Parody Critiques Popular Khan Academy Videos

Raldi, I respect you a lot, but this statement is hardly reflective of what's been going on. Criticism of Kahn academy, especially by math teachers has been going on for years, only to be consistently ignored. This is them going 'well, I'm not being heard any other way, so let's try this.'

The worse part is that you describe this as a fight. It's not a fight, and I know that those teachers who are most outspoken against khan don't want it to be a fight. They want a collaboration, but it's not happening. It's really too bad that any criticism of khan is viewed as coming from the 'what's wrong with education' side of things. Pedagogically speaking, Khan academy is stuck with stuff known bad decades ago. Khan academy is like using rocket ships to transport telegrams. Yeah, the technology is cool, but the teaching practices need to be there too. That's what's currently missing from Khan academy, and there has been very little apparent effort on their part to actually fix that.

Your problem here is that you are using your own experiences and extrapolating to the general. You think any math teacher you see teaches like that. This is not the case. The teachers that have been the loudest critics of Khan tend to be really excellent teachers. You know why? Teachers who teach like you describe don't care enough about their teaching let alone worry about what some website is doing.

Based on the sarcastic tone and comments of the two people in the video, I find it hard to believe they have any interest in cooperation. They're going for the lowest possible form of criticism. They even make fun of the guy's ethnic name at one point.

>Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise -- nobody will care.

This is the problem when hacker news tries commenting on Education. Readers here tend to be wildly ignorant about what's actually going on Education. How do you know that these teachers aren't doing things? Do you mean, they should be making a website? What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

You see this video and you don't know about the years of criticism that has been laid against Khan. You don't see the suggestions that have been offered (and ignored). You don't see these things because you're not a member of that community. Just like these teachers probably have no idea about what's going on in the Rails community, you really don't know what's going on in theirs.

>is there a problem of reaching students with good educational content?

Actually, you've hit upon the root problem. Truly effective education doesn't scale. Why? Because truly effective education is personal and personalized. A teacher is very effective when teaching small classes, because they can give students individual attention. That teacher is not going to be as effective when teaching 100, or 1000, or a million students. There's no way to provide individual attention there.

It can be hard for us to understand, because readers of HN are likely to be autodidacts to some extent who don't need that kind of attention. We need to understand that this isn't the norm. The research has been very consistent on this topic for decades now.

That doesn't mean that mass education a la khan and some of the other solutions that are out there are bad. The frustration educators are feeling about these rise from several different areas:

1) We know that these are not the most effective means of teaching. Most students do experience long-term learning in these environments.

2) Mass education is very dehumanizing. This isn't just websites that experience this, but teachers in actual classrooms who have to teach larger and larger class sizes every year. It's a dehumanizing experience.

Basically, to me it seems like we don't care about 2 any more, and the sacrifice of effectiveness is one we're willing to make in order to get quantity. I don't like that, and many teachers out there completely reject that idea.

So if you can find a way to scale personal (in the social sense), and personalized education, you're going to be positioned very well. Khan academy isn't it, and I'm not even sold that doing it on large scales is even possible.