Misconceptions about the Khan Academy

http://shipordie.com/post/4003361706/lets-clear-some-things-up-5-misconceptions-about-the

by kamens • 15 years ago

89 56 15 years ago

VladRussian4• 15 years ago

there must be some conceptions before notion of misconceptions may arise.

jonsmock• 15 years ago

I forwarded his recent TED Talk to several of my teacher friends, and many immediately thought this was supposed to be their replacement. So, I'm assuming the first (mis)conception is valid at the very least.

VladRussian4• 15 years ago

>my teacher friends, and many immediately thought this was supposed to be their replacement.

what a poor state of the profession if practicing professionals can be scared that easy into thinking that they are that easily replaceable.

That is especially interesting considering the anecdotal evidence i see how private tutoring market is growing. People more and more feel the need to have their children provided with additional instruction at least in the areas they feel most important for the children to not fail at, usually math/science subjects.

yummyfajitas7• 15 years ago

It would certainly be beneficial if we could reduce our needs for human teachers by means of a tool like Khan Academy.

As a nation, we spend more one education than the military ($972B as of 2007 according to wikipedia, vs about $725B for the military including wars). A 1% increase in efficiency would save a little less than $10 billion, and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].

If the Khan Academy is not striving to reduce our need for human teachers, we should create an organization that will.

[1] Edit: I should note that education is paid for primarily by the state and local governments, so it wouldn't be directly possible to reduce the federal budget by such savings. I was solely trying to make an order of magnitude comparison.

Duff• 15 years ago

For many students -- perhaps as high as 80% IMO, something like the Khan Academy, combined with a supervising adult to coach you could easily replace teachers, and should.

Why? Schools work the way that they do because it is convenient. They ignore the needs of the bright (most of whom are bored out of their minds) and those who need some more help. We push kids through school, use outdated, repressive discipline to keep them in control, and spend alot of money in the process.

Education hasn't always been this way -- in rural areas as late as the 1950's 1 room schools taught K-12 successfully -- with one or two adults. How? The kids taught each other.

I could think of nothing more rewarding (for teachers and students) than designing schools to be institutions where kids actually enjoy learning. I don't think staffing needs would be reduced as much as one may think. It will by necessity shrink somewhat, total teacher compensation is growing beyond the ability of many communities ability to pay.

bane• 15 years ago

A paraphrase of something my father used to say (a former teacher and worked in factories for a bit)

"at first, the workers were scared their job were being replaced with automation, then they realized somebody had to run and fix the automatons"

(There's a cartoon to the same point someplace, but I couldn't find it.)

Is it any wonder that the modern educational system, modeled on mass manufacturing techniques, is about to undergo the same kind of "manufacturing" revolution? The problem in the original model, of children as machined goods, is that children are participants in their own learning/building. With a car, you just weld here, screw here, paint this, hammer that. With a child, you show, you tell, you hand hold, you do all that, but in the end it's millions of years of evolution driving a self-organizing pattern recognition cognitive system that needs to do what it does best. You can't shape a mind like you shape a door frame.

kmfrk• 15 years ago

I've seen plenty of people on HN tout Khan Academy as the awaited usurpation of the education system.

Many also call it "the future of education" in a vein that it's meant to replace parts of the educational system.

I think Khan Academy is going to do wonders for the American K-12, if teachers are made aware of its advantages.

mnemonicsloth2• 15 years ago

To most people, teachers are authority figures first and employees second. Having worked on educational software for several years now I can tell you that, while most teachers are smart enough not to talk about it, they're all very aware of this fact.

So the worry probably isn't that teachers will be replaced by software. It's that availability of teaching software that's almost as good as some teachers will erode the social prestige held by all teachers.

That prestige has been a central feature of the American political landscape over the last few decades. From a survey I happend to have on my desktop, taken during the Wisconsin Union Thing a few weeks ago [1] [2].

    What's your overall opinion of:

    Teachers           73% pos  10% neg
    Teachers' Unions   47% pos  30% neg
    Other Unions       38% pos  35% neg
    Barack Obama       49% pos  35% neg

As a group, teachers enjoyed a 63-point spread between favorables and unfavorables during a coordinated attack in the national spotlight that went on for 3 weeks. Maybe a president enjoys that kind of popularity for a little while, right after winning a war, but not always.

If I were a teacher, I think a slogan like "[We] aim to make the world bad teacher-proof" would sound very ominous.

[1] http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_Politics/_...

[2] This is a good time to point out that I'm trying to make this post politically neutral, because politics is first in the official list of topics best avoided on HN:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jasonrr2• 15 years ago

I think I understand what you're trying to say here, but the comment about presidents in war time is really throwing me off. A president is an actual person who has done "things". My opinion of the president is informed by my knowledge of those things, so, when asked my opinion of the president, I can answer. The survey question you compare it to is essentially the equivalent of asking "Do you like the idea of teachers?" If you were to ask people about the teachers in their district or their child's teachers, you would likely get a very different spread.

That's not to say that teachers don't enjoy a good deal of prestige, but I think it is safe to say that the survey you are using here may overstate your case for just how popular actual individual teachers are with their respective communities.

mnemonicsloth2• 15 years ago

I think we're probably in agreement here. I wanted to use the president-in-wartime reference to parallel the fuzzy attitudes about teaching that you're objecting to. We'll rally around the flag regardless of who the president goes to war with, and if you ask people about teaching, and they'll tell you they love teachers because teachers love their children... while the reality is that teachers are just as human (and yes, just as venal) as everybody else.

There is one angle I'm not probably not seeing. I don't have kids myself, so I don't know what it's like to leave a child in the care of strangers for seven hours a day. You might have to ascribe positive motivations to those people to keep from going crazy. But then I think about how much unhappiness one incompetent teacher can inflict on a child, and that really gets my hackles up.

buyx2• 15 years ago

In South Africa, teaching quality and outcomes remain extremely uneven despite the huge sums of money thrown at education by the state (lazy incompetent unionised teachers being the primary reason [I won't go into the historical reasons for these teachers' chronic incompetence, since there are Apartheid apologists on HN, and I don't want to detract from the main point]).

To deal with this problem, the sort of instruction provided by the Khan Acdemy has been around in South Africa for more than 20 years. The per topic videos, as well as call in tv shows provided by these organisations are extremely important to thousands of students.

The pioneers of this sort of learning in South Africa were the Learning Channel (http://learn.co.za/LC/index.php), and a newer competitor called Mindset(http://www.mindset.co.za/learn/).

Mindset uses Creative Commons licensing, but downloading their content or viewing online seems impossible, while the excellent (in my opinion superior) Learning Channel charges large fees for their content on DVD (although some used to be broadcast for free on state television).

My friends and I used Learning Channel VHS tapes to pass our school-leaving exams 13 years ago, as we didn't have teachers for many of our subjects. Unfortunately, because of the price, I could only purchase a limited number of topics.

It is a pity that massive repositories of Learning Channel content (some of it probably unused because of South Africa's recent ill-advised, and soon to be reversed curriculum changes) are hidden behind a 20th century paywall.

South Africa, despite expensive and limited bandwidth, has a long tradition of students actively using this sort of instruction (via vhs/dvd and tv broadcasts). Distributing Khan Academy videos and Mindset Learn, and especially freeing and distributing Learning Channel videos could make a huge difference to education here. If someone has a philanthropic need to save millions of children in a third world country from chronic unemployability, those would be the first easy steps to take.

niels_olson• 15 years ago

>there are Apartheid apologists on HN

that's absolutely deplorable! I'm clearly missing whole genres of conversation on this forum. So as to avoid charges of libel, let me encourage you to provide examples. Can you cite examples?

shii• 15 years ago

I'm guessing he means things like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797920

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563941

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062454

SearchYC is always your friend. Literally a treasure trove.

joelhooks2• 15 years ago

We home educate and the Khan Academy has been absolutely fantastic for supplementing the math curriculum we use (Saxon). Saxon is great, and the kids use it as a self-study device with great success for years, but watching Sal do his thing is a great way to get some humanity into the maths.

salemh• 15 years ago

Khan is a great supplemental tool and probably could not replace an 8 hour (different argument as to the effectiveness of such) "regular" school day.

However, why not start even just a year-long study as to the effectiveness of Khan Academy being used within a syllabus for coursework as a supplemental resource or help for the students.

Not all of the many video's of Khan Academy would be applicable to a teachers curriculum (like the category for Statistics as a whole has 66 videos).

Some studies on the effectiveness of lack thereof would put most of the argument to rest. Though a very comprehensive study would include a Bill Gates esque full-online Khan Academy only program, perhaps 50% usage, 25% usage, etc.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

supplementing the math curriculum we use (Saxon)

For homeschooling, I much prefer Miquon Math

http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml

for starting out my children, and then the Singapore Primary Mathematics materials (which now have an edition aligned to United States curriculums standards)

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...

followed up by the Gelfand textbooks

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773

http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817...

http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathemati...

http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144...

appropriately supplemented by ALEKS

http://www.aleks.com

and EPGY

http://epgy.stanford.edu/district/info.html

joelhooks2• 15 years ago

Hey, thanks for all the great links.

jleader2• 15 years ago

I just wanted to say that I like the way the article refers to "great teachers" in the plural, and to "the one" bad teacher in the singular.

Also, to misconception #4, I just finished reading Gowers' "Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction", where he tangentially makes the point that sometimes putting too much effort into trying to get students to understand "the meaning" behind some piece of mathematical technique may be misguided, in part because a given piece of math can represent multiple meanings (he uses the example of xa + xb = x(a+b), which can perhaps be taught more easily axiomatically, instead of teaching "exponentiation is really repeated multiplication").

pixcavator• 15 years ago

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. -- John von Neumann

JshWright• 15 years ago

Just today I used Kahn Academy in what the article seems to consider the "intended" way.

My wife's sister is in high school, taking chemistry this year. From time to time she'll get stuck on something, and I'll tutor her a bit. Earlier today she called and asked if I could help her out with "kinetics." I told her to go to Kahn Academy, watch the intro to kinetics video, and that I'd stop by on my way home from work. Later on, I stopped by and we went through a few pages of exercises together. There obviously were still a few gaps in her understanding, but all the basic hurdles (terminology, etc) were out of the way. We were able to just work on a handful of sticking points.

KA is great for handling the "busy work" of teaching.

Misconceptions about the Khan Academy

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