Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

(Obviously biased member of KA here.)

"Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along"

I just don't understand this. KA, Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy, MITx, teachontablo.com, this list goes on. I don't see how KA has done anything but prove the possibility of traction. When professors like Thrun and Norvig and investors like Paul Graham, Fred Wilson, and Peter Thiel are excited about the educational space, I believe the students will eventually win. It's no secret that many of the above have been inspired by Sal in one way or another.

The more products competing here, the better education will be. Yelling at Khan Academy because it's "the only thing that [exists]" feels...oddly misplaced.

We're hating on this article, but you know what, I really like it. It covers a one sided view, but it makes some solid points.

That Khan Academy is free WILL prevent some innovative paid for solutions entering the market/being created. The "learn this, now do this test" methodology is indeed flawed as I've found myself recently. Yet it does make adaptive learning systems easier to build.

There must be a better way to do it and I'd be open to suggestions anyone may have on a computerized learning system that just works. Links and ideas welcome.

The mathalicious site this is a PR piece for does look nice and I clicked around, The vids look good, but what's their testing system like? Adaptive?

This was a terrible read for me. The author sounds like a stereotypical parent telling their child that they can not succeed where the parent failed.

His article is a list of arguably failed teaching techniques that our current education system has implemented and khan academy is currently implementing. He then draws the conclusion that since institutionalized education failed with these techniques so will khan academy.

But he ignores the biggest difference and promise of Khan Academy vs Traditional Education, which is focus on the individual vs focus on the masses.

My feeling after reading the article is that he's link-baiting to make a valid point about trends in education in general. He gets demerits for the misdirection, but his fundamental question is essential and needs to be engaged.

Is he correct that education is fundamentally a human, not technological, endeavor? Is something essential lost when teaching is made completely abstract by software and engineering?

I say this as a home-schooling father of five that uses a lot of technology -- DVDs, online -- to augment our curriculum, and couldn't be happier that I'll be able to have my kids go through MIT, Stanford, Khan, etc., online content, and I think our options in the next few years will be even more amazing.

I'm in agreement with the author that human interaction has to be fundamental to the educational process, but technology must play a role. Books themselves represent arguably the most important mass application of technology in modern history.

So the question for me is: does Khan (or Mathalicious for that matter) attempt to become a replacement for human interaction in education? I don't think so. That is still left to the freedom of any parent or teacher using the material. If more context needs to be applied to a given technology-driven lesson, then the parent or teacher is certainly not prevented from doing so.

The more I think about it, the more I think the author is simply advocating one abstract technological solution over another: his particular brand of context-driven content vs. Khan's more conventional content. Nowhere is the question of actual human interaction broached, just the question of whether qualified "experts" created the content to begin with. He may be correct that his content on the whole is better than Khan's, but his invocation of the "human vs. technological" seems to me yet another misdirection.

The real human element of education takes place in one-on-one situations, with a teacher or parent who can intuit where the child's understanding is at, respond in real-time to the student's own reactions, and change their approach in real-time accordingly. Nothing can replace the give-and-take of face-to-face teaching. Every student is different and real teachers know how to change their tactics slightly, drastically or somewhere in-between to help a student make that crucial conceptual breakthrough.

So to me, "Mathalicious vs. Khan" is merely pitting one abstract set of materials vs. another, and has nothing to do with "human vs. technology." I may use one of them or both or neither, but I won't give up my direct interaction with the student, and, having been raised by a teacher myself, I know that real teachers understand this as well.

Where Khan Academy has the distinct advantage to me is not in its content or teaching style (both of which seem good) but in the ability for the student who does not grasp the subject to be able to replay the lesson over and over without fear of holding up the class or causing the teacher inconvenience thereby allowing the students who do understand the ability to move on to the next subject without having to "read ahead". The overall content covered can be greater overall in a shorter amount of time.

Kids don't want to seem different from other kids. If a child has to ask the teacher to repeat the lesson or stay after for extra help he may be perceived by his peers (or feel as though he is being seen as) as slower or stupid. With KA on the other hand the student can learn at his own pace...something that just cannot be done in a class of 30+.

Khan Academy does not get upset if a student does a search and finds another method to solve the problem at hand (I don't know how many times I was told "I don't care if you are getting the right answer, we want you to do it our way" when I was in school).

To me it is not about KA at all...but more about self education. The best teacher is you, the lecturer may be giving you the information but how you perceive and use it is entirely based on you. It is a simple fact that teachers cannot at the same time be paid more and have smaller class sizes...the funding is not there. Students are going to fall behind unless they are taught early on to not rely entirely on the teacher to show them "everything". We have at our disposal the most powerful learning tool in the history of man...The internet. No longer are libraries bound to the confines of a building down the road that you may or may not have access to. This is the most amazing thing to me, decentralization of learning, and those who profit from learning in the old system obviously are going to be worried about their future income.