Sal Khan is MIT's 2012 Commencement speaker

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N57/khan.html

by tilt • 15 years ago

185 20 15 years ago

tech.mit.edu

cadr• 15 years ago

Nice. One of mine was Carly Fiorina - would have much preferred to have Sal. (The other year was the Car Talk guys - that was fun.)

ilamont• 15 years ago

I, too, would have preferred to have Sal. We had another Fortune 500 CEO -- it wasn't a bad speech, but the speaker was unknown to most of the crowd and is not regarded as an innovator/trailblazer/person who has made as large an impact as Sal has in his field.

plainOldText• 15 years ago

Awesome. If there's someone who can say something interesting about education then that's Salman Khan.

hmottestad• 15 years ago

"Khan Academy, a popular online educational resource — more popular, even, than MIT’s OpenCourseWare"

Khan Academy is to OpenCourseWare as a castle is to a small, below ground, flat.

kevinalexbrown• 15 years ago

Except MIT's OpenCourseWare has a lot harder stuff. I'm not saying Khan Academy isn't doing good things - it is, but it's designed for a fundamentally different audience, even if there is some overlap. Kahn Academy is for kids, or to get a basic handle on things. For that it is superb, better than anything out there. OpenCourseWare is in general high-level, sophisticated, and far more in depth. Just because you watched Kahn Academy's presentation on diffeq, for instance, doesn't mean you'd be able to breeze through OpenCourseWare's diffeq.

Edit: BTW I wholeheartedly think Kahn Academy is awesome.

rdouble2• 15 years ago

Khan Academy has expanded quite a bit and is not just for kids. The sections on Finance and Banking are better than any of the college lectures available.

Khan Academy material is generally better than a recorded college lecture because it is designed specifically for web video. Even in the good OpenCourseWare lectures, or similar videos from Stanford, at least half the video is wasted time.

I was pretty excited when videos of real classes from respected universities became available online for free. I have watched quite a few from places like MIT and Stanford. One unexpected result I've had is that I have been mostly unimpressed. The lectures were not better than the lectures I went to at the no-name college I attended. My conclusion is that college lectures really aren't an efficient way to disseminate education, and they are even less so when they are recorded on video. I am now much more excited for Khan Academy's expansion into more advanced topics.

jacobolus• 15 years ago

Khan academy’s material is mostly useless to me, as someone who has gone through high school and college taking a wide variety of courses, and read up on the basics of many fields; I could probably get something from the finance and organic chemistry sections, if I decided those were important to learn about (though I think I’d start with a book or a set of university lecture videos first).

MIT’s OCW by contrast is a gold mine.

The two are just aimed at entirely different audiences.

keiferski• 15 years ago

Nah, it's for a different demographic. Khan Academy is primarily for high schoolers, whereas MIT is for college students (and beyond).

MIT OCW could definitely learn something about design and ease of use from Khan Academy, though.

neolefty• 15 years ago

Younger than high school, too. His lectures on basic arithmetic are really sweet and disarming, good for both grade-schoolers (and remedial adults).

fratrik• 15 years ago

He's also giving the commencement at Rice University. http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID...

dskhatri• 15 years ago

Wow, what an amazing year for him! I enjoyed this recent talk where he spoke a lot more freely than at TED: http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/15484-rethinking-education---sa....

spindritf• 15 years ago

It's nice that his work is getting more and more recognition, especially from an established educational institution, but it really would make more sense to have him speak to the new students, not those who are already graduating.

mgh22• 15 years ago

He is also speaking at Rice's commencement =P! http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID...

mgh22• 15 years ago

It seems that this post will have some competition, watch out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3322024

bradfeld• 15 years ago

As an MIT alum, I'm proud that MIT is having a commencement speaker who is working on something fundamentally disruptive to the status quo of education. It's an enlightened point of view - "disrupt yourself before someone else does."

Sal Khan is MIT's 2012 Commencement speaker

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