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Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

gatesnotes.com

161–170 of 418 posts

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

IIRC studies show one-on-one attention is worth 2 standard deviations in test scores and a good teacher is worth 1 standard deviation. (Not coincidentally home schoolers have about one standard deviation of advantage). Khanmigo doesn't have to be as good as a teacher to provide an advantage to the student.

> (Not coincidentally home schoolers have about one standard deviation of advantage).

Citation required as this is heavily dependent upon the purpose of the home schooling and the resources of the parents.

Anecdata: My cousin was not doing well in 4th grade. So, they pulled her out and her grandmother taught her for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, every single day.

By the time she came back to school in 5th grade she was doing extremely well and hyper motivated to never go through that experience again. :)

She was, however, the exception, not the rule. So much so that a lot of teachers complimented her and her family on the outcome. Her family had no agenda other than "fix her education". Most homeschoolers do not bring to bear that amount of resource and attention, and they have quite a bit poorer results.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#162
post #79

Students are not lacking access to information, they're lacking motivation.

> lacking motivation

Isn't this for lack of tutors, which AI solves?

With teaching now (even via videos), there's no way to present material for 30 students when they vary widely in background understanding and attention span, so only the high middle gets targeted. This creates a vicious cycle where the spread only gets larger as students age.

If slow kids can be tutored to catch up, they'll be much more motivated as part of the class, instead of the losers. If fast kids are given a taste of how ignorant they remain, they might have more sympathy for others, and might try to help instead of compete.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#163
I began a Journey in my mid-20s that I'm still on. (38) I took math classes, starting at middle-school grade. Did most of the Khan material. Moved on to MitX classes in further math, and sciences. Now I am working on an ab-initio atom/molecule simulating for funsies.

Khan academy is an invaluable resource. When I have kids, it will be a core part of their curriculum!

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khanmigo is free for teachers I believe

Who are not the learner which is the context of this particular writeup. Gates is talking about using LLMs to assist students as tutors, and that is not offered for free ($4/month, $44/year).

the bet is probably that the teachers will vouch for Khanmigo at schools but I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t mind giving away Khanmigo for students too

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#165
post #154

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…

>> "Three, what if the AI is just wrong and starts confusing the student? Even GPT-4 fabricates things all the time." It was bad enough when the text was wrong because of shoddy editing.

This is the purpose of LLMOps. To provide guardrails for precise output to prevent hallucination.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#166
post #114

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]

> AI does a better job than prob 90% of the teachers.

AI is better funded than probably 99.9% of teachers, so ...

Ahem. Go sit in a class sometime before spouting that kind of unsubstantiated claptrap.

Like anything with a distribution, some teachers are subpar. However, 90+% of teachers are trying very hard. They have too many students. They have too few resources. Many of them are fight against bad home lives of the students. And, through it all, they have a bunch of bureaucrats promulgating the latest and greatest bullshit that never works.

We know what works. Small classes (<15 students) with two teachers. This has been documented over and over and over. Nobody wants to pay for it.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly depressing to read this comment when I have tested GPT-4 extensively on simple finite group theory, and it could not reliably distinguish associativity from commutativity, either in prose or in computations, even for very small groups where I gave the multiplication table. The only simple abstract algebra problems it could solve were cliches it almost certainly memorized. I would never use an LLM for learn…

At this point, I am surprised that LLMs _can_ do code, given the volume of incorrect information they give on specific topics.

I think most LLM codegen successes is due to their translation abilities, which is what transformers were designed to do in the first place. Software developers usually solve problems in human language (or maybe a sketch) with general “white collar reasoning abilities” that most of us honed in college, regardless of our major. The translation to Python or whatever is often quite routine. A human developer’s software-specific problem-solving skills are needed for questions involving state, unfamiliar algorithms, “simple” quantitative reasoning, newer programming languages, etc... all of which LLM codegen is pretty bad at.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#169

I am a high school dropout and who learned math using Khan Academy after never having completed more than pre-algebra in middle school. Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the intern…

Khan Academy is a treasure of a service. Probably my favorite non-profit out there. High quality information with low barrier to entry. It got me through Calculus, Calc 2, and Linear Algebra.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#170
post #71

I am a high school dropout and who learned math using Khan Academy after never having completed more than pre-algebra in middle school. Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the intern…

> Every time I go to the grocery store to buy something and don’t have to worry about my card being declined, it feels like magic. Even years later. So this is universal!

I'm almost 30 years from anything resembling precarity and I still subtly cross myself almost every time I swipe a card at the grocery store.
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