111–119 of 119 posts
In my opinion Stack Overflow is a better model for this stuff. Imagine something like Stack Overflow focused on video tutorials covering concepts that got up voted. (heck, maybe it exists.) why can't I upload my take on "slope" (or whatever) rather than just post Q&A on Khan's?
I'm really starting to believe that these "critiques" of Khan Academy are just teachers and professors terrified of becoming irrelevant. The question shouldn't be "How well does Khan Academy teach" (well, maybe someday). The important question right now is "Is Khan Academy a better learning tool than most high school and college teachers?". In my experience, the answer overwhelmingly is "yes". I did have some truly f…
Many good instructors can't draw a line between KA (or any other disruptive solution) and the absolute best, gold standard, scientifically-proven best way to teach (usually their favorite methodology).
The fact is that he's better than most of the teachers out there. It's a rising tide: if your teacher has a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching you probably don't need Sal Khan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really starting to believe that these "critiques" of Khan Academy are just teachers and professors terrified of becoming irrelevant. I try not to ascribe unstated motives to people, but I really wonder at the smell of pedantry and elitism in an article like that. Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD. People are logging in to his site to learn things. Khan…
> Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD. Yes, because when something is popular and free, its got to be good. cough religion anyone cough . If that is considered to be the measure of quality these days, our society is doomed. Education is an important thing, ignoring it and treating this one man as some "messiah" of education when he clearly introduces wrong a…
It would be like if Khan Academy was giving out free meals to homeless people and McDonalds fabricated reports on how the food was unhealthy and used their influence to get the Washington Post to carry the smear and add to it.
wrong and obtrusive concepts
Now who is showing a religious level of bias?
I'm a pragmatist. If something is free that I need, I use it. If something is for-pay that I need and the price is justifiable, I use it. My commercial software architectures often mix proprietary and open source solutions and I don't make excuses for either business model.
One thing about free, you can always get a refund on your investment and you have to really suspect the motives and the character of someone who attacks "free". Not real surprising that the attacker in this case was a for-profit competitor, was it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD. Yes, because when something is popular and free, its got to be good. cough religion anyone cough . If that is considered to be the measure of quality these days, our society is doomed. Education is an important thing, ignoring it and treating this one man as some "messiah" of education when he clearly introduces wrong a…
Besides learning about his project online, I don't have any use of or interest in Khan Academy. There's no religion on my part, just a little disgust that a for-profit company would try to smear KA over minutia. It would be like if Khan Academy was giving out free meals to homeless people and McDonalds fabricated reports on how the food was unhealthy and used their influence to get the Washington Post to carry the sm…
There is no religious bias, its a difference between a ineffective and wrong way vs. an effective right way. The professor performed no smear against Khan Academy, but the fact he only saw two videos that cause confusion in basic math concepts, it should make one skeptical, especially when someone like you justifies it on the basis of popularity, pragmatism and "minutia".
It seems like you read one article from the Washington Post that wasn't written very well and from that one article, deduce that WP is on some smear campaign. Absurdity of the highest order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD. Yes, because when something is popular and free, its got to be good. cough religion anyone cough . If that is considered to be the measure of quality these days, our society is doomed. Education is an important thing, ignoring it and treating this one man as some "messiah" of education when he clearly introduces wrong a…
Besides learning about his project online, I don't have any use of or interest in Khan Academy. There's no religion on my part, just a little disgust that a for-profit company would try to smear KA over minutia. It would be like if Khan Academy was giving out free meals to homeless people and McDonalds fabricated reports on how the food was unhealthy and used their influence to get the Washington Post to carry the sm…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some of the things these people believe they've learned from the KA, and believe must be right because they (think) they've seen it on KA really worry me What kind of things? Are you suggesting that flesh-and-blood teachers or brick-and-mortar schools are less likely to spread misinformation or leave students with misconceptions? I can tell you a hundred false things I was taught by "real" school, and some of them…
Are you suggesting that flesh-and-blood teachers or brick-and-mortar schools are less likely to spread misinformation or leave students with misconceptions? Possibly, because when you leave school you can realize your misconceptions and learn from other people, as well as pointing out other people's misconceptions. But if everyone uses Khan Academy, everyone will end up with the same misconceptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with education in the US is cost - quality is almost as good as it possibly could be (holding the inputs fixed). In 2010, the US government spent $900B on education. If Khan can reduce the number of teachers needed by even a few percent, that's a HUGE savings.
in 2010, the US Department of Education budget was $47 billion [1]. That's between 1-2% of the total budget. The problem with education in the US is not cost, and even if it was, the solution is not 'get rid of a few percent of teachers." Where did you get that $900 billion number? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg...
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…
and the Khan Academy developers have been listening, and I have had interesting off-forum email interaction And THERE is the difference between genuinely-given constructive criticism and the questionably-motivated smearing that those folks working with the Washington Post are attempting to deliver. Thank you very much for the links. I've already sent some of them on to my wife so that she and I can research them a bi…
In fact it was very important to me that the piece I co-wrote not be a smear piece. I can't speak for the comments I did not write. But a careful read of the post itself should reveal a claim backed up by evidence. The claim is that Sal Khan is lacking some important knowledge for teaching. That's not a smear. I would gladly engage in a discussion that pointed to evidence that he does know some important things about how people learn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and the Khan Academy developers have been listening, and I have had interesting off-forum email interaction And THERE is the difference between genuinely-given constructive criticism and the questionably-motivated smearing that those folks working with the Washington Post are attempting to deliver. Thank you very much for the links. I've already sent some of them on to my wife so that she and I can research them a bi…
As one of those who worked on one of the Washington Post pieces, I would invite you to come by my blog, Overthinking" rel="nofollow">http://christopherdanielson.wordpress.com>Overthinking My Teaching , where I think you will find my motives to quite pure-better understanding of student learning of mathematics. In fact it was very important to me that the piece I co-wrote not be a smear piece. I can't speak for the co…
The problem with education in this country is that we funnel most all of our public education dollars into a system and related organizations that are only tangentially motivated to educate our children. Watch how the public school systems and teachers unions react to vouchers and charter schools and you'll see how much they care about educating kids vs protecting their turf and power base.
I've noted that those within the education system or closely aligned with it absolutely hated "Waiting for Superman". They nitpick it and try to blow up minor faults with it in a similar way to how you're going after Khan. To those of us outside of that power structure, that documentary showed how the establishment is utterly opposed to actually solving problems in education in this country if those solutions occur outside of that establishment.
I view your articles vs Khan to be in a similar vein. What Khan has done is he's added a solution to our society for our education problems that operates outside of the current public education power structure. Rather than build on what he's done and improve on it through working with Khan or doing something better -- you folks have taken the route of trying to publicly take him down in the media.