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How well does Khan Academy teach?

washingtonpost.com

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Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#81

Post by drcube »

"Our view is that content knowledge alone is inadequate for quality instruction."

I cannot disagree more. The best teachers I had were college professors who were all experts in their field and never took a class on pedagogy or education. But they had the autonomy to change their teaching style based on what was most effective for them and their students.

Our grade school teachers would be a lot better if they were experts in their domain of knowledge and given more leeway to teach according to their strengths and their students' needs. As it is, public school teachers are pretty much automatons whose actions are dictated down to the minute by school boards.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#82

Post by JPKab »

tokenadult wrote: post #48

Colin once again submits an article from the United States popular press, here a co-authored op-ed piece, about mathematics education reform in the United States, one of my main topics of personal research for more than a decade. The regular opinion column to which this guest piece was submitted, the "Answer Sheet" edited by Valerie Strauss, is basically propaganda for the current school system, and has been caught h…

""The teachers are eager and able to learn. I vividly remember one summer class when I taught why the multiplication algorithm works for two-digit numbers using base ten blocks. I have no difficulty doing this with third graders, but this particular class was all elementary school teachers. At the end of the half hour, one third-grade teacher raised her hand. 'Why wasn’t I told this secret before?' she demanded. It was one of those rare speechless moments for Pat Kenschaft. In the quiet that ensued, the teacher stood up." The "Secret": http://www.tech4mathed.com/MAT156/topics%20test%202/twodigit...

Since there is a strong, strong chance that many of the readers who were taught in a U.S. classroom never saw this, I have the above link included.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#83

Post by orc »

mtgx wrote: post #10

One of the issues I have with Khan Academy is that they are using exactly the same style of teaching as in schools...just ported online. Is that really the best way to go about online education? I find the AcademicEarth.org method of simply filming classes even worse. Yes, they do allow for what you'd normally call "quality education" to be accessible by anyone online, so that's a pretty big step, but I get this feel…

This is an important point. I've always found lecture to be a very inefficient method of teaching. Why not switch to an entirely written format? You can say a lot with diagrams and pictures. Good exercises and well explained solutions are also very important. Also if it's all text then you can easily search for keywords.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#84

Post by com »

drcube wrote: post #81

"Our view is that content knowledge alone is inadequate for quality instruction." I cannot disagree more. The best teachers I had were college professors who were all experts in their field and never took a class on pedagogy or education. But they had the autonomy to change their teaching style based on what was most effective for them and their students. Our grade school teachers would be a lot better if they were e…

My best teachers were also content experts.

My worst teachers by a long shot were also content experts, holding, in one case, the research chair of an academic department in a renowned research university.

Couldn't teach to save his life and was lucky that the tutors put in a lot of extra hours so that around 50% of the enrolled students passed his fairly easy course (it was a revelation that after I had failed, and had to re-sit during the summer, I asked an academic in a related field to coach me based on a text, and his explanations were lucid, to the point, had an expository style that engaged and that he actually wanted to address the material at hand).

An intelligent person with some domain knowledge, good teaching materials and firm grasp on how students learn beats someone with all the domain knowledge in the world who is a hopeless teacher, in my experience.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#85

Post by novalis »

Jtsummers wrote: post #51
novalis wrote: post #6

"Comparing decimals. Decimal fractions (decimals for short — the numbers to the right of the decimal point) are a notoriously challenging topic in the elementary math curriculum." Just to point out this is the most ass backwards way to talk about decimal fractions I have ever witnessed, but nothing would stop said Valerie Strauss on pedagogical insufficiency spotting... "decimals for short — the numbers to the right…

The author isn't Valerie Strauss. "Decimals" is (in the US at least) a common way of referring to decimal fractions (that is, numbers represented like: 12.345) vs the whole number or integer representation that the students would already be familiar with (like 12) or other fractional notations like 6 7/10.

I am under the impression the author of the article is Valerie Strauss and she is presenting a small piece critique by Christopher Danielson and Michael Paul Goldenberg at the top of her article. If not, there is a problem with the placement of her name at the end of it.

As for the abbreviation presented, it is just terrible and is used in article while accusing others of lack of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#86

Post by vph »

Khan Academy is social-network type of learning, where you learn from the community. This is good. But learning from expert educators is also essential and perhaps irreplaceable. There are a lot of short-sighted people, who are marveled by current technologies that allow people interact remotely and immediately jump to the conclusion that we have an answer to learning, while dismissing the entire tradition, culture and knowledge of and about learning that has been established for centuries. Now, if Khan wants to make a quick buck, that's fine. But he's serious about teaching and learning, he should realize that Khan Academy and its approach is only complementary (at extremely great at that) and is not a replacement of the traditional ways of teaching and learning.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#87

Post by spamizbad »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #7

The main criticism of the article is a bit silly: Khan will put the video out there and see how people react to it. He perceives this to be a better approach than incorporating results of quality research projects into his instructional decisions. In the age of No Child Left Behind and its mandate for “scientifically based research” as the foundation for classroom instruction, this seems lazy. Yes, Khan is doing his…

I don't think so at all. The author supported their claim with that indicate Sal Khan doesn't fully recognize the impact of PCK, and gives specific examples in Khan's lessons.

While PCK is a "buzzword", it does represent something very real in learning: That Instructors (be they amateur or professional) must understand the hidden challenges of the material they teach. Specifically, in ensuring that misconceptions do not propagate and embed themselves into a pupil's mind. In math, misconceptions can be particularly troublesome as the facets of mathematics, particularly at the elementary level, carefully layer on top of each other.

If you want an example of this that falls into the sphere of stuff closer to HNs, look to Zed Shaw's Learn Code the Hard Way series.

Shaw puts exercises and examples in front of readers designed explicitly to prevent the reader from developing weird misconceptions about the way a programming language (or programming in general) works. That's often why readers will say things finally "clicked" when they work through his material. Shaw may not be familiar with the buzzword term "PCK" but he definitely recognizes the challenges in teaching each concept he presents to the reader. You can see part of this come through with his critique of K&R C.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#88

Post by Jtsummers »

novalis wrote: post #85
Jtsummers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author isn't Valerie Strauss. "Decimals" is (in the US at least) a common way of referring to decimal fractions (that is, numbers represented like: 12.345) vs the whole number or integer representation that the students would already be familiar with (like 12) or other fractional notations like 6 7/10.

I am under the impression the author of the article is Valerie Strauss and she is presenting a small piece critique by Christopher Danielson and Michael Paul Goldenberg at the top of her article. If not, there is a problem with the placement of her name at the end of it. As for the abbreviation presented, it is just terrible and is used in article while accusing others of lack of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

So you believe she speaks about herself using "We" instead of "I"?

Her contribution is the first 2 paragraphs, the rest is the critique from Christopher Danielson and Michael Paul Goldenberg.

Edit: And please explain, how is the abbreviation terrible, because I've clearly missed something.

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#89

Post by PotatoEngineer »

smacktoward wrote: post #49
yummyfajitas wrote: post #7

The main criticism of the article is a bit silly: Khan will put the video out there and see how people react to it. He perceives this to be a better approach than incorporating results of quality research projects into his instructional decisions. In the age of No Child Left Behind and its mandate for “scientifically based research” as the foundation for classroom instruction, this seems lazy. Yes, Khan is doing his…

But just "putting the video out there and seeing how people react to it" isn't "scientific research." Science involves testable hypotheses and controlled experiments. Just throwing things against the wall and seeing which ones stick is something different.

"Putting the video out there" is an experiment. It's not rigorously controlled, but it's about as controlled as a website is likely to get. So they put something out there, see how well it works, and maybe tweak it.

That's the very essence of scientific experiments. You don't always need a "hypothesis" to do science. (Or, if you like, the hypothesis is "This video will teach students to do X.")

Re: How well does Khan Academy teach?

#90

Post by yummyfajitas »

smacktoward wrote: post #49
yummyfajitas wrote: post #7

The main criticism of the article is a bit silly: Khan will put the video out there and see how people react to it. He perceives this to be a better approach than incorporating results of quality research projects into his instructional decisions. In the age of No Child Left Behind and its mandate for “scientifically based research” as the foundation for classroom instruction, this seems lazy. Yes, Khan is doing his…

But just "putting the video out there and seeing how people react to it" isn't "scientific research." Science involves testable hypotheses and controlled experiments. Just throwing things against the wall and seeing which ones stick is something different.

Khan has a fairly extensive testing/data analysis system. He puts the material out there, measures whether students correctly answer the problems, and iterates from there.

While it's not controlled experiments, it's about as close as you can get in education.

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