Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy

http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/technology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/index.htm

by cwan • 16 years ago

344 93 16 years ago

money.cnn.com

sekou• 16 years ago

I truly believe that stuff like Khan Academy is a part of the real future of education.

revorad• 16 years ago

If you listen to Sal's talks or read some tesimonials, you will find it is a very real part of education already. I hope the work of Khan Academy keeps growing organically on its own merit and is not institutionalised in anyway.

sigzero• 16 years ago

I have not done either of those. I did watch a couple of his math videos on the site. It just so happens that we are teaching our son math this year. What great timing for this post. The videos were very good. I had my son watch the the "Division 1" video for a bit and he was tracking with it very well. Kudos to Khan Academy.

abp• 16 years ago

I hope that it will be widely accepted, or at least deeply incorporated. Also certificates from khan academy, from some day, would be very nice.

flipbrad• 16 years ago

Ivan Illich, in his writings on Deschooling Society, would have been immensely proud - especially once this gets truly p2p. Being able to get an education, without being institutionalised, on demand not force-fed - what a beautiful counterpoint this will become to traditional education. If kids went home to this and every morning/evening did some collaborative community service of some sort - so that they learn to socialise - how much better off society could be!

elai7• 16 years ago

Gates should donate to khan, even if its a few thousand.

kailashbadu• 16 years ago

I see a much larger donation coming the way of Khan Academy. Gates is in a philanthropic spree and if his recent remark is any indication, he has big hopes from education delivered through web.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/

In all, it’s a well-deserved feat for Khan Academy.

tlholaday• 16 years ago

You can donate to khan, even if it's a dollar.

elai7• 16 years ago

Oh I already have :)

pstuart2• 16 years ago

A MacArthur award should be headed his way.

mcobrien• 16 years ago

If the Khan Academy was new to you too, it's a giant library of training videos produced by one clever guy, Sal Khan. Subjects range from algebra to chemistry, finance and lots more. Looks great.

http://khanacademy.org/

http://khanexercises.appspot.com/video/raising-money-for-a-s...

jules3• 16 years ago

It's great. I wish there was something like this on higher level subjects. The pace of learning when sitting in a lecture is depressingly low.

sambe• 16 years ago

I agree completely - I tried a couple on subjects I didn't know much about and found them slow. But I think this is perhaps a more complex problem - even advanced lectures at university sometimes seemed so slow as to be boring, even when I found the overall topic quite difficult. Pacing needs to change during lecture according to the individual maybe? Only easy solution is 1:1 teaching I'd guess.

bcrawl• 16 years ago

Here is an interview with Khan done at Mixergy. Awesome guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQtXHp5wXLE&feature=chann...

tocomment• 16 years ago

I love watching the videos on that site, but I find a month later it's like I never saw the video. I'll revert back to not knowing how the immune system works for example. Any memory/learning tips for that?

gms• 16 years ago

You lose what you don't use. This is normal.

sp332• 16 years ago

To be specific: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

naner• 16 years ago

If you're watching it passively like it was a sitcom on television or something you're not going to have very good recall.

If you want to remember more try taking notes, quizzing yourself, reading up on related areas, applying what you learned to your daily life, etc.

khafra• 16 years ago

Spaced repetition. Review the material right when you're about to forget.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

The first step is to take notes.

The next thing is to apply it. If you don't apply it, don't sweat it; you've only lost the time you spent watching the video.

breck• 16 years ago

Sidenote - Khan Academy is hiring: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/eng/1920729182.html

benatkin• 16 years ago

Cool! I hope they can get a better way of drawing text on the videos. It gets a bit illegible in this one:

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/introduction-to-differentia...

winthrowe• 16 years ago

That is one of the older videos done with MS Paint. there are newer ones recorded in high definition with other software that I have never seen any legibility problems. I believe he intends to redo the older videos in high def with the newer software, but that has to be balanced against actually making new videos.

pstuart2• 16 years ago

I think the real win would be to transform the video to html5: transcribe the text and drawings, add some basic "slideshow" like control of the text (syncing his narration to the text. The result should require much less cpu/bandwidth/storage. One could load up a new kindle with the entire contents and have one hell of a "magic textbook".

korch• 16 years ago

Oh man I wish I lived in SF and I wish worked for them! As a mostly self-educated autodidact-hacker-math-type, I get their mission. They're one of the few websites out there for which I would drop everything to pour myself into fully. Unlike say the 5,000 hype-driven profit-driven web startups who are just copy-cloning the flavor-du-jour amongst each other, and who have no hope of any tenable business model. And they all mimic Apple or Facebook in saying "we're going to change the world", which is complete hyperbole as the true intention is for the business guys behind the curtain to extract profits.

Khan Academy will change the world!

Alas!

dangoldin• 16 years ago

It says "Telecommuting is ok." so you should apply!

philfreo• 16 years ago

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but since this is the perfect mix of hackers + people interested in education...

Quizlet.com is the startup I'm working on and we're also hiring. We're a for-profit but strongly educationally focused web company trying to help improve the way people study online. Different than (complementary to) Khan Academy, but gaining traction with 1M+ registered users. Get in touch if your interested.

tommynazareth2• 16 years ago

I don't see how Khan academy is truly 'controversial', but obviously it is threatening enough to the status quo for people to try and frame it in a controversial light.

Since learning is my greatest love, school has always been my greatest enemy. I've been enamored with the Khan Academy from about the first 30 seconds of the first video I watched.

I've come across a few references to the idea that the biggest factor in education is the skill of the teacher, and that there is no way of guessing which teachers will be better than others. Apparently, there is no correlation between teaching ability and experience or education level. The Khan Academy model lets us leverage the impact of the greatest teachers and make excellent education available to anyone who wants it.

[edit: typo]

thethimble2• 16 years ago

As a student at UCLA I can say that I have learned more from a handful of Khan's Calculus and Linear Algebra video tutorials than I have from several quarters worth of math courses at school.

Clearly there is controversy in this statement. Conservatives insist that receiving a "quality education" at the university level should cost $40k+ a hear. A man that shatters this notion by providing free videos superior to many university courses cannot do so without creating an uproar from the old-fashioned.

In any case, Khan has done a great service to this world. I hope this publicity will help his videos reach the corners of the world.

keithwarren2• 16 years ago

I am a conservative/libertarian and dont think university level education should cost 40K per year. I have no idea where you got that from or why you injected politics into this. If anything the university establishment is overwhelmingly liberal and would be the one taking issue with this.

bingaman• 16 years ago

Note the phrasing: "Khan has his skeptics in the education business." Emphasis on "business".

nazgulnarsil• 16 years ago

if a business can't be run profitably it means its potential customers don't value its product at a price that covers the cost of production + overhead.

don't confuse the shitty government collusion in the education industry with a free market in education.

georgecmu6• 16 years ago

I'm not sure why one would choose lectures narrated by a single guy without expertise in any of the topics over real lectures given by world-class faculty and researchers.

Berkeley, MIT, Yale and other top universities in the past decade have made hundreds of courses available in audio and video form. I've been hooked on Berkeley courses for a few years now, actually wishing sometimes that my commute were longer.

georgecmu6• 16 years ago

I suppose part of it is that they target a very different audience. He addresses subjects at high-school level: something that any reasonably educated person should be competent enough to do.

thethimble2• 16 years ago

Khan is an Electrical Engineer from MIT with an MBA from Harvard. His ability to teach far outperforms the majority of university professors.

Try watching some of his videos.

georgecmu6• 16 years ago

I won't argue that the guy is a very talented and eloquent speaker. My point is different: he may be very erudite, but the depth of his knowledge in any of the subjects he's teaching (except maybe some subjects in EE and finance) is not going to compare with that of professors in the respective fields. Certainly, the fact that he's addressing these subjects at high-school level, does a lot to level the field for him.

By the way, I'm not sure how listing his credentials is supportive of your claim that "his ability to teach far outperforms the majority of university professors."

Finally, it's not the anonymous 'majority of university professors' that I'm comparing him to, but the top people in their fields at the top American universities. Those people must excel both in research and teaching, otherwise they simply don't make it there.

ewanmcteagle2• 16 years ago

Most professors at those institutions care very little about the teaching part of their job. The incentives they face make it that way.

georgecmu6• 16 years ago

Do you know this from personal experience or is it just one of those things that "everyone knows"?

My experience of both real-life lectures and podcasted ones suggests otherwise.

ionfish• 16 years ago

I think it may be unfair to say that they don't care, but certainly the incentives weigh against spending their efforts on teaching (against, say, writing a paper or yet another grant application).

sbaqai• 16 years ago

This has to be the most disruptive startups around. The videos are always applauded, but I think not as many people know of the web applications Khan has built for some of his videos.

I urge everyone to watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8

Khan lays out the future development goals for Khan Academy. There's software, peer-to-peer learning, and better allocation of teacher resources.

It makes me realize that the way education is taught right now has to be one of the most archaic traditions.

100k• 16 years ago

I had not heard of Khan Academy before today. I'm impressed by the breadth of his knowledge. He's a math expert so I understand that, but being able to lecture on a high school level on all the other topics on the site is pretty amazing.

I checked out one of the videos on the Napoleonic wars. It's a subject I have interest in and have read about, but there's no way I could give a lecture on it. Khan gave a very nicely prepared lecture with plenty of details.

elai7• 16 years ago

Would you call his college level courses (high school in some countries) high school level lectures? He doesn't really skip rigour compared to any other college math course at that level.

jules3• 16 years ago

I'd call most of the math lectures, except the later calculus and differential equations and linear algebra lectures high school (or lower) level. For college level you'd expect a more rigorous treatment of limits and integrals for example. The videos do seem excellent as an intuitive explanation.

greenlblue• 16 years ago

Khan Academy is awesome and I hope more people take notice of what he is doing.

tommynazareth2• 16 years ago

Hopefully, Khan, and the people he inspires, can work towards a solution to the larger problem in making education accessible to everyone: while the resources for education are readily available to anyone who can get to a public library, the culture of the least educated people often prohibits self-improvement.

I don't mean this to be a prejudiced statement, I understand there are prejudices and nuances, but I live in a very blue collar neighborhood, and I hang out in the library and interact with the middle school and high school students here. The percentage of people in my town who would feel comfortable admitting an interest in watching a Khan Academy video is very low.

hop• 16 years ago

I keep thinking he could use a better/smoother drawing method. A way to 2x the speed would be good for my attention span as well.

Edit: looks like newer videos have better rendering - http://www.khanacademy.org/video/linear-algebra---eigenvecto... versus http://khanexercises.appspot.com/video/raising-money-for-a-s...

pjscott• 16 years ago

A way to multiply the speed by 1.4x or 2x would be amazing. I mean, without using a Flash video downloader and then viewing the downloaded videos in VLC at higher speed; that's too much trouble for something that should be nigh-effortless.

yesbabyyes• 16 years ago

Flowplayer can play at double speed. It can also play YouTube videos, so it should be a pretty easy hack.

nasalter• 16 years ago

John Udell ran a very interesting interview with Salman Khan: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4386.html

dws• 16 years ago

The interview with Udell theorizes a bit on why Khan's approach works. Key bits: he approaches subjects conversationally; he doesn't appear in the videos, which reduces distraction; most of his video segments last 10 minutes, which is at about the point where attention gives out; the technology lets people pause the lessons to look words up, something you can't do in a classroom.

danilocampos• 16 years ago

I am so giddy excited for this. I'm going to do this every night for half an hour until I reclaim math as a subject I understand.

kvs2• 16 years ago

I am now reading The Fourth Paraidgm in which Mark Abbott talks about "A new path for science?" where he says discoveries and teaching will happen at the "edges." I think Khan Academy is a good example.

aik• 16 years ago

I'm reading the same book. What in particular brought you to the book if you don't mind me asking?

kvs2• 16 years ago

A friend of mine recommended that I read it and find it interesting. He was right.

bliss2• 16 years ago

Khan!

bliss2• 16 years ago

i regret nothing ;-)

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Between the Khan academy and wikipedia, open source and a whole bunch of other things the internet has realized a lot of its potential.

That the rest is turning in to a giant billboard is a pity, but those few sites and the open source movement make it more than worth it.

They're some of the best things to come out of all this and for the most part they were completely unpredictable.

The Khan academy is the use case for youtube to put forward as to why they exist. There are many more, but hardly any on that level of dedication and quality of content.

Wikipedia does the same thing for text and has left 'old' encyclopedias in the dust.

Now we need something similar for scientific papers that develops real traction, so that those that use for instance the Khan academy have access to all the underlying materials.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

arxiv.org may be turning into that for sci papers

anyone in science care to chime in?

woodson• 16 years ago

For the less "sciency" science of Generative Linguistics, there is another arxiv.org-style repository at http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz.

People in this scientific community are quite aware of the advantages that these kind of open repositories bring to their disciplines.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

Ivan Illich predicted exactly this sort of thing in his 1970 book Deschooling Society. He basically predicted an Internet-led revolution in learning.

gojomo• 16 years ago

I have a few pet links I always post when this sort of radical refactoring of education is discussed. Khan is doing via the net something a lot like a 'tracks and clusters' concept David Gelernter pushed in the 2009 Edge essays:

http://edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#gelernter

Roger Schank's ideas about just-in-time, story-centric curricula may also be interesting:

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_print.html#schank

Empact• 16 years ago

IMO, of the various videos & podcasts of his I've found, this is the most thought-provoking & in-depth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C7FH7El35w

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

I think this guy deserves some kind of posthumous Nobel prize if he really keeps this up, as he states he intends to, "until he dies" (ok, we don't have to wait until he dies).

Cliched line but true ... : things like this restore my faith in humanity.

antipaganda• 16 years ago

That won't be happening. The Nobel Prize cannot be given to a dead person. It's in the rules.

pragmatic• 16 years ago

One downside. The wealthy (like the Gate's) will have a harder time signalling their wealth if their children don't matriculate in a prestigious academy/school. Will Gates refuse the high priced tuition at Harvard in favor of a free internet school?

Or more likely, he'll simply augment his children's already (probably) incredible education with some online lectures.

I don't think Harvard et al are in any danger yet. Too much vested in the current status quo. Again back to the social signals, a cocktail party, were did you go to school, etc. Unless you are uber-rich, this is important.

eru• 16 years ago

Gates is ueber-rich.

rick_20472• 16 years ago

OK this may get me a few downmods but I just have to say it.Before you click that down arrow, hear me out please.

There is no denying that what Mr. Khan is doing is fantastic. But it would be wrong to de-emphasis the value that a community of learners adds to your education, like a university or a college. I am not a conservative (I not exactly old enough to be a conservative), but I see the point in the university model. First of all, I am not for the high fees and the bureaucracy, nor am I for the heavy course work with no explorations and grades for minimal work. I cannot loath them enough. But why do you want to take away the community that a place like the university would generate?

You do not want to be a lone wolf just watching a few tutorial videos and call it an education. We all know we learn more from each other than from anyone of the faculty members. (Here I am talking about students who really want to learn, not the one's who just want the elite degree. Thought the number is less, but it may increase if we work on making the system reward excellence rather than exam papers).

Also you may be able establish a lab for UG studies of software engineering or electronics (upto a certain extent), but subjects like mechanical engineering and Instrumentation & Control require quite expensive labs. Not feasible for an individual to buy.

Why not pool many student's money and buy those. We would need a common place to meet, so lets buy some buildings. Hey we would definitely need recreation and food, so lets make a recreational centre and a canteen. All this can be managed by students, but if not lets hire some MBA's to manage all this. WALA you have a ditto university but without bureaucracy.

elai7• 16 years ago

And again, the community of learners can be better found in for quite a few on the internet, (especially tech fields) than a random sampling of a university classroom. Plus stuff like tech can be very solitary for large periods of time.

rick_20472• 16 years ago

I am not concerned about the tutorial sessions, but heck my main concern is labs. How can you have a Bridge construction or fluid dynamics lab at our home?

nav• 16 years ago

Had a bit of time to kill. So quickly put together a quick re-design. Would love to get thoughts. http://screencast.com/t/MWMyNzRi

Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy

Related Stories