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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

#121

Post by fullofideas »

diddypiddy wrote: post #105
doctoboggan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive! You should give yourself more credit as it takes more than just internet and patience to teach yourself enough to get into college. I am also excited for society. However I am worried as well. While an AI tutor who is able to understand the child's current knowledge and gear the lessons toward what will make the most sense will be very powerful, it could also be used for brainwashing, propaganda, misinfor…

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify t…

I am not discounting what you said about wealth concentration and upward mobility, but the top post that started this thread is surely a counter example for what you are saying? Yes, the makers of openai/gemini/whatever could power such ai tutors, and make more money, but there are legit cases where this will be an enormous boost that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#122

Post by d_burfoot »

There's always been an economic contradiction in a common education. The skills that a typical high school education will teach you are not very valuable, because they are oversupplied. No one is going to pay you to solve AP calculus problems or write an essay about the French Revolution; not because these are easy tasks, but because the world is full of people who can perform them.

AI education will continue this trend. AI can certainly teach you all kinds of remarkable skills. But the value of those skills will now plummet, because these are exactly the kinds of jobs that will be automated by AI!

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#124

Post by nicce »

babl-yc wrote: post #84
Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

There may be "no money in EdTech" but that doesn't mean there can't be impactful products for it. Students don't want to pay for Google but every student still uses it. Some students will want to waste time if given access to more tools like AI agents, but the motivated ones will use it to their advantage. Even if it's wrong sometimes, it's right a lot, perfect for rubber ducking, and almost always gives answers that…

> As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible.

At least you wrote it by yourself? Copy-paste from GPT-4 removes the whole thinking process and need for basic skills. It is extremely difficult to prove that someone just copied the text without doing any own work. If it is difficult to detect and punish, then certainly almost everyone will do that, if they get an advantage.

What is the future of proving that I know something myself?

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#125

Post by aeyes »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #120
Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

Maybe no school board buys and puts it into every class. Parents will still buy it and it can supplement learning gaps when doing homework. $20/month is a rounding error compared to pre-school, clothes, extra-curricular activies, private school, private tutors, etc.

The kids of people who can afford all you mentioned usually don't have problems with education. It's those who don't have $20.

My parents spent almost nothing on my education, just a couple of $ per year to buy a notebook or two. I used the same pens for almost ten years. I participated in zero sports, had zero tutors... I did ok but I had peers with even less resources and not all of them did good.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#126

Post by tombert »

RandomLensman wrote: post #116
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I've found ChatGPT (and its clones) have been immensely useful as a learning tool for me. Having it summarize stuff in different ways and being able to immediately ask clarifying questions has been sort of a game-changing learning tool, at least for me. I don't think they should allow use of AI during tests because yeah, it'd just do all the work for them and they wouldn't learn anything, but I absolutely th…

Does ChatGPT give you good exercises in set theory to work through as well on that or is that back to other material?

I've never really had it do exercises in set theory, so tough to say. Usually the thing I like about it most is getting it summarize stuff at a high level, and then giving me keywords than I can independently search for and play around with in Isabelle. Like, for me I think part of the value to ChatGPT is simply figuring out some of what I don't know that I don't know.

When I was a lecturer I would use ChatGPT to generate Java homework assignment. It would do "ok" with that, but it usually required three or four iterations to get something that actually made sense, and usually it would require a bit of editing on my end to get results I was happy with. It still saved me a boatload of time though, particularly since it was even able to give me the assignment in pandoc-compatible markdown.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#127

Post by IncreasePosts »

nbzso wrote: post #6

If you have some form of financial independence in your life, some form of the grid backup, you know what is all this about. Did you think the richest of the elite will give their kids this form of education? Seriously? My kids learn in a classical way. No aid, no electronic devices, no "modern" bullshit. Critical thinking is a must in a world of corporations greed and digital dystopia. The school mandatory program i…

The elite will give their kids this education when it is better than what a team of dedicated humans can provide. We are no where near that stage though.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#128

Post by QuarterReptile »

qaq wrote: post #114
Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

[flagged]

Textbooks do a better job than 90% of teachers, and that's not a dig at teachers. I spend more time, by far, figuring out how to keep student attention than thinking about the material itself.

I'd be way more excited about getting 6 of my students to start reading and understanding textbooks than getting all 60 to pass. OTOH, my bosses would be pretty pissed...

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#129

Post by Jtsummers »

> As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence.

You don't need an LLM for this. Since the topic is specifically math, consider what that actually entails, especially for K-12 math education. The example is fractions. The rules for fraction problems are well-defined, we don't need an LLM to guess at the steps, we can literally write a simple program that encodes all the individual steps and prompts the student when they make a mistake to step back and walk through each small step (instead of taking big steps, like going from 1/2+1/4 to an answer have the student fill out each step like how to make the denominators the same and then adding the numerators and then, if applicable, simplifying).

Generating problems is also not something an LLM needs to be involved in. Such a strange and wasteful use of these tools.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#130

Post by rramadass »

arresin wrote: post #45

I never found the Kahn academy videos good. His teaching style was just totally off. I found some videos by a company called The Teaching Company. Really old school, very early 2000s or late 90s. Incredibly high quality truly gifted teachers—-just less well known online.

I am glad somebody mentioned "The Teaching Company" and their offerings - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Teaching_Company

I used to checkout their "The Great Courses" dvds from the local library (in the USA) long time ago. They were a set of presentations each a full lecture length and delivered by respected professors in their fields. No flashy animations/music/narrative distractions but sedate multimedia in support of the lecture. I am not sure how it has changed nowadays but people should definitely check it out; there is a lot of good content there.

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