Parody Critiques Popular Khan Academy Videos

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/parody-critiques-popular-khan-academy-videos/37543?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

by ilamont • 14 years ago

25 47 14 years ago

chronicle.com

option_greek• 14 years ago

Would it not have been better to create a genuine video on how the concepts can be explained better instead of making fun of the course videos. Or better yet, launch a competing site instead of nitpicking.

tocomment3• 14 years ago

My own critique from watching a few videos on Khan Academy is that I hate how he makes mistakes sometimes and just leaves them in. (And corrects them in the next video)

I know that's his philosophy. But as someone who's a rules-based learner, it makes it really hard to learn anything when I start focusing on a mistake and wondering how does this fit with the general rule, etc.

And beyond that I find it much harder to unlearn something wrong than to learn the right thing to begin with.

It might be a good philosophy and practical for classroom teaching, but he needs to use the advantages electronic media offers and do some editing. At least to remove anything that's really going to throw a student off and possibly even discourage them.

kiba3• 14 years ago

Leave the mistake in and then correct it.

tocomment3• 14 years ago

I don't understand. Are you disagreeing?

I think leaving the mistake and correcting later is very confusing and possibly discouraging to students. What is your response to that?

kiba3• 14 years ago

If you want people to learn "problem solving", not just "following the rule to solve a particular equation", learn programming and apply your mathematical skill to a programming problem?

bogdand• 14 years ago

Haters Gonna Hate!

duopixel• 14 years ago

I do agree with some of the issues presented here. Khan teaches you how to solve many math problems, but he rarely mentions how you could use it in real life. But if you go to the Q&A section you will rarely see this brought up.

I do find it appalling that their approach is making a parody video instead of presenting a better solution. Instead of wasting their time—and mine— making fun of Khan, it would have been immensely more useful presenting a video of how their approach is better.

This is something I love about the development community (even though I'm not a developer myself). If someone thinks he has a better solution to your problem he sends a pull request and boom: the better solutions are often obvious.

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

If you sit and watch the video itself it's a very mild form of parody. They are actually commenting on the presentation given by the Khan Academy video and their comments make clear how they believe multiplication of negative numbers should be taught.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

That, plus it's a way to get attention.

A mild critique written up in a small corner of the internet is likely never to be seen by most.

Any publicity is good publicity, and I think these individuals definitely want to help.

jmcqk66• 14 years ago

What you are missing is the long line of criticism that has been made concerning Khan academy for years now from math teachers around the united states, all of which has been basically ignored. You're appalled that a few of them made a parody? How would you feel if you discovered that the only way you could be heard on the topic was by making a parody?

These teachers that criticize Khan, you know what their 'pull request' is? They actually teach in real classrooms. They experiment constantly, looking for better ways to teach, and then they share their ideas with other teachers through a variety of different mediums. Those are their pull requests. You don't see them because you're not a part of the community.

ippisl3• 14 years ago

A github pull request shares tools with tool developers and tool users. Are teachers sharing those educational insights with students ? if not , why ? and if so , is there a problem of reaching students with good educational content ?

pflats4• 14 years ago

There is no pull request for Khan Academy. I don't even see a bug tracker. Teachers and other involved people have tried to do everything else; it just doesn't get their attention.

The last time Khan posted a call to hire on HN, I reached out to them about a position as a curriculum developer. They're more interested in expanding their back-end currently, not improving their instruction.

ippisl3• 14 years ago

>> They're more interested in expanding their back-end currently, not improving their instruction.

I think the reason is simple. Khan came from india, where teacher quality is awful in many places. he want to offer good enough education to those who have awful education.

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

This video is perfect as a Khan Academy parody - they just throw some shit together, and maybe it isn't very good, but it's better than nothing.

schiffern• 14 years ago

FTA:

>Salman Khan, uses positive and negative signs inconsistently and mixes up transitive and associative properties.

Oh, the irony: Khan actually confused the commutative and transitive properties. The parody video gets it right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC0MV843_Ng#t=3m14s

This stuff is hard. To be fair, I don't think Khan is doing any worst than a first-year teacher in his first class of the day.

Youtube provides annotations – I wonder why KA doesn't insert crowdsourced corrections the instant a mistake is made? It seems like a good middle ground between his "write-only" philosophy (which has made him incredibly prolific) and the legitimate criticisms that quality has suffered as a result. This video was corrected, but I'm sure there's countless other small mistakes that could benefit from a change in process, not just a PR band-aid.

p2e3• 14 years ago

I think that this is a serious issue. Khan usually just hits record once, publishes, and never revisits his videos again. By his own admission, he takes some initial feedback (first few video comments) from his videos but only applies it to his subsequent lessons not bothering to fix the prior lessons. This allows him to produce a lot of content, but it can end up doing more harm than good by keeping a lot of bad lessons out there.

I've seen quite a few of his videos that have had serious problems in them, 20-second long stretches of silence when he's erasing or fixing mistakes, and places where he talks himself (and the listener) into a circle. I just don't see why Khan doesn't take the time to fix obvious mistakes/issues in his videos -- or have someone else do it! Sure, it means more video development time but it's for the purpose of producing superior lessons and not spreading misinformation.

Traditional educators revisit topics/lessons and learn from their previous attempts and from student feedback. This allows future lessons on the same topic to be more refined and better serve the student. Who honestly believes they get something right the first time, or doesn't try to improve something when they, or someone else, identifies an obvious problem?

Khan has an excellent framework in place, but he needs to revisit his content. Or let someone else do it -- do these videos have less value if someone other than Khan comes in to fix things up? I'm sure there would be plenty of volunteers. Obviously the guys in this video had some good insight that could have helped Khan's video.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

The more criticism, the better

surgeterrix• 14 years ago

"But the professors say their bigger gripe is with the procedural, rules-based approach in all of Mr. Khan’s videos."

Well, that's how they teach it in public school, here are the steps, no explanation of why it works, just accept that it works and memorize the steps. So if you want to attack teaching the procedure instead of the concept, look at just about every math teacher in K-12 first.

jmcqk66• 14 years ago

Your problem here is that you are using your own experiences and extrapolating to the general. You think any math teacher you see teaches like that. This is not the case. The teachers that have been the loudest critics of Khan tend to be really excellent teachers. You know why? Teachers who teach like you describe don't care enough about their teaching let alone worry about what some website is doing.

sanderjd• 14 years ago

What is a good non-rules-based approach to teaching why a negative times a negative is a positive? I've seen a proof-through-absurdity showing that if -1 * -1 = -1, then you can make 0 = 2, and a proof using all three negativity permutations, and setting two different distributions equal, showing that ab = (-a)(-b), but the math for both of those approaches seems to be more advanced than the rule.

hdevalence• 14 years ago

Say that multiplication by -1 is a 180 degree rotation of the number line. Then -1 * -1 is a 360 degree rotation -- which is the same as a 0 degree rotation.

Note that saying it like this is non-intuitive, but the point is that it's actually a geometric interpretation, so you draw a picture. This also helps students with the idea that there's actually some connection between algebra and geometry --- even though this is really fundamental, it's often omitted from mathematics education.

JadeNB• 14 years ago

My favourite motivation is to think of bank accounts. (A less monetary approach would be to think of a rising or falling temperature.) I think that anyone can predict the results of the following four operations:

* make a deposit in your bank account every day, and see your balance in a few days (positive times positive);

* make a deposit in your bank account every day, and see your balance a few days ago (positive times negative);

* make a withdrawal from your bank account every day, and see your balance in a few days (negative times positive);

* make a withdrawal from your bank account every day, and see your balance a few days ago (negative times negative).

pflats4• 14 years ago

I've never had to teach this, except remedially, where honestly, time is a major issue. A teacher in my building has students record someone walking backwards down the hallway, then plays the video back in reverse. The student appears to walk forwards down the hallway, more convincingly than you'd expect.[1]

From there, you can show that -(-1) = 1. If the students have any command of factoring, you can use that to handwavingly show, for example, that -2 ✕ -3 = -1 ✕ 2 ✕ -1 ✕ 3 = -(-6)) = 6.

[1]She actually has them walk forwards, and hold signs - it's more involved, and covers all four cases for multiplying negatives and positives, but we'll gloss over that for the moment.

edit: oh yeah, can't use * for multiplication.

asto• 14 years ago

You make your own banking system or something. Say you give a class of 10, $2 each. They all owe it back to you which makes the balance -2 each. So ask them how much you're owed back in entirety. I bet most of the class will crack it themselves without you and your rules :)

utopkara• 14 years ago

While making a parody of Khan's teaching, they have become the parody of being a critic.

d3r42• 14 years ago

I went to a government high school in the 90's in South Africa. Experienced teachers were given early retirement and replaced by younger teachers who, through a combination of ineptitude and inexperience, struggled to teach.

My grade 10 and 11 maths teacher couldn't factorise polynomials consistently. She'd often get stuck while halfway through a problem while working on the blackboard. Euclidian geometry was a challenge, and she failed to communicate theorem proving techniques. My Grade 12 (final year) maths teacher was promoted out after 3 months, and replaced by someone who didn't appear in class regularly.

I went for additional after-school maths tution, and I did very well during the exams in the topics that were covered there, but unfortunately we couldn't redo the whole syllabus. So my Higher Grade C for maths, although better than the majority of students in my school (and the country I guess, which has very low, and still-dropping educational standards) was disappointing.

We also had serious problems with our science teacher - retired, and replaced with someone who also never really used to pitch up. My parents bought me physics videos from the Learning Channel, a video-based system, and I managed to get an A. Unfortunately their budget didn't stretch far enough to buy the maths videos as well.

I have watched Khan's videos and I always wish that that sort of service was around back when I was in school. Yes, I, and most of my friends may have been deprived of some conceptual understanding, but at least we would have gotten some teaching. Something is better than nothing, at least for those of us who don't live in US College towns.

raldi2• 14 years ago

I guess this shows that people threatened by Khan Academy are in the midst of a transition from the "then they laugh at you" phase to the "then they fight you" one.

jmcqk66• 14 years ago

Raldi, I respect you a lot, but this statement is hardly reflective of what's been going on. Criticism of Kahn academy, especially by math teachers has been going on for years, only to be consistently ignored. This is them going 'well, I'm not being heard any other way, so let's try this.'

The worse part is that you describe this as a fight. It's not a fight, and I know that those teachers who are most outspoken against khan don't want it to be a fight. They want a collaboration, but it's not happening. It's really too bad that any criticism of khan is viewed as coming from the 'what's wrong with education' side of things. Pedagogically speaking, Khan academy is stuck with stuff known bad decades ago. Khan academy is like using rocket ships to transport telegrams. Yeah, the technology is cool, but the teaching practices need to be there too. That's what's currently missing from Khan academy, and there has been very little apparent effort on their part to actually fix that.

raldi2• 14 years ago

Based on the sarcastic tone and comments of the two people in the video, I find it hard to believe they have any interest in cooperation. They're going for the lowest possible form of criticism. They even make fun of the guy's ethnic name at one point.

Kaffkaff• 14 years ago

Never used Khan Academy, but Udacity's been really great

NonEUCitizen• 14 years ago

Sour grapes.

jroseattle3• 14 years ago

//-- sarcasm --//

Wow, fantastic work guys! Your condescending commentary on the methods and content of the Khan videos is sooo helpful to a bunch of people who have benefited because of them. I know that my own kids, who augment their math from school with the Khan videos, really appreciate your mocking sentiment toward totally free content that has raised their knowledge, acumen and confidence toward math.

//-- end:sarcasm --//

Seriously, you want to "raise the level of the discussion" with this type of piss-poor commentary? The only thing you're accomplishing at the moment is simply re-inforcing the stereotype that traditional education teachers are threatened by this content.

Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise -- nobody will care.

jmcqk66• 14 years ago

>Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise -- nobody will care.

This is the problem when hacker news tries commenting on Education. Readers here tend to be wildly ignorant about what's actually going on Education. How do you know that these teachers aren't doing things? Do you mean, they should be making a website? What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

You see this video and you don't know about the years of criticism that has been laid against Khan. You don't see the suggestions that have been offered (and ignored). You don't see these things because you're not a member of that community. Just like these teachers probably have no idea about what's going on in the Rails community, you really don't know what's going on in theirs.

jroseattle3• 14 years ago

I know what's going on with my own kids and the KA content. Mocking that content, while producing nothing else as worthy alternative that I can find, is counter-productive at best and offends me at its worst. If they think something different is better, why didn't they produce a video that explains that and then -- better yet -- offer that up as an alternative?

> What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

I don't care about criticism of KA, I care about results for my kids. And I see positive results, so I have my own evidence that's contradictory, I guess. Given my "wild ignorance" of the education community, that's apparently the only measure I can use anyway, right?

pflats4• 14 years ago

>Seriously, you want to "raise the level of the discussion" with this type of piss-poor commentary? The only thing you're accomplishing at the moment is simply re-inforcing the stereotype that traditional education teachers are threatened by this content.

I'm a classroom teacher, in mathematics and computer science. I can say, with certainty, that no teacher at my school is threatened by Khan Academy. That's a straw man. We became teachers because we want students to learn, and any resource that helps them do so is wonderful.

If we do criticize Khan Academy, it's because we're less than thrilled with the implementation and instruction, not the site's very existence.

jroseattle3• 14 years ago

That's good, no teacher should be threatened by the Khan Academy content.

I've spoken with more than a few teachers who are abjectly opposed to KA content. While my own observation is that of a concerned parent (small sample size applies), I would suggest that there are some teachers who exhibit the behavior of having their approaches to teaching second-guessed (hence: threatened.) By a similar measure about "straw men", I would double-check any assumptions about teachers and their desires for students to simply learn. I've personally dealt with those in the teaching profession who resist the idea that there's more than one way to learn something.

As for KA criticism, I've yet to hear suggestions that would yield better results. I get that implementation/instruction goes against the grain of traditional teaching methods. But hey, maybe that's the point? I'm in no position to assess that, but I am in position to evaluate results.

My kids are proof positive that using KA works for them. I'm an engineer and excelled at math, and they understand concepts better with KA material than without, so I have some perspective as to whether their learning is what I consider well-grounded.

krupan• 14 years ago

I'm reading these comments and I'm seeing these things:

* Khan makes mistakes and just leaves them in.

* Khan doesn't tell you how you could use these things in real life

* He's just using a procedural rule-based approach.

Um, did none of your school teachers ever make those mistakes!?!? Because mine did, all the time. And I had nowhere else to turn. The beauty of Khan, and all the other educational videos on youtube, is that you can get a second (or third or fourth or tenth) opinion on the matter by asking your school teacher or by doing some more google searching. This is amazingly better than it used to be.

The great thing about Khan is he's obviously having fun teaching you. He's laughing and having a good time, he makes little mistakes and he has to scribble things out or correct himself later, and it's OK. He draws in pretty colors. What does that convey to a kid? Math can be fun! There are people that like it! You can like it too! It's OK if you mess up, even the pros do! The first time my kids watched a Khan video they were simultaneously cracking up and getting excited about their new-found knowledge. They begged for more. It was awesome. I wish more teachers taught like Khan.

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