCSD. Very few of the online lectures were better, majority were worse.

I think online can be better, but it requires expertise that doesn't exists in most teaching professionals.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#222

Post by v_london »

bnralt wrote: post #125
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

In my experience, in-person educators often do a rather poor job with online education. There's often a lot of effort to emulate in-person learning, instead of an acceptance that online education is its own thing. They also often approach online education with a bias against it, which I doubt helps things. In-person educators trying to do online learning, getting poor results, and then saying it's the fault of online…

I think there's something to comparing education (especially when delivered remotely) to YouTube. There's a huge variance between the teaching skills of teachers, just as there is variance between how entertaining YouTubers are. The difference is, the best teachers get paid the same as average ones, while nobody knows the name of an average creator.

I wrote briefly about the topic in a blog post, titled "Professors as Creators". It explores the idea briefly, and how treating teachers as "creators" could add value not just to remote learning, but to in-person lessons as well. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/professors-as-creators-h...

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#223

Post by cseleborg »

greedo wrote: post #197
xyzzy21 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that since humans are social primates, online simply can never work as well as face-to-face. I work in sales and direct face-to-face sales ALWAYS has better close rates, happier customers, etc. than indirect sales through phone or internet.

Close rates are better because a captive customer is at a severe disadvantage to the psychological tactics used in sales.

Objection, your honor!

I sold private whisky casks to individuals or groups. Before the pandemic, I would sit down at the table with them and guide them through a tasting, several hours long. My close rate was close to 50%.

With the pandemic, I switched to shipping samples and moderating the tasting online via Zoom or Teams. My close rate dropped to noise level.

I don't think I fundamentally changed my "tactics", and since it involved drinking more than a few sips of alcohol, I never required the customer to sign the order form in my presence.

In my experience, physical presence was waaaay more conducive to sales.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#224

Post by bstar77 »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

You are correct, applying traditional education methods to online/home school is unlikely to work well. Concepts like "homework" are generally obsolete at the home school level. Independent learning replaces the antiquated idea that our children need to be preoccupied with boring, grindy work when they are out of the "classroom". Children will have plenty of time to grind when they get older. Building a love for learning is 100x more important than rote memorization.

The child's age is also significant... I certainly would not have a child under 12 working under the the same expectations as a teenager. Additionally, every child develops at a different rate, so finding that sweet spot is an important part of home schooling. These are all things that the public school mentality finds incredulous.

So I agree with what you are saying, but so many people still think the model for home school should be the same as a public/private school situation, which is where things fall apart. It's obvious to me that children always need to be well socialized and have a variety of teachers and experiences, but that can be achieved if the parent is proactive and willing to spend the required time and money to foster learning over optimizing for succeeding in the public school system.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#225

Post by nebula8804 »

dalbasal wrote: post #39

Online learning resources are amazing. Compared to pre-internet, the depth, quality and accessibility is amazing. It really does open an opportunity route for a lot of people. However... Institutional learning, whether it's K-12, colleges, techs or whatnot have barely changed. The same fundamental dynamics exist, whether it's tertiary sorting and prestige or primary teaching methods. Education still serves and fails…

I am not too sure about accessibility of all subjects. More esoteric information is still locked away deep in forums, youtube videos, or maybe paid online classes. For example a few years back I quit my job and spent two years slogging through trying to learn ruby and ruby on rails. There are countless tutorials and videos detailing how to get simple stuff going but more advanced stuff seemed to only be available if you end up in a Rails shop and learn hands on with experienced developers. All the interviews would catch me off guard asking about more intermediate ways of writing code in the "Ruby way". As someone who wrote Java, if the logic seems right to me, how would I know if I am doing it the "ruby way"? Same goes for Rails(things like active support are not covered by many learning locations).

This also bit me yesterday in a completely different fashion. I was attempting to replace the battery of an iPod Nano 3rd generation. This device is notorious for being very fragile to disassemble and repair. I managed to solder in the battery connectors only to start seeing the board heat up immensely. In removing the wires I burned one of the vias. Now I spent hours looking for a schematic or some info explaining what each via was for. I had to resort to looking up various youtube videos and asking on discord...no dice.

There is something special of having a structured curriculum that is trialed and tested so that you can go from a to b. I don't know if Khan Academy is that but local school curricula may be still relevant because of this.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#226

Post by gabelschlager »

lodi wrote: post #208
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

I despise the notion that "real communism has never been tried!", but real online teaching has, uhh, never been tried. The futuristic dream: kids use fancy tech like AR goggles and haptic tech to manipulate shapes in a collaborative learning game and ultimately learn math in an intuitive way. Think of the best Jypiter notebook you've seen and then take that off the screen and into the real world. Then add an AI assis…

It doesn't even need to be that complicated. Starting out with good software that tracks exercise progress of the students, giving them exercises on a suitable level and immediate feedback would already go a long way. And teachers could use it to see, how the students perform and know what to teach in more detail.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#227

Post by rmason »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

There's some truth in what you're saying but I've got to disagree. Right now there's a kid in a Lagos or Harare slum who will find the cure for cancer. This boy or girls parents will spend their life savings on a Chromebook for this child who will trek to an Internet connection in a library (or a McDonalds like in present day Detroit) and they will acquire a high school education and with that credential be accepted into a top university. It may not prove to be the best choice for some but for many kids in the third world it's that or nothing.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#228

Post by kkfx »

Mh... I'm a big fan of remote in general, mostly because I choose to live in a nice place, I have a nice home, nice surroundings etc things cannot exists in modern European cities and in cities in general BUT for young, people who can't and shouldn't already have their own family being together of almost the same age means being able to know each others, socialize, better exchange ideas, cementing relations etc. ALL those things can't be really done remotely.

In schooling terms I suggest the Idriss Aberkane "Libérez votre cerveau !" vision where he say a school is like a very rich buffet where when you arrive you are told: "you have to eat anything in a given time at a certain peace, we know you can because we design anything on standard human eating habits, you need to conform". Schools must not be like that, surely their main point is giving a certain set of common knowledge on various topics to from tomorrow mature Citizens, but aside they are also the first step toward the external world outside family. Remain inside, watching the world from remote, is just like watching an XXX movie instead of actually perform, not at all a good thing.

Once we have our own family, earned enough (well, or being rich enough anyway) to have a home, a stable situation than WFH is a godsend (unless you can't afford a good home or have family issues) but before... We are social animals. If we are able to craft a new society where we can have a local social life with enough variety of people around of our cohort like at a physical school and we can separate the studying part from that... Well, ok, I'm interesting in discussing it's design and see if and how can work but so far we do not have anything like that. Surely except for very remote/rural living humans we normally all have neighbors and them are from various age so someone of nearly the same age is likely there but that's typically far from the "high school"/"uni" diversity just in mere numbers, if we add in personal interests and culture terms...

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#229

Post by gabelschlager »

narrator wrote: post #144

Has anyone ever evaluated different online education approaches and how they work for the not smart kids? I know it is sacrilege to say that some kids are naturally more or less talented than others, but most of the unending and relentless crisis in education it seems is with the kids who are not naturally talented. Maybe these online courses could do a better job at finding out what people are actually good at and f…

I think real research in this regard is still rare. For one, because not many software solutions exists. But more importantly, performing research studies in schools tend to be difficult (as parents, teachers, the school, etc. have to agree to it).

One recent approach in Germany, I'm aware of, was teaching students with an online text book, that immediately offered feedback for exercises and provided other helpful tips. The software was used to enhance the traditional teaching, not to replace it.

All in all, students using it tended to perform better on exams, no matter how smart they previously were (though bad students were still worse than the good students using the software).

So all in all, it seems to be a viable approach.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#230

Post by screye »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

I have been sceptical of online schools and will continue to be a sceptic. Khan Academy is one of the most competent organizations to try such a thing, but I deem the problem to be completely intractable.

In person learning is about learning from your peers as much as it is about learning from your instructors. People are quick to point out that the commonly occurring bad in-person instructor can be compared to online-learning. But, they leave out the fact that online-learning completely sidelines any prospects for peer-learning. I am not even bringing up the role schools play in socialization, physical health and as day-care. No amount of online-anything is going to replace that.

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