Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#161

Post by jeffreymcmanus » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:12 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #141

The blog post author is a provider of educational software sold to schools, writing to identify problems that he thinks arise from the Khan Academy approach to online education. I'll respond to what he said now that I've read the blog and the earlier thoughtful comments on his blog and here on HN. 1. It is hard to compete against free, especially in education. Adam Smith pointed this out a long time ago: "In modern t…

It's great that you're contrasting Khan to ALEKS. I'm not drinking the Khan kool-aid; my kid just started using ALEKS in the last month and I agree it's terrific. It's really puzzled me why Khan is getting all this attention when ALEKS has been around so much longer (and seems to be better in many respects -- just lacking instructional video). It would actually be terrific to have some kind of integration between ALEKS and Khan -- to be able to see a video lecture on a particular topic would be quite useful for the student.

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#162

Post by jeffreymcmanus » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:14 AM UTC

boredandroid wrote: post #131

XLcommerce wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago? It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many…

In companies of any size, programmers generally go through quarterly, biannual, or annual performance reviews where they are assessed by the manager and peers. Programmers who are overperforming are promoted and given more responsibility (and money), those who are under-performing get coaching or are fired. This is the same as virtually every other job on the planet. You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair…

"the point is that on the whole it works"

How do you know that?

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#163

Post by jeffreymcmanus » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:16 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #98

autarch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overstating the friction. After I graduated, I wanted to learn Mandarin. I signed up for a course at the University of Minnesota through the Continuing Education department. I didn't have to apply, it was really trivial. I took one course, and they were happy to let me do so.

That's usually the case for most Humanities disciplines (history, languages, literature etc), because their overheads are really low and there is an abundance of teaching professionals compared to actual audiences. The opposite is true for "hard" sciences like chemistry, engineering or CS, where expensive laboratory equipment is necessary and where teaching resources are scarce (due to higher private-sector demand).…

That's not really true. It's not challenging to find CS courses online, and the year I spent in a CS graduate program (through Colorado State), the cost per course unit for CS was the same as any humanities course.

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#164

Post by intended » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:16 AM UTC

boredandroid wrote: post #131

XLcommerce wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago? It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many…

In companies of any size, programmers generally go through quarterly, biannual, or annual performance reviews where they are assessed by the manager and peers. Programmers who are overperforming are promoted and given more responsibility (and money), those who are under-performing get coaching or are fired. This is the same as virtually every other job on the planet. You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair…

So, as asked earlier in this thread, how do you know it works?

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#165

Post by enjalot » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:43 AM UTC

arijo wrote: post #79

yequalsx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been in the classroom for 17 years in higher education. I'm much better at my job now than I was 17 years ago. I've learned a lot in the intervening 17 years. Wisdom and experience count for something and imparting this onto other is useful. Professional development can be helpful and to suggest that the goal is simply to employ teachers is ignorant and naive. I've never met a single teacher who has proposed an innov…

How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a reference to validate your claim?

I read this question as an insult. How could they not know they are better at their job after 17 years of doing it?

This is just my personal opinion but the true judge of a teacher's effectiveness is how much their students learned, and even that can only be used as a measure if the students were willing to learn in the first place.

Relying on some national standard to judge teachers hasn't seemed to help any country in history to have better teachers. I'd wager to guess that periods in history where education unilaterally improved are more due to the motivation of those being educated than anything else.

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#166

Post by enjalot » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:52 AM UTC

XLcommerce wrote: post #136

boredandroid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In companies of any size, programmers generally go through quarterly, biannual, or annual performance reviews where they are assessed by the manager and peers. Programmers who are overperforming are promoted and given more responsibility (and money), those who are under-performing get coaching or are fired. This is the same as virtually every other job on the planet. You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair…

I understand your points and they're all fair in the context of programming as a job. Code is code and can be evaluated in an atomic fashion, its objectively either good(correct, efficient etc) or not. How exactly do you accurately assess teaching? Test scores? I've worked at very tough schools. High unemployment, high crime area. Good teaching in this context meant the teacher showed up, made it through the year wit…

I don't think you understood the parent's points... First, the main point was that programmers were evaluated by their peers and managers, i.e. the people who they work with, not bureaucrats.

Second, judging a programmer solely (in an atomic fashion) by their code is the exact same thing as judging a teacher solely by test scores. How do you know the code was not written at 2am the night of a release to stop vital information from being deleted every time a user submits a form.

On the flipside how do you know that the elegant code wasn't the combination of effort and discussion of several coders all considered to be in the top n% of some mailing list.

I think my point is really that we all tend to rush to judgement of professions outside of our own, when in reality we share the same human problems that are incredibly hard to formalize and hence provide a systematic solution for.

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#167

Post by enjalot » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 6:58 AM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #55

kamens wrote: post #31

(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…

I think it's a mistake for them to throw KA in the same category as traditional K-12 education in the first place. At least from my experience with it, people don't go on Kahn Academy to try to learn everything; it's more valuable when you're looking for knowledge about a specific subject, and you already have a reason for wanting to learn it. The article's main criticism is that KA doesn't try to talk about all the…

I feel like KA frees up some of the time constraints of traditional educators so that they can spend more time doing the motivation and the possible uses of a subject matter.

I'm no teacher but if I was I'd much rather spend my time getting kids excited about stuff and then point them to the resources they need to get going. I'd also have more time to answer questions so the kids wouldn't get as frustrated or stuck.

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#168

Post by stoolpigeon » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 7:18 AM UTC

jforman wrote: post #86

patio11 wrote: post #13

To address our challenges, we need to do what every other successful country has done: invest in professional development; give teachers more time to collaborate; and provide them with resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them. You could have copy/pasted that conclusion without altering a word from the debate about every other educational reform: school choice/vouchers, NCLB, high…

This is an incredibly depressing post. The discussion over educational reform has devolved into one side begging for teachers to stop being treated like cattle and the other saying, essentially, "if you cared about the kids, you'd be happy being treated like cattle." Doctors go through significantly more schooling and receive significantly more professional development — yet they are still perceived with respect as p…

The study of medicine is grounded in hard sciences. There are many things that are known and many that aren't known but usually the line between the two is relatively clear. When something works or doesn't work, it is also often very easy to see.

The study of education is based on social sciences and everything is much more slippery. What is being taught to teachers right now is whichever theory is currently popular. When I earned my credentials to teach, it was quite frankly a joke most of the time. Getting an A was easy. Many of the people in my program were not competent enough to compete in a more difficult field or program.

In the years since, as my own children began working through the public school system, I am taken aback regularly by evidence that their teachers are poorly educated themselves.

I'm shocked that someone would be surprised that there is a gap between how people view doctors and teachers.

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#169

Post by romnempire » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 7:46 AM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #90

yequalsx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way that a bad parent who becomes a better parent knows they are now a better parent. Some things are not quantifiable. I know of no effective national evaluation system for parenting and yet some parents are good parents. I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started. I'm not claiming to be a good teacher. I'm just claiming to be a better one. It's common for a practitioner to get bette…

"You should believe me because I say so"? Really? I'm not saying you are or are not, but this line of justification is an insult to anyone who considers themselves rational thinkers.

the bottom line is that america's eternal quest for a teacher metric is failing in relation to systems like the (perhaps overly touted) finnish one, where the discriminating factor for teacher quality is much more a measure of trust in the intuition of experienced teachers.

I think the 'I NEED MORE NUMBERS' mentality of empiricism you're using here has neutralised the prospective utility of the intuition of experienced teachers who would make effective consultants, if they ever come across something that works that they simply can't explain. Obviously, questioning their suggestions and looking for answers is the next step, but to insult their ability to think and view their opinions with derison? How are you helping anything talking that way?

Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time

#170

Post by SudarshanP » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 7:48 AM UTC

Education is already structured like game with every every feature of gamification like points(scores) and grades(levels) and Leaderboards and so on... But it is a very boring and badly designed game.

Playing a physical game like football and maintaining a good physique for winning a football game seems a lot more fun than exercising to not be sick. Same thing could be said about khan academy. Would it not be awesome that a student can learn 50+25=75 without having to pull out an iPhone to calculate the same... Does it matter whether he did it for energy points or self improvement. A student with good "skills" will likely find it easier to navigate more meaningful content in the future like graph interpretation without even noticing that "the algorithmic skill" came in handy. I totally agree that something like KA is not a solution but just piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

One of the students of the stanford online classes ended up making a cellphone powered self driving car by going through the online class. While the student got the basic framework and ideas from the class, he must have learned a huge amount of stuff putting it all together. Learning is very human no doubt. But it can happen in the minds of the learner. Thrun or Andrew Ng do not need to actually talk to the student by standing a few feet away. They just need to empower and inspire students to work on awesome projects. The students can learn by themselves and each other.