this is exactly how i feel about khan academy. a lot of how and no why.
Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
121–130 of 192 posts
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#122Disappointing that it didn't even touch on what I see as one of the central items of Khan Academy: the "watch lectures at home and do homework with teachers" methodology.
That seems like the most interesting bit -- one that could get a great teacher to expand their influence across many more students than they could otherwise. (ie, they have more time for 1-on-1 help since they do not have to put so much time into lectures)
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been in the classroom for 17 years in higher education. I'm much better at my job now than I was 17 years ago. I've learned a lot in the intervening 17 years. Wisdom and experience count for something and imparting this onto other is useful. Professional development can be helpful and to suggest that the goal is simply to employ teachers is ignorant and naive. I've never met a single teacher who has proposed an innov…
How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a reference to validate your claim?
Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago?
It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many times has meant that I now have far more effective ways of describing and teaching certain concepts. I know that 7 years ago teaching a 10th grader how to iterate over an array would have taken 5 false starts and 4 weeks worth of instruction (bearing in mind that many lack motivation). Now the same content takes half the time because I can anticipate what kinds of questions will arise and how to deal with them effectively.
Oh and teacher evaluation is hard. Teachers fear it because it's done by non-teachers to teachers. And as some comments on this thread indicate the world is full of monday morning quarterbacks who have lots of opinions without any real experience.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#124Access to education is the problem Kahn Academy solves for me. I changed schools a lot as a kid and was kept back to repeat classes I had no problems with because the new school would teach classes at a different rate or in a different order.
Even in classes that I didn't have to repeat I was board a lot in class. (Bio, Physics, Math) I wasted a lot of my youth that way and while it was annoying then, it angers me now. Getting 100% on a class or test wasn't hard and shouldn't have been the limit of my education.
If this was available then I would have pounced on it and tried to test of classes. (If that was available of course, but that's another topic for discussion.) If my parents had some other way for me to get out of grade and high school they would have taken it.
This style of learning wont be for everyone. But it works for me.
On a side note, I've personally used Khan to teach my friends, my siblings, and myself the basics in subjects we've gotten rusty in or never covered growing up. I quite enjoy it.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#125I don't think the problems that inspire education reform will go away until a large number people with clout re-conceptualize the whole notion and function of education. Education ends is too conflated with nationalist and career ambitions. If students were given the encouragement and support to complete relevant projects that can translate into attractive college applications or on-the-job skills, students would be better served to enter the workforce and would probably more effectively see the relevance of their actions. It's difficult to test student success and standardized tests, organized by specialist subjects, become irrelevant.
Marshall McLuhan (in the sixties) talked about how instant access to information made specialization in education less relevant. He predicted that schools would cease operating under the industrial assumption of specialization. In fact, many other hard boundaries - work/leisure, education/employment - would become blurred and resemble more pre-industrial, and even pre-literate, sensibilities. Unfortunately, technology moves so much slower than ideology, and people are treating the "jobs of the future" as if one learns math, and then one can work in some math-making factory, or something, for the rest of their life.
The dichotomy the author presents is irrelevant. Khan academy and mathalicious.com would both serve a project-based curriculum quite well.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#126One thing I think gets left out of these discussions is how much of a teacher's job (in many districts, even good ones) is motivating his or her students. Most students do best when they respect their teachers and want to impress them. You can't really replicate this remotely. The human connection is largely reliant of being in the same physical room.
This fact does not fall on one side or the other of any argument I see here. I expect it is completely compatible with integrating KA into a school curriculum or not. I just think it needs to be kept in mind.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started. Sure, you know that you're a better teacher than when you started. But can you prove it? What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't? What can you do better? How can you show that you do your job better? As a programmer, I have a similar problem. But I don't just throw up my hands and say, "Well, some things just can't be quantified." Inst…
Patio11 made a claim that calls for reform, school choice, testing, etc. all had as their goal employment of teachers and that education of students was a by-product. Specifically he/she said this in regard to professional development. I responded to the professional development aspect of Patio11's comment. My point being that seasoned professionals do have wisdom to impart on less experienced colleagues. I used myse…
I know of no profession in which practitioners do not generally get better over time. Football players and Strippers don't automatically get better with time and despite learning new things their overall performance decreases with time. More generally any profession that deals with burnout either physical or mental has the same sort's of issues.
Look, my Mother has 2 PHD's in education and often does professional workshops for teachers. However, like most forms of professional development her workshops are both expensive and their value is hard to quantify. So it may pay better than her normal job but as she says it's of limited value.
Programming is a lot like teaching it takes a few years to get up to speed, but vary quickly years of experience stops being a useful metric.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give it time. With the direction healthcare costs are going it's just a matter of time before the hate enters the profession. Soon people will see doctors, nurses, and administrators for what they really are: rent-seekers gouging taxpayers for enormous amounts of money by erecting barriers to entry, keeping accountability to a minimum, and charging endless procedures to the bottomless pits that are medicare and medic…
From my experience a significant percentage of the population already feels this way. Maybe it's because I have mostly dealt with the military health care system(which also uses civilian specialists), but most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent.
'... most doctors seem arrogant, uncaring, and incompetent' - it's unfortunate if this is your take-home from meeting doctors, but I have to say that is a serious overstatement.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#129Khan Academy provides a low-overhead, on-demand learning environment. The format is good, but it's not novel, and the format isn't the point . Khan Academy allows me, with no overhead whatsoever, to pick (or refresh a skill), whenever I want. If my math skills aren't up to snuff for a hobby project I'm working on, Khan Academy is there. If I can't remember how a transistor works ... Khan Academy has me covered. Compa…
I think you're overstating the friction. After I graduated, I wanted to learn Mandarin. I signed up for a course at the University of Minnesota through the Continuing Education department. I didn't have to apply, it was really trivial. I took one course, and they were happy to let me do so.
I believe toyg already covered the split between humanities and science/engineering, but I'd also like to cover the Continuing Education departments themselves.
The course offerings are generally constrained, and the courses themselves are often lightweight versions of the university course -- assuming that the subject you want is covered at all. The facilities for continuing education courses are also often less robust.
Take CCA in San Francisco. This is a highly considered arts college, and they offer a small number of introductory extension classes:
http://www.cca.edu/academics/extension/courses
Compare to their full course offering:
http://www.cca.edu/academics/undergraduate
You'll have to drill down on individual categories to explore the full breadth and depth.
Continuing Education offerings are rarely a substitute for the quality of courses they offer to a matriculating student.
Given how often educational institutions have raised their tuition in recent years, I'd love to see them institute a program where they charge a (possibly large) fee to allow non-matriculating adults to audit a course, without limitation or requirement, and use those fees to subsidize enrolled student tuition.
However, this may be a shift too far in the "trade school" direction for their comfort.
Re: Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
#130I wish I knew more about the person writing it, its hard to contextualize their opinions as it stands currently.
Happy to tell you more. My name is Karim. I'm the founder of Mathalicious and the author of the blog post. I'm also a former classroom teacher and middle school math coach, where I worked with other teachers to help improve instruction by focusing on 1) conceptual understanding, and 2) relevance. It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories: 1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The aut…
Let me try to crack that nutshell...
1. ...and several other factors, like requiring all students in a class to move at the same pace.
2. We all, including Khan, recognize there is a problem.
3. You gravely mischaracterize Khan's approach. Yes, the video you selected (out of thousands) does promote rote methods, as do many of the exercises. But Khan is also at pains to demonstrate mathematical reasoning from first principles, and to emphasize why we use the methods we do, why they work, and what relevance they have to the real world - in real world terms that make at least as much sense to me as those used by mathalicious. These 'reason' and 'proof' videos are judiciously interspersed with the 'rote' videos and taken together form exactly the kind of compelling mathematical narrative you complain is lacking from typical math curricula.
4. This is great. Students can view and review Khan's videos as their core learning material, help each other, and make use of the teacher's limited time according to metrics which continually and repeatedly assess their personal level of comprehension (which, as they absorb substantial portions of a playlist, will expand far beyond the memorization of rote methods).
5. Hard data will soon show if you are right, but it is my impression that thousands have already benefited.
6. The Khan model, taken in its entirety, only encourages this.
7. If you listen to what Khan actually says in his various talks, he is proposing that his site has a novel and exciting role to play as part of a general restructuring of math education along the lines your propose.
You could have taken the view that the Khan Academy is a useful tool and resource, yet to capitalize on it we must redouble our efforts to improve education funding, classroom teaching methods and better curricula. That sounds reasonable. Instead you wrote an article attacking the Khan Academy as being a direct impediment to this kind of progress. Few respondents here on HN have found your arguments persuasive, and instead of replying to the kind of points I make above, you tellingly characterize us as follows:
It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories: 1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored
The discussion here has been far more nuanced and sophisticated than you allow for - kind of like the way you discredit Khan's videos.