Khan Academy: the bad

http://inperc.com/blog2/2011/04/10/khan-academy-the-bad/

by pixcavator • 15 years ago

42 77 15 years ago

samrat• 15 years ago

I think that Khan Academy is based on the idea that the curriculum schools currently follow and the way the curriculum is taught is not ideal. So, in that regard, the fact that Salman Khan has no experience in a formal teaching environment could actually be an advantage. Also, I think that Khan receives a significant amount of feedback in the form of Youtube comments, including questions regarding the subject matter he has discussed in a video, so he can actually interact with students.

RBerenguel2• 15 years ago

I think (I'm a mathematician and I have lectured and taught in the University) the poster has valid points... but will be trashed in the comments (here and elsewhere).

pbreit• 15 years ago

The poster may have valid points but the post is useless. Anyone can sit back and say a maker didn't do it right. I actually don't think his points are all that good.

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

You didn’t follow any of the links, did you?

mbesto• 15 years ago

Care to elaborate?

RBerenguel2• 15 years ago

I agree with the points that "maths is not a tool", and that teaching (real life teaching) is hard as hell. Students questions can sometimes blow your mind, or make you invest huge amounts of time and mental resources to answer them correctly. Preparing a decent interesting syllabus (something I have not been required to do, but I've seen some colleague doing) is a hell of a lot of work, even if it's bound to be lousy.

zdw• 15 years ago

The advantage of the Khan Academy is that the teaching method:

- Shows how the work was done in a step by step manner

- Cuts the subjects up into short, easily digestible chunks

(note that both of these could be attributed to the medium, as screencasts require showing nearly everything unless you want to edit heavily, and YouTube has a length limitation)

The poster's points are valid - Khan's videos exist pretty much in a vaccum, and having no active feedback means that people who don't get a concept are sunk.

That said, there are solutions - I could imagine a teacher assigning "Watch videos 1-3 on subject X" to a class, then in the class sessions students would have to demonstrate competency and could get help.

I don't know anyone who thinks that Khan's work is the end-all solution to teaching problems.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

"I could imagine a teacher assigning "Watch videos 1-3 on subject X" to a class, then in the class sessions students would have to demonstrate competency and could get help."

In fact, this is exactly how Khan advocates that his site be integrated into existing education.

yequalsx4• 15 years ago

I've done this and it didn't work. It was a disaster. Students weren't willing to watch the videos. They weren't willing to do even this small amount of work.

My experience is that they prefer the lecture/test format. It allows them to slack off. A couple of days before the test they will study. The prefer to go through this cycle 4 or 5 times a semester than to continually have to work.

swix• 15 years ago

I dont think the poster has valid points really, at the khan academy a student can follow in his or hers own pace, when they want as they want. That is not something that can be done in a lecture room.

Also in a lecture room you cant participate in the lecture 40 times so you really understand... unless you record the lecture, but in the khan academy.. if you need to watch a video 300 times.. goahead

joevandyk• 15 years ago

I failed the first tine I took a class on scheme. A the second time.

ramidarigaz• 15 years ago

When reading this article, the thing that came to mind was his TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...)

I think Salman Khan's biggest point in the talk seems to address this guy's complaint. He's not aiming to replace the teacher, he's aiming to replace the lecture. Students go home, watch his videos at whatever pace suits them, and then they go to school and have the really important interaction with the teacher and other students, which can also happen at the student's desired pace.

rubergly3• 15 years ago

I agree, and I thought of that too when reading the article. In some sense, it doesn't matter if Khan is just underlining and emphasizing the same word that the student doesn't understand over and over again, because the goal is for the student to still have that really important interaction with the teacher where that stuff is clarified.

But I think the implicit point in the article is that using Khan Academy in a school classroom is just one use case and that Khan Academy should still be useful for people who want to use it but don't have a teacher to talk to the next day about questions. And that's a difficult issue; while changing the education system is American public schools is amazing and all, the real humanitarian benefits to the site is that it can bring education to people who don't have access to other forms of education, and I have to agree that, as is, it doesn't handle that case spectacularly. I trust that it is on their minds and planned at some point, though (maybe though a better Q&A interface or something).

nsfmc• 15 years ago

yes! exactly! i first thought this internet learning thing was total bunk because my only exposure was mit's ocw and basically i hadn't considered something like KA a few years back. I think that trying to change where and how various stages of the learning process happen so that you can maximize your teacher-time is a great goal.

The fact that you can assign a lecture as homework is amazing, it totally changes the dynamic of what you can do in a classroom. That being said, these tools they're developing seem useful only because they track student engagement with lectures and problem set success rates.

i always thought (and dreamed) that the future would be a better textbook, something really humane and well designed, but this (for lack of a better word) paradigm shift makes a textbook more like a learning journal rather than an immobile one-size fits all beast.

fourspace• 15 years ago

The OP seems to forget that the goal of the Khan Academy is not just to produce videos. Of course there's no feedback with a one-way video lesson.

If you watch his (excellent) TED talk [1], you'll see that his organization isn't just about video lectures, but rather an all-encompassing suite of tools that allows students to learn at their own pace, repeat lessons that they didn't understand at first, and provides teachers with analytics to target their attention towards those students who need help.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk

rubergly3• 15 years ago

This is very important. The article ends on the note of "they're not even looking to hire educators; they're hiring software developers" as if that's an extremely poignant accusation of the misdirection of the Academy, but the stuff that Khan shows in the TED talk, which is what they need the developers for, is the real potential for the site.

dws• 15 years ago

You could as easily say that it's a poignant accusation of the misdirection of educators.

andrest• 15 years ago

I might not be the best solution in the long-term, but it's certainly a start in the right direction.

Teaching is roughly the same as it was 50 years ago. We're yet to harness the power of computational revolution and Khan Academy shows the way.

andos• 15 years ago

I always understood Khan Academy as complementary to conventional classes.

To cover all topics of high school and college curricula doesn't necessarily mean supplanting high school and college or redefining education. If that is the case, I think the OP has a point. I don't think it is the case, though. No reason to worry.

pjscott2• 15 years ago

It's complementary to some parts of conventional classes. It directly competes with the part of conventional classes that consists of monologue-style lectures paced too fast or too slow for most of the students.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

"First, Khan has never lectured." "Second, Khan has never taught."

Odd, because I'm pretty damned sure that through his lectures, he has taught me a good deal of basic chemistry.

Results are the only thing that matters. If and only if people find Khan's material valuable, it will become popular. Guess what? It's pretty damned popular.

arnorhs• 15 years ago

Exactly.

Also:

  > What do you expect from a good lecture? Depth, 
  > insight, introspective. It shouldn’t be just
  > regurgitated material from a textbook and it
  > shouldn’t be a “how-to” manual on tape.

Is it possible that students don't feel the same way? For my part, the fact that the courses get down to it and don't over complicate things makes it better.

If the courses were filled with "insights" and other off topic things I'd find myself fast forwarding all the time.

I think this is a prime example of how having no domain knowledge actually can help a lot and free you from years of this-is-how-it's-always-been-done.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

It could be that students don't in fact place the same value in those things. However, in my humble experience, the Khan videos are actually much better at providing those things than most of the lecturers I have ever had.

Sure he doesn't go off on tangents about work he did as a grad student in some tenuously related topic two decades ago, but I consider that a win and unrelated to "Depth, insight, introspective"

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

OK, how about a practical example? In all Khan’s lectures on linear algebra find an explanation of how it contributes to calculus.

JoachimSchipper• 15 years ago

Teaching solely to the test - if that is indeed what Khan does - does lead to decent test scores, and probably a decent education. I don't want to distract from Khan's work: a scalable system of decent education would truly be great.

But offering a deeper understanding really is quite valuable to (some) students - even to some students who would not otherwise seek out this understanding. There are perhaps too few good teachers, or good students, to make this work at scale; but education can be more than transferring a list of facts and tricks from a textbook into a student.

glenra• 15 years ago

Khan's current lectures are best thought of as placeholder material. A rough draft. Having a free, competent, standardized tutoring job available on every little subject is SO MUCH better than nothing at all that clearly the low-hanging fruit at this point is to just cover more parts of more subjects. Once you've got lots and lots of subjects covered, it would make sense to assess the field to figure out which lectures are working the least well and invest effort on improving those.

Khan Academy is a system that lets us set a baseline and then incrementally improve from there. If this "deeper understanding" can be conveyed in lecture form, it seems inevitable that as the lectures improve, some of them will impart "deeper understanding". Or maybe they'll just add an extra "deeper understanding" course in addition to the current ones.

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

This book has taught me a good deal of algebra. It's self-teaching.

juretriglav• 15 years ago

I'm betting a business (not just yet, but soon) on making good teachers out of people who never taught. I think I'm on the right side of that bet.

toddh• 15 years ago

When you go to a process critique rather than argue results that's the sign of a weak criticism. The article is more concerned about how he does what he does rather than what he accomplishes. Khan has a system of which the videos are just one part. Teachers are a key part of his program, they are just freed to tackle more salient aspects of teaching, like helping kids get over problems. It's an open source business model. The source is free, use it if you wish, but for service, there could be a fee. Teachers could actually be paid to teach and mentor instead of lecturing and giving tests. It's a successful model elsewhere and worth trying in education. Teachers and others can produce the content and then anyone else can charge a fee for teaching using the infrastructure. There's no reason the lectures can't improve over time, but you have to start somewhere, and he did. And the other parts of the system are still very valid. Inversion of lecture and help time, a test until success testing model, go at your pace, short modules that build on each other, a dashboard helping teachers track progress and proactively solve problems. Why is that a bad approach?

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

It’s not a bad approach. However, the lectures are the only results I can see right now. I criticize the results that I see. And you don’t refute my points. You just see “the sign of weak criticism”.

patrickaljord• 15 years ago

> If the student in the “audience” is struggling, he is free to turn the video off and try something else.

That's what his guided exercises are for http://www.khanacademy.org/exercises?exid=linear_equations_1

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

tl;dr

Salman Khan is not an insider, and therefore I reject his attempts at disruptive innovation.

forkandwait• 15 years ago

$0.25 says the author thinks Mr. Khan should go through a (worthless, IMO) teacher training program.

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

Wrong. Mr. Khan needs experience teaching real students. Oh yeah, and a PhD in every field he wants to “disrupt”. Just kidding.

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

tl;dr

OP is an insider, and therefore I reject his criticism of an outsider.

codelurker• 15 years ago

"The Khan Academy has a few good things that make the service useful. Unfortunately, the good things about it don’t outweigh the bad ones."

Umm - Millions of people are learning. I'd say the good >>> the bad.

ajays• 15 years ago

"First, Khan has never lectured." "Second, Khan has never taught."

This is such BS. When I came to the US on an assistantship, I was assigned to TA an intro to programming course. The problems were: a) I didn't have an undergrad degree in computer science, having taken only 1 course in programming (officially), b) I had never taught, c) my degree was from India, and here I was in a different education system in a different country.

But you know what? I got rave reviews from students.

It doesn't matter whether you've taught or not. What matters is how well you can explain the subject at hand, and how passionate and patient you are.

Lewisham• 15 years ago

This was exactly what came to my mind too. No professors that I know of were taught how to lecture, they just got thrown in and did it. When I've TA'd, I've totally winged it. What Khan does is no different, but at least he does it with charisma.

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

I remember winging teaching as a TA. After 10+ years I know I stunk, no offense.

kmfrk4• 15 years ago

I know dropping newly-learnt and vaguely-understood words loosely is generally a bad habit for people on Hacker News, but also consider the concept of pseudoteaching[1].

[1] https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-...

solarmist3• 15 years ago

Yes, but Khan academy also provides exercises to test your undestanding of the material, so I don't think it falls into this category.

Also, Sal doesn't write the exercises and the people that write the exercises don't use Sal's videos exclusively as far as what to put in a module. There are videos with no specific exercises and modules that cover multiple videos and bits that are left out of video that use the same techniques.

So, student can see if they really understood the concepts or just thought they did.

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

>I got rave reviews from students.

How many of them did you fail?

erikb• 15 years ago

As many other readers here I disagree with that statement as it stands. Saying that a new idea is not valid because it is not like the old idea is wrong in itself.

But when I look behind this little logical error, I find a quite valuable analysis. Before I really thought K.A. might be the "university killer". Now I see it more as opening up the spectrum of ways, we can teach and learn.

lyudmil• 15 years ago

The first two points seem completely vacuous to me.

Khan has never lectured? So what? I know plenty of people who have lectured every day for decades and they're still no good at it. It doesn't seem like (professional) experience lecturing is necessary to be an effective teacher.

Khan has never taught, so he hasn't needed to deal with the difficulties of the classroom? Yes, and to think that's a problem is to deny the premise of The Khan Academy - that if people are allowed to learn autonomously, the problems of the classroom go away. That argument basically reduces to "No, they don't". That's hardly reasoned.

For me the greatest benefit of The Khan Academy is the fact that Khan is a great teacher. We know there are teachers who are more engaging and stimulating than their peers and we know there's very few of them. I see The Khan Academy as an exercise in scaling great teaching. The institutional effects are very interesting and important, but secondary to me.

nathos• 15 years ago

While I think Peter Saveliev's immediate conclusions regarding Khan are incorrect, I do wonder: will Khan be bringing on more instructors to record videos outside his fields of expertise?

The Academy has already started a revolution in education. Wouldn't it benefit from more/better instructors, better production values, etc?

Also, I'd love to see Khan Academy-sponsored videos on the humanities. Of course, I'm not sure how liberal arts content could fit into the automated testing of the new exercise dashboard.

Kyotoku• 15 years ago

This is a filtering/sorting problem. There is a lot of people and companies working on this. It is good having something to be filtered/sorted

swaits• 15 years ago

Sorry, I couldn't get past the word "tuturing". It is, after all, a critique on Khan's educational abilities. So embarrassing!

pixcavator9• 15 years ago

Always spell-check! Thanks.

gnosis• 15 years ago

Another critic of Khan Academy:

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2332277.html

mattwdelong• 15 years ago

As a student, I'm particular interested in learning the basics of any given domain. With the basics, I'm given enough knowledge to go out and explore that particular domain - this is how I learn and Khan Academy is AWESOME for this method.

brudgers• 15 years ago

I think the article misses the big point of Kahn's enterprise - finding an alternative model for delivering education which can scale well.

It isn't meant to replace a top quality teacher at a highly selective institution teaching an elite group of students. It's intended to make decent education available on a large scale and accessible to learners in highly diverse and non-traditional situations, e.g. home schoolers, adult learners, and intellectually gifted individuals.

It still suffers from many of the issues that the factory model has because it is still the factory model - just different and hopefully improved.

hexis• 15 years ago

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

carmellevy• 15 years ago

As videos on the internet, Khan is actually fine. The videos are largely informative, and I like watching them. But classroom implementations are a whole different ballgame.

If you want to actually improve the education kids are getting, there are a huge number of moving parts you have to address. In this sense, as a classroom implementation tool, Khan is just getting started. There's nothing to judge yet!

I've spoken with them a bit, and they're still trying to decide on the direction they want to take, how much they want to get involved in what they call "change management" in the classroom, i.e. making sure the tool gets used effectively. In my opinion, this is essential, but it takes manpower, and that's not something they can offer for free.

Of course, that requires having an understanding of how such a tool should be used, and as has been said, they're not teachers. The importance of them not having any classroom educational expertise is that they don't actually have a clear idea of how the tool would be used effectively. I work as an on-site PD specialist for Reasoning Mind, my job is to help teachers use this kind of technology. Khan learned a lot from their pilot in Los Altos, but they weren't being used as the primary curriculum there.

They're looking to be a full curriculum, what they call a "textbook replacement system". Doing that kind of thing effectively in communities that aren't as well-off (economically and teacher-quality-wise) as Los Altos is really, really hard. It takes a huge amount of work on the "change mgmt" side, high quality material, a ton of training for the teachers in the new classroom paradigm. This isn't the first foray into 100% differentiated classrooms, it's just the first one to go viral.

In sum, take a step back guys. Give them a chance to grow into a mature organization.

kmfrk4• 15 years ago

This entire post makes no sense. It's like the author says that Khan Academy is bad, because it doesn't copy the usual lecture format completely. It's different, boo.

And then there's the part where he doesn't realize that Khan Academy is supplemental, and not a replacement.

antoinevg• 15 years ago

Khan Academy doesn't have to be bad for the thing you are doing to be good.

teilo• 15 years ago

Yeah. Tell that to my kids who are learning Algebra from Sal, and are learning it quite well.

Khan Academy: the bad

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