Live data from Hacker News

Khan Academy Competitor? Alison.com founder on the future of Online Ed

wiredacademic.com

21–22 of 22 posts

Re: Khan Academy Competitor? Alison.com founder on the future of Online Ed

#21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question has always been - will Khan Academy lose relevance outside Sal Khan? He can't be an expert in everything. In order to scale, I'd expect that he'd have to be able to pick people who are great teachers and also domain experts.

And he's not an expert in 90% of the things he teaches. He's just quite good at understanding things quickly and explaining it to others, like Feynman was. Being called Khan Academy is apropro, it's mostly about his teaching and he is irreplaceable. Fortunately, video lives forever and most of the subjects are not transient.

Feynman only taught physics. Sal Khan teaches maths, astrophysics, economics, history, etc etc...

The potential for misinformation from someone who is teaching a subject that they are not an expert in, and have just "understood it quickly" is quite worrying. he has been criticised on this before, see http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=2029

Economics is a lot like maths, and there is crossover so it's no surprise that he is good at both. But History is a different kind of subject.

If he is really irreplaceable, then there are severe limits on it. I hope and expect that even if Sal Khan is a trailblazer, others can do follow his example.

Re: Khan Academy Competitor? Alison.com founder on the future of Online Ed

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he's not an expert in 90% of the things he teaches. He's just quite good at understanding things quickly and explaining it to others, like Feynman was. Being called Khan Academy is apropro, it's mostly about his teaching and he is irreplaceable. Fortunately, video lives forever and most of the subjects are not transient.

Feynman only taught physics. Sal Khan teaches maths, astrophysics, economics, history, etc etc... The potential for misinformation from someone who is teaching a subject that they are not an expert in, and have just "understood it quickly" is quite worrying. he has been criticised on this before, see http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=2029 Economics is a lot like maths, and there is crossover so it's no surpri…

I've learned about a lot more than physics from Feynman. I also see little evidence that classes are taught by experts in their subject matter except at the university level, and even then only rarely.

But let's post a link to Khan's comments/rebuttals to the claims of the NAS article you cited.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2633796

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634324

Post reply on HN