41–50 of 146 posts
Many of the comments here boil down to: At least he's doing something - let him get on with it. If you think you can do better, then do so. To some extent, I agree with that. However ... In the past I've been faced with students who have a serious mental block about some operation, or some process, or some concept, and upon digging deeper into what they believe and why, I have usually come across a moment in their pa…
I just watched the first included video, "Understanding decimal place value exercise", and I am flabbergasted. This is pointless; it conveys no understanding whatsoever. In fact, I agree with the letter writer: it gives completely the wrong impression about what the place values mean, suggesting that they're all of the same importance.
What would be better would be to have the student pick out a number on a virtual slide rule. You'd have to do some zooming even to get four significant digits; showing seven is probably not worth the trouble (well, maybe do it once to make the point). That would show very graphically the relationship between successive place values.
Many of the comments here boil down to: At least he's doing something - let him get on with it. If you think you can do better, then do so. To some extent, I agree with that. However ... In the past I've been faced with students who have a serious mental block about some operation, or some process, or some concept, and upon digging deeper into what they believe and why, I have usually come across a moment in their pa…
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…
I'd like to also emphasize how much we lean on our community. Khan Academy's goal is not to be perfect, but to iterate towards perfection — it'd be impossible to do that across such a broad array of content without building up a strong community.
Beneath our videos the community creates Q&A to help address (we hope) misconceptions and follow-ups about each topic (fun example: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/...).
When the original WaPo article was posted, it mentioned a user's question ("So is .02009 greater than .0207?") as evidence of KA failure. But to me, the fact that there were already helpful, patient responses to this question from our community...well, that's a success. We know KA can't magically teach everybody everything, and building a community of support is one of our biggest goals.
Of course, we also use the gems in this community to help us iterate on content.
Sal goes back and reworks videos often, but this is difficult to scale so we recently added the ability for us to make "official clarifications" from our community's content. These are video annotations that clarify important or confusing points for videos we haven't had time to redo yet (see an example at 12:47 in https://www.khanacademy.org/science/chemistry/acids-and-base...).
Overall, Sal has imbued the entire company, starting at the top, with a belief that shipping beats perfection.* We're building tools to move as fast as possible any time we can improve our content — but that won't stop the occasional valid criticism from surfacing. We'll make use of it.
On a transparent/personal note, I take issue w/ many of the assumptions and tone behind this letter...but my shortcomings here won't stop our team from plucking some value out of it.
* https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-develop...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It is opinion at best. _You_ think his videos are boring; I find them engaging but not precise enough.
Yes. This is what we're doing here. Sharing our opinions. We rarely have the benefit of solid fact when criticizing things.
Saying that "A are B", particularly with emphasis and without a qualifying introduction isn't a typical way of expressing an opinion.
This article is a partisan attempt to discredit Sal's great work. Pick one example where the content has a flaw and use it to claim that all of his content is therefore "useless". I don't know the author's motives. Is it an altruistic care about the children or a personal motive to protect his career and to defend the methods he uses to teach versus a new potential disruptive threat. I'm really excited to see how the…
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…
This. From what I know, teaching is broken in the U.S. (and probably in many other places), and the way incentives and the balance of power is set up, what matters for most decisions on how things work is what is best for teachers, not what is best for students (the documentary Waiting for Superman shows a lot of this). So it's not surprising to see teachers fighting back and trying to discredit KA, because success f…
You nailed it perfectly, mate! ॐ
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…
This. From what I know, teaching is broken in the U.S. (and probably in many other places), and the way incentives and the balance of power is set up, what matters for most decisions on how things work is what is best for teachers, not what is best for students (the documentary Waiting for Superman shows a lot of this). So it's not surprising to see teachers fighting back and trying to discredit KA, because success f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. This is what we're doing here. Sharing our opinions. We rarely have the benefit of solid fact when criticizing things.
Is English your first language? Saying that "A are B", particularly with emphasis and without a qualifying introduction isn't a typical way of expressing an opinion.
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…
It's a valid criticism. His videos are boring, but they're still some of the clearest instruction I've found, especially on math. I just have trouble staying awake through them.