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Open letter to Sal Khan

christopherdanielson.wordpress.com

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Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#141

Post by foobarqux »

aatash wrote: post #134
foobarqux wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me specifically what Khan Academy's objective and how it goes about achieving it? What does KA view its role as in education? Your "about" page says "Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere." Is providing free learning materials the extent of what you do? Do you ha…

Aatash from Khan Academy here. As the mission mentions, in addition to providing free learning materials, we care deeply about making the quality of those materials the best they can be. We work with a lot of teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms year-round, giving us constant feedback on how students are interacting with the videos and exercises, in terms of both what's working well and where the gaps li…

> We have also worked with education researchers, and we're constantly studying various models of learning.

Can you elaborate? What discoveries have you made? How have you advanced the state of the art?

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#142

Post by spicyj »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #137
spicyj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more thing: As I was looking through our content, I found we have a new exercise on comparing decimals! It was written just 10 days ago (and hasn't yet been added to the main site): http://sandcastle.khanacademy.org/media/castles/Khan:master/... With questions like 0.3 __ 0.03 and 0.02 __ 0.1, I think you'll find that the exercise touches on exactly the misconceptions that you've seen. In addition, the hints use…

Minor bug report, hints 3 and 5 (where the values are displayed as hundreths) overlap with the previous hints (where they are shown as combinations of tenths and hundredsths) for me on Firefox/Ubuntu, but look fine on Chromium/Ubuntu.

Thanks, should be fixed if you reload.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#143

Post by geonz »

aatash wrote: post #134
foobarqux wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me specifically what Khan Academy's objective and how it goes about achieving it? What does KA view its role as in education? Your "about" page says "Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere." Is providing free learning materials the extent of what you do? Do you ha…

Aatash from Khan Academy here. As the mission mentions, in addition to providing free learning materials, we care deeply about making the quality of those materials the best they can be. We work with a lot of teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms year-round, giving us constant feedback on how students are interacting with the videos and exercises, in terms of both what's working well and where the gaps li…

lOVE THE lip service. It's extremely consistent with the KA view of "school" -- get the assignment done, collect the cheque.

I'm sorry, but "quality" is not the lesson described in the "open letter.

Quality is not telling students 2 plus itself times one is the same as two times one.

Quality is not stating that concepts are incredibly important, but an average "sort of represents" a group of numbers.

Quality is not mixing impossible problems into an introductory lesson, and assuming advanced background in elementary lessons.

Quality is not ... Khan Academy. GO back to your little insulated groups and the folsk who buy your slick sales talks.

Quality would involve listening when people raise questions and addressing (wait a minute) the actual questions they raise!

But you can't! Please, though, don't believe that people who actually work with students who are actually trying to understand math think that what you've got is going to help. It's fine for all those folks who just need to crank out a mess of problems, factory assembly-line style. There are lots of people who have this crazy idea that learning math should be more.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#144

Post by aranglancy »

aatash wrote: post #134
foobarqux wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me specifically what Khan Academy's objective and how it goes about achieving it? What does KA view its role as in education? Your "about" page says "Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere." Is providing free learning materials the extent of what you do? Do you ha…

Aatash from Khan Academy here. As the mission mentions, in addition to providing free learning materials, we care deeply about making the quality of those materials the best they can be. We work with a lot of teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms year-round, giving us constant feedback on how students are interacting with the videos and exercises, in terms of both what's working well and where the gaps li…

I'd also like the hear more about your work with educational researchers. In what way does research on learning effect KA's development? And specifically what learning models are you looking at and how are those learning models influencing the videos and exercises you create?

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#145

Post by aranglancy »

dpatru wrote: post #132
zaphar wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to evaluate a Teacher by those metrics but that does not guarantee that the content the teacher is teaching is correct or accurate. Thus my point above.

The best way to ensure good content is to ensure smart teachers, which is what these metrics are designed for. Fractions and decimals are not difficult. I doubt that kids who have been learning math with Khan have problems understanding them. But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem. The lacunae of a smart teacher are easily fixed,…

> But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem.

You must realize that this is an incredibly simplistic view of learning? How students learn is an extremely complicated process. While decimals are not difficult, understanding exactly where students struggle with the concept and determining a sequence of learning activities to help them overcome that concept is extremely difficult.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#146

Post by Trianglemancsd »

justin66 wrote: post #129
Trianglemancsd wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Original poster here. I have amended the line in the post to make clear that the "useless" claim was not intended to apply to all of Khan's videos; only to the decimal ones. As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways: "But I do…

> As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways: Do you have any videos of your own we can watch, so as to get a better handle on the way you think these things should be made?

Sure thing. I'm not a huge fan of expository video, so I don't have a ton of things. Here I use video to show an algorithm: http://www.sophia.org/partial-quotients-algorithm-tutorial

And here is a Ted-Ed video I worked on that is intended to provoke discussion and thought. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/one-is-one-or-is-it

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