Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

asuprep.asu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 263 posts

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#201

Post by greedo »

LanceH wrote: post #177
freemint wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In intro classes in our department, mean grades have been a whole standard deviation lower than the long run pre-pandemic average. Have you ever considered that the digital teaching methods you employed are subpar compared to those a dedicated online only teaching platform might have. I don't mean to suggest you did not try.

The bigger effect is that kids getting sent home due to the pandemic weren't being enrolled in online learning. They went on vacation with occasional check-ins online. That's about how I would describe my kids' experience and they were solidly grounded, with supervision at home at a school well prepared technologically. Most kids had no interest in working without supervision forcing them to work. Now that they're ba…

This tracks with what my daughter experienced. At her age (HS Junior), she had classes that she wasn't particularly interested in. In-person classes have that social/peer pressure to actually study and turn in work. For dull/uninspiring classes, this helps to push students to pay attention, read the texts, turn in assignments, and participate. With the online classes, she had an easier time shrinking into the background and not participating as much as in-person.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#202

Post by mymythisisthis »

t_mann wrote: post #66

There was an essay recently on HN on the merits of individual tutoring for children, in the spirit of Renaissance aristocrat education (not the exam-prep style tutoring that is common today). Projects like Khan Academy could make this extremely resource-intensive style of education a bit more accessible (not on their own maybe, but as a building block). Edit: PS: just remembered, if there were orgs like Khan or other…

Until the 20th century, professors didn't make much teaching courses at universities. Lectures were just a publicity platform. Most of a professor's income came from tutoring students privately. The majority of a grade was the final exam, so all that mattered was being tutored for that final exam.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#203

Post by zoom6628 »

david927 wrote: post #190
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

> If online works for you, awesome ... But I don’t think you are in the majority. I think there's a huge under-served group who are specifically not the majority. Smart kids are generally held back by being shoehorned in with other kids. Personally, I think we need to figure out how to use online resources best and that the future will most certainly be a mix. But also please entertain that maybe the optimal audience…

Couldnt agree more. I personally prefer to study alone, and even my MBA i chose a program where class-time(f2f or online) was optional. I did none and still passed.

Have recently watched my daughter respond quite differently in online learning in group environments. One is Wingchun( a martial art) taught by enthusiastic and outright funny instructors. My little girl loves every minute of class. The other is oddly-enough Montessori class where she feels held back by other kids and their chatter. But she LOVES the IRL Montessori classes.

I feel that this form of online high school wont be for everyone but there is a segment of those for whom this medium suits them best due to combination of circumstance, motivation, and personality. Education is not 'one mode suits all'. I struggled to stay engaged at high school. Tertiary wasnt much better until i discovered extra-mural (distance education), and loved it.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#204

Post by tombert »

ravedave5 wrote: post #198
david927 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If online works for you, awesome ... But I don’t think you are in the majority. I think there's a huge under-served group who are specifically not the majority. Smart kids are generally held back by being shoehorned in with other kids. Personally, I think we need to figure out how to use online resources best and that the future will most certainly be a mix. But also please entertain that maybe the optimal audience…

This is exactly my daughter, she thrived online when her teachers posted a weeks material at a time she'd be done by wednesday. She was so happy she could work at her own pace and didn't have to wait for other kids.

I'm a bit similar. I always did poorly in school working at the pace that the teachers wanted me to go. I would do well on the tests, but always had awful grades because I didn't do all my homework.

When I discovered WGU 1.5 years ago, I did much better simply by being allowed to go at whatever pace I felt like, and taking time off when I felt like it, and I managed to get through school in a fairly short amount of time.

I'm doing online graduate school now, and fortunately my supervisors are somewhat amenable to this style; they simply give me a bunch of recordings of their lectures and all the assignments that I'm expected to do all at once. Some days I don't do anything, other days I'll spend six hours straight watching lectures and doing homework.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#205

Post by t_mann »

lordgrenville wrote: post #133
t_mann wrote: post #66

There was an essay recently on HN on the merits of individual tutoring for children, in the spirit of Renaissance aristocrat education (not the exam-prep style tutoring that is common today). Projects like Khan Academy could make this extremely resource-intensive style of education a bit more accessible (not on their own maybe, but as a building block). Edit: PS: just remembered, if there were orgs like Khan or other…

Unless I've misunderstood the concept of aristocratic tutoring, I don't think a prerecorded video counts - even by a teacher as good as Sal Khan.

The site mentions something about Oxford-style tutorials, that sounds like it could come a lot closer.

Also, simply having a good curriculum and materials to use could make it easier to provide quality in-person tutoring for whoever does that then (eg parents).

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#206

Post by photochemsyn »

endisneigh wrote: post #181
photochemsyn wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some of these online classes I've heard of >1000 students signing up with one professor and maybe two assistants. In that case, maybe a model would be to recruit the top students (selected early in the course based on their submitted) work) to act as tutors for say groups of 10 or so. Pitch them on the idea with "the best way to learn something is to explain it to someone else."

And what happens if they don’t want to do it?

How about offer to pay them for their services?

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#207

Post by IshKebab »

alvah wrote: post #10
petesergeant wrote: post #6

where price tho?

https://asuprep.asu.edu/khan-world-school/about-us/ -The tuition for full-time students who are Arizona residents will be paid for by the state at no cost to families. -Students who live in the US, but outside Arizona, will pay $9,900 per year tuition. -Students who live outside the US will pay $12,900 per year. -Tuition for all students does include the opportunity to take two university courses per semester and ear…

Seems like a lot for online courses. You can do an in-person course for that money.

On the other hand I think it is competitive with e.g. The Open University though who also charge the same fees as normal unis.

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#208

Post by lodi »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #104

Very favorable comments all around from the very online crowd who comments here. I’m much more skeptical. I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person. My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (…

I despise the notion that "real communism has never been tried!", but real online teaching has, uhh, never been tried.

The futuristic dream: kids use fancy tech like AR goggles and haptic tech to manipulate shapes in a collaborative learning game and ultimately learn math in an intuitive way. Think of the best Jypiter notebook you've seen and then take that off the screen and into the real world. Then add an AI assistant that constantly guides you through common questions and make it so that the whole program is continually being refined to make it better and better for each successive generation of kids. Every lesson has tens of millions of dollars poured into it since it will be reused potentially billions of times.

The practical dream: okay we don't have money for any of that, but at least use the internet to break geographic constraints. Have actual math teachers teaching math to various classes around the country/world, have actual music teachers teaching music, immediately direct gifted kids to accelerated classes, have more flexibility with special needs kids (e.g. take classes in a different time zone so that their parents can help), offer a wide selection of second languages by connecting kids to foreign teachers, do virtual exchanges, etc.

The reality: most kids don't even have computers. Actually I was shocked to learn that many kids don't even have chairs and desks at home. This is in Canada by the way. My wife was teaching K-8 online classes to kids lying on their beds, propping up their mom's borrowed iphone on their bellies, trying to not fall asleep as the front camera streams a dimly-lit view of their chin.

So to summarize, we start with the same in-person learning, from the same teachers to the same class, remove all of the blackboards/manipulatives/etc., reduce the child's field of view to a 6" screen streaming a laggy 480p video with horrible sound, delete all friendships by enforcing quarantine both during and after school, and finally conclude that online learning doesn't work!

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#209

Post by bnralt »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #153
bnralt wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, in-person educators often do a rather poor job with online education. There's often a lot of effort to emulate in-person learning, instead of an acceptance that online education is its own thing. They also often approach online education with a bias against it, which I doubt helps things. In-person educators trying to do online learning, getting poor results, and then saying it's the fault of online…

I don't entirely disagree, but I partially disagree. Personally I was desperate in March 2020 (as were my colleagues) for any tips about what would work online. I didn't want my classes to suck, nor did my colleagues. There was very little information available at the beginning about what worked. But what's worse (and what makes me disagree with your comment) is that even after a year of being online it still wasn't…

One thing I've seen is that people convinced that in-person education is the best will try to focus on making their online classes more like in-person classes, when that might be the wrong direction needed. Particularly since it sounds like you and your colleagues (as well as the students) were thrown into things suddenly with little to no experience. If you were trying to discover success from your own classes, those of your colleagues in a similar situation, or those from your students, I'd imagine it'd be slow going, since it sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind.

On top of this, schools tend to be constrained with trying to fit everything into the particular confines of what's considered a class. I don't know about your particular school, but all of the ones I've seen would never try to educate students with something like The Odin Project, even though many here think it's a great example of online education.

Also, even with a great program and experienced teacher, changes in education styles entail a transition period for the students. We would expect this to be much slower in such a rocky transition with the professors themselves trying to figure out what to do. But even with poor circumstances I'd expect to see at least some amount of progress as students adjusted to things. Did you not see any?

You mention them being exposed to the classes of several hundred professors at your university. Surely there was some variability in the success the professors had. What difference did the school see between the more successful classes and the less successful classes?

Re: Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school

#210

Post by zozbot234 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #166
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's not by design. I like your response though, good jumping off point.

The notion of a conspiratorial cabal of aristocrats plotting together to sabotage working class education in the name of preserving their exclusive privileges makes for good cinematic content, but I'd guess simple indifference and the desire to pay less taxes is more of the issue. I think it's disastrous to the long-term success of any nation, however. If America continues to slide towards such a system, it will fall…

> The notion of a conspiratorial cabal of aristocrats plotting together to sabotage working class education in the name of preserving their exclusive privileges makes for good cinematic content

Except that it's happening in California as we speak... Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31170431

The "Progressive" model of education was very consciously planned with the intention of keeping the riffraff down, and far away from "elite" studies. It's "Progressive" in the early 20th c. sense of that word.

Of course one can also err in a different direction, devaluing practical education altogether and leading to "overproduction" of aspiring elites that are wholly parasitical on their surrounding society. And the two problems can even coexist, as seen in the US today! Extreme credentialism at the highest end (due to elite overproduction) coexists with the most dismal failure to achieve even basic educational outcomes for the bulk of the population.

Post reply on HN