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Open letter to Sal Khan

christopherdanielson.wordpress.com

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Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#131

Post by badclient »

qntmfred wrote: post #123
natrius wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted that the Washington Post owns Kaplan, which is effectively a Khan Academy competitor.

Kaplan Test Prep employee here. I of course don't speak officially for anybody but myself, but I will say that everybody I know at Kaplan all the way up to senior management has great admiration and respect for Khan Academy and all the other disruptive players in education these days. In fact, we have been hosting an educational technology startup accelerator with TechStars all summer.

You can admire your competitor but for the simple reason that its your competitor, you always have to try and one up them or keep them from eating your lunch. If senior management is doing its job right than they'd want to take on KA, not merely watch it take over the world.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#132

Post by dpatru »

zaphar wrote: post #127
dpatru wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. . . . it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to. It's easy to recognize good teachers. They are first, understandable and second, motivating. If a teacher is not readily understood, or if they do…

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, unlike the confusion caused by a teacher who doesn't understand the material.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#133

Post by rimantas »

1O0101ll100O wrote: post #51
ColinWright wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it another way. You train for years. You spend more years, perhaps decades, working in a classroom. You read the research, you know just how hard it is to get kids to understand decimals. You work and work to find the right way for each child to understand this concept that trips up so many. Then someone else comes along, teaches it badly, and gets lauded for doing wonderful things. Well, it's true that KA is…

I know it is a hard pill to swallow that such a pedagogical luddite such as Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on learning when the professionals are struggling mightily. Maybe, just maybe, he's on to something that despite years of institutional training 'real' teachers are missing. Maybe it's important for a student to be able to interact with a lesson over and over again in order to catch a key p…

  > Sal Khan is having such a broad and important impact on
  > learning when the professionals are struggling mightily.
Are you sure he is having such borad and important impact? Are you sure that he won't fail at exactly the same spot where "professionals are struggling mightily"? Do you know the reasons they are struggling?

  > great teacher is his breadth and depth of knowledge and context thanks
  > to being a triple undergrad from MIT with backgrounds in math, computer
  > science, and electrical engineering AND a Harvard MBA.
Nothing in the list makes anyone a great teacher. You may have all the knowledge in the world and be a lousy teacher. What makes a great teacher is the skill of kindling the interest in the subject in your students and then having the skill to transfer you knowledge effectively. Khan Academy has none of that. It is just another attempt to solve the problem by throwing technology at it. The thing is, problem has little to do with technology. And Khan Academy has little of understanding ot that.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#134

Post by aatash »

foobarqux wrote: post #117
spicyj wrote: post #17

Hi, Ben from Khan Academy here. I just woke up and don't have time for a full response right now but here are a few quick words. Most of our math content creation work these days is driven by our push to cover the new Common Core math standards, which have recently been adopted by 45 states. We're following these standards not only because of their recent popularity but because they are among the best standards we've…

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 lie.

We have also worked with education researchers, and we're constantly studying various models of learning. And more than anything, we learn from testing and feedback from our users. As mentioned in Ben's comment above, we like to ship. We like to put stuff out there for folks to use (especially when learning is at stake), and take feedback and improve from there.

Khan Academy's role in education is a varied and ever-changing one. More than anything, we want to provide a tool/resource for knowledge and learning that's high quality and accessible. How people choose to use it--whether as standalone learners at home or through integration in a classroom environment* --is really up to them.

* We've put up some great videos/articles on how teachers are using KA now, and what our vision for its use in the classroom is: https://www.khanacademy.org/coach-res/KA-in-the-classroom

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#135

Post by rimantas »

geonz wrote: post #58
stiff wrote: post #27

This is the exact same kind of shit that got thrown at every person ever who successfully challenged a rusty status quo, especially when job security was at risk. Quoting the original piece in Washington Post: We have great respect for the stated goal of Khan Academy — “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” Yet, we have some serious concerns about the quality of the instruction providing this education…

Khan Academy is putting out really flawed videos and spending millions and millions on 'em. Think VHS / Beta... Guess what -- this is not a letter to you -- it's to the Khan Academy. It's questioning its quality. Since you obviously can't address the well-grounded claim that it is very poor quality, you have to find something else to bring up. It's 'way easier to say "you're a poor loser' than to address the actual c…

I am sorry you are downvoted. Alas, a lot of people on HN think technology is the ultimate solver of all the problems in the world. I guess to actually learn how to teach is too much work. Let's go making videos.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#136

Post by runarberg »

smnrchrds wrote: post #22
dictum wrote: post #4

From a comment: >I don’t want to fix KA. I don’t think it is possible to do so given Sal Khan. Sal Khan should not be the voice on his videos. He should not be the person putting together the actual content of his videos. And, I suspect, he should not be making any important decisions about either content or delivery of instruction, from the pedagogical side of the operation. I’m sure he’s a competent business/financ…

I used to teach English as a foreign language for a little while. My students were kids 10-13 years old. The most difficult task was to teach them things they were previously taught incorrectly. For example, I was struggling the whole semester to convince them "pizza" is pronounced "peetsə" although there is no visible "t" in it. The reason: Their last teacher told them it was pronounced "peeza". No matter how much I…

  > The most difficult task was to teach them things they were previously taught incorrectly.
That is an easy thing to fix. If they take everything the teacher tells them at face value, they are bound to to repeat silly errors (and worse, biases,) in the teachers knowledge. If you teach them that the teacher might err (including you), then it is so much easier for you to demonstrate how they know wrong. Even better, if you fail at something while teaching (everybody do), they will be more likely to correct you, and you will learn something from them.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#137

Post by ZeroGravitas »

spicyj wrote: post #95
Trianglemancsd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. Thanks for the reply. No worries about the forum for the response.

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.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#138

Post by hatu »

incision wrote: post #36

Talk about missing the forest for the trees. This person has a valid point, a relatively minute one that is being made in an overly-dramatic and annoyingly self-important way. KA is great, far better than anything I was exposed to in traditional education. I'm currently using it to refresh and prepare for pursuit of a late CS degree.

Same for me, but I can see a possible issue with very young users. Re-teaching people who are out of school but never really grasped some math concepts is "easy" compared to providing the whole math curriculum to kids.

For me personally it has been a really great resource. I think the fact that there's no pressure when you're watching them compared to the classroom where you're supposed to understand things very linearly - makes it the best possible resource for learning math for me. I love being able to pause and go Google/Wikipedia around or re-watch the video from the beginning when I get lost. Overall I think it's a great resource, you basically get a private teacher any time you want. If someone doesn't see value in that, I guess they never had trouble in school.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#139

Post by vdaniuk »

rimantas wrote: post #135
geonz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khan Academy is putting out really flawed videos and spending millions and millions on 'em. Think VHS / Beta... Guess what -- this is not a letter to you -- it's to the Khan Academy. It's questioning its quality. Since you obviously can't address the well-grounded claim that it is very poor quality, you have to find something else to bring up. It's 'way easier to say "you're a poor loser' than to address the actual c…

I am sorry you are downvoted. Alas, a lot of people on HN think technology is the ultimate solver of all the problems in the world. I guess to actually learn how to teach is too much work. Let's go making videos.

Your comment offers no value. Making videos, even if some of them are wrong is valid strategy as current educational system has, arguably, more elements that are wrong.

Re: Open letter to Sal Khan

#140

Post by chris_wot »

aswanson wrote: post #96
stiff wrote: post #27

This is the exact same kind of shit that got thrown at every person ever who successfully challenged a rusty status quo, especially when job security was at risk. Quoting the original piece in Washington Post: We have great respect for the stated goal of Khan Academy — “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” Yet, we have some serious concerns about the quality of the instruction providing this education…

Right, the whole tone reads as though he wants to impugn Sal's character and motive, as if he set out when he initially developed the vids as an attempt to pilfer money from the Gates foundation. He was a hedge fund analyst, for god's sake. As if he couldn't find a more financially profitable path through life. He never stated the goal of the Academy was to be the end all and be-all of mathematical education, and any…

For the record, ColinWright has contacted me via email in the past.

I want to say that it seems to me that while some of the tone in the blog seemed to be a little exasperated, it wasn't trying to impugn Sal's character. I can say that Colin is very constructive and encouraging to those who are new or trying to learn mathematics - certainly he was like that in the emails we sent back and forth.

I think evidence of his motives is on the comments section of his blog where one commentator did go too far, and he shut down the thread.

I think that the blog post wasn't "blogbitching" about Khan Academy. Just pointing out some perceived flaws. Criticism is good, and from what I can see Khan Academy are trying to address them.

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