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Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

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Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#31

Post by mminer237 »

chii wrote: post #9
croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

> But now you have an AI that solves it for you. and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you. Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.

That requires a young student who is really self-motivated to keep asking it to clarify things. Plenty of teachers, parents, and tutors are willing to keep trying new ways of explaining things to kids until they understand it. The kid giving up is way more common than the adult without someone pushing him to keep trying or coming back to it regularly. Obviously, not every child has someone in his life that cares enough to do that, but I can't see AI as anything other than a subpar substitute.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#32

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

LegitShady wrote: post #8
croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

I have coworkers who already stop to type things into a GPT before using any part of their mind to think about things. At this point I assume its inevitable that for large segments of people, who are not actively trying to maintain the independence of their mind, will allow these computers to do their thinking and decision making for them.

Calculators keep us from having to practice a certain skill and we accept whatever consequences of that, we've survived it. But yeah, imagine if the skill we no longer had to practice was critical thinking period.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#33

Post by Phiwise_ »

croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

Why would you assume this? Wouldn't Sal Kan want to design his version of a teacher AI to avoid that behavior?

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#34

Post by nicce »

asabla wrote: post #15
croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

For sure! But idea behind these AI tutors are to help and guide you through the process of asking questions until you understands. Will it be perfect? hell no! Just another tool for teachers to either enhance and/or give extra help with almost no extra resources. Hopefully this will pan out for the better then the worse

Where is the opportunity, there is a crime.

The most of the students will not use it for improving their own text or iteration process, unless the penalties for cheating are very high. They instead copy-paste the instructions, add some adjustments, and then copy-paste the output. This will give them results in the shortest amount of time, if there are assignments where something needs to be returned. But how to detect cheaters?

Too many students do tasks as in "completion" oriented way, not in learning oriented way. I am mostly talking from college/university perspective.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#35

Post by red_admiral »

Both Bill Gates and Sal Khan (and, for good measure, Mark Zuckerberg too) have tried revolutionizing education with technology before. If we look at exactly how and where past attempts went wrong, we might find some challenges for this one too.

I remember when MOOCs were the future of education, as students across the world would have free access to the best lectures from the best teachers and could watch them over and over again at their own pace. That ... didn't result in the second coming of Christ, to put it politely.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#36

Post by belter »

cr125rider wrote: post #13
belter wrote: post #3

[flagged]

I’ll bite. Why is Khan Academy so bad? It seems like a good collection of high quality classes, at least the ones I’ve tried from Sal himself.

Khan Academy is great. It's their agreement with Microsoft that will be their fall.

https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2024/05/enhancing-...

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#37

Post by wisty »

> But drawing on his experience creating Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, Sal makes a compelling case that AI-powered technologies will be different. That’s because we finally have a way to give every student the kind of personalized learning, support, and guidance that’s historically been out of reach for most kids in most classrooms. As Sal puts it, “Getting every student a dedicated on-call human tutor is cost prohibitive.” AI tutors, on the other hand, aren’t.

Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.

Classes work because the teacher can inspire (or at least push), and there's peer pressure to learn (or at least keep up with the herd). I'm sure there's a dozen or so self-taught Python or Rust programmers here who will loudly refute what I'm saying, and point out that they were perfectly capable of learning something they were very interested in, but I bet a lot of them would also like to learn a foreign language or quantum physics and haven't gotten that done.

AI will fail for the same reason Youtube, DVDs, video cassettes, radio lessons, and phonographs all failed to be a revolution. If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough (for theoretical subjects) and for less theoretical subjects you barely need a textbook, just lots of practice.

Yes, you can probably learn a little tiny bit faster with AI, if you (or someone staring over your shoulder) have the motivation to play some AI learning game rather than a more fun-optimised game that's purely about having fun, but it's a small optimisation.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#38

Post by mihaic »

All the articles I've read about AI improving education make the same assumption: AI will help students learn that same things as we teach them now easier.

If AI will be so revolutionary to me that first mean a complete overhaul of what students should learn? We haven't even properly done this reevaluation of the curriculum even for being constantly connected to the internet.

Students really need to learn a lot fewer things on average, but the fundamentals matter even more now. Honestly, 90% of the population doesn't need more than elementary math, but they really need to understand how percentages or pro-rata work.

In the end, looks like a puff piece by Bill Gates is still a puff piece.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#39

Post by nicklecompte »

croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

Picture this: you're a high school junior struggling to understand simple free-body diagrams. You ask the AI tutor for help and it gives you a pile of bullshit. Unfortunately the bullshit is written in the exact same authoritative tone as your (correct) textbook, and the AI temporarily gaslights the actual human teacher into accepting a wrong answer, even though the teacher has a B.S. in physics.

(Source: a very smart science teacher I know and won't name. Keep in mind most high school science teachers have weak scientific backgrounds. This technology is poison.)

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#40

Post by jgalt212 »

chii wrote: post #9
croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

> But now you have an AI that solves it for you. and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you. Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.

> Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.

Not true, but only available at great expense.

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