HN user
I am the lead designer for the Khan Academy, and Airship Software.
The data presented in this article is extremely suspect. The methodology for both the collection of shipment information and the extrapolation to revenue are secret (or at least not reported here -- see the update at the bottom of the story). As a community that is concerned with accuracy and precision, I think we should be bothered by this. Instead it's a launchpad for arguments based on conjecture and personal anecdote.
Mountain View, CA - full-time designers and mobile devs
Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Over 1 billion math problems have been done on our site and 2 million more are done each day. Here's some stuff we've been working on lately:
* creating adaptive assessments to accurately measure student knowledge
* running new A/B tests every week to learn how best to teach students and grow our userbase
* building infrastructure to allow us to scale up our content creation efforts
* internationalizing our entire website to enable pilot implementations in Mexico and Brazil
https://www.khanacademy.org/careersYes! KA is looking for two types of design interns: product design interns, and visual design interns. We strongly recommend that product design interns be in (or have just completed) an HCI-like program[1] or have relevant real-world experience. Visual design interns can help with everything from making cool stuff around the office, to creating assets (like avatars) for the site, so digital art skills are a must.
The design team is much smaller than the dev team so we will likely only be taking one or two interns this year.
There is actual data to look at here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf
Desire to provide religious or moral instruction is at the TOP of the list of reasons people homeschool.
I am saying that you can follow OOCSS coding practices and still wind up with a ton of really great abstracted styles that you don't reuse. That is because most people look at OOCSS and only see the "this is how you write proper CSS" and don't realize that most of the work is around planning and communicating. How many of the folks using OOCSS have a style guide of some kind that they are sharing to let people know what exactly is available to be reused?
This article focused on the first part and even compares different approaches, but misses the point that OOCSS is advocating a process overhaul, not just a change to the way that you write CSS.
When I say help people not write custom CSS, I am referring to reuse. Writing the code the right way is of course a pre-requisite, but from experience, not nearly enough.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently, and while all of these approaches solve some problems I think the requirement for maintainable CSS is a fundamentally different approach to the purpose of CSS. Once you make the mental switch from "CSS is the stuff that I do to make the things that I build look right" to "CSS is a component of everything I build" it becomes easier to see what I mean. It's not about "I need to be able to reuse this font size" as much as it is "I want to reuse this widget when I am display text in this way on any page".
In other words, if you want to build something maintainable, start thinking about all the ways you can help people not write custom CSS at all.
Also, LESS and SASS at their core do little to help with this problem, and can even hurt you with unintentional specificity (due to nesting) that hurts reusability. Mixins help you think "reusability" but they can really easily be misused in ways similar to how people are misusing CSS right now. This is by no means an attack on LESS/SASS, which I love. It is just a reaction to working on a large project that is making the switch and seeing the fallout.
Loving the thoughtfulness here, and I have a few more resources I need to read now.
Re: Quick and Correct badges -
It is important in many cases to be able to recall math facts quickly. Automatic recall has also been correlated with understanding of more difficult concepts (for example: [1]). I am by no means saying that we've gotten the reward system perfectly right, but we were thoughtful when creating it.
[1] http://www.ldonline.org/spearswerling/Developing_Automatic_R...
Simply stating it is not a ponzi scheme doesn't advance the conversation in a meaningful way in my opinion.
It's really just semantics at this point. There is a lot of evidence here that suggests systematic misleading (if not out-right defrauding) of investors. So you while you are technically correct, I think what Groupon has done is in the spirit of Ponzi even if it is executed differently. What's happened here is more than just a bad business plan executed honestly producing poor results. Just because we don't have the exact word for it doesn't make it any more ethical.
This is an ongoing falsehood. Several Khan Academy employees were real honest-to-goodness teachers, and we work with teachers directly in-person every single day to make the product and the content better. In addition, we are looking for more folks to make videos. Our standards are extremely high, and that will take time, but I disagree that this is our biggest challenge in scaling.
Furthermore, your opinion of the Biology content may be spot-on, but there are thousands of students who say it's making their lives measurably better. Maybe it would be 100,000 if the content was better; it's hard to know for sure. I'm just not sure that it is directly affecting scale at this point, or that there's not a greater effect on scale trying to get more people to use our existing content.
Disclaimer: I'm the lead designer for KA.
There is a name for this approach to design. It's called Activity-Centered Design , and Don Norman has written a bunch about it here:
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_design_considered_harmf... and here:
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/hcd_harmful_a_clari.html
Highly recommended reading. I feel like it's a good sign that the community keeps re-inventing this. It means that it has some real legs. Another great example of our best practices slowly strangling good process.
I find that personas are nearly useless for this kind of design discussion. Personas are an attempt to homogenize some group of people into a single pseudo-person that has specific attributes. When the lines between personas are hard to draw or there are so many lines that you wind up with lots of personas, you can find yourself spending lots of time managing personas without a ton of direction or solving anyone's problems.
For a heterogenous audience like "web makers" of various types, an activity centered approach can be really helpful. Don Norman explains this idea better than I ever could:
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_design_considered_harmf...
What about accounting for the massive selection bias of people who would actually visit the Genius Bar in the first place and combining that with the total number of people who visit the Genius Bar with their iPhones at all. I am guessing the number represents a tiny fraction of total iPhone users.
Working for the Khan Academy, I've seen the link to this video a bunch of times. Naturally, I was really curious about the voracity of the claims, so I did some research. It's actually worth reading the thesis as it's pretty interesting stuff. It's here: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/pdfs/research/super/PhD(Mulle...
The study was, as best I can tell after reading through much of it (a lot not relevant to this discussion), quite limited. The largest number of students considered for any of the experiments: 370. All from one school. Most of the other experiments included far fewer students (fewer than 100).
Chapter 9 (additional experiments in chapter 10), and the section on Participants and Design has most of the relevant information. I was particularly fascinated by the decision to remove students from the final result for "watching more than one multimedia treatment." I mean I understand why it's important to control for this, but part of the point of KA is to provide additional treatments of information.
I am not saying that this in any way invalidates the research, but I also don't think it's fair to say that this is somehow a surefire tested solution that is being handed over. In addition, because the research hasn't been repeated outside of the original setting -- at least I couldn't find it, please correct me here if I'm wrong -- it makes the claim that "because introducing misconceptions was effective in this study means it must be effective in all science videos" a pretty serious stretch.
I'm all for research. We're doing a lot of it right now with our pilot students/classrooms and existing users. But just because something has been research-tested doesn't mean it's automatically the right thing to implement for KA or its students.
John beat me to the punch here. We're thinking about a much more general mobile strategy. My personal mission is to try to design an experience for content, student interaction, and exercises that is usable on smaller screens because, although the tablet market is booming (thanks in great part to the growth of the iPad) the smartphone market is much bigger and growing more quickly. They are also likely to become commoditized more quickly (if you want to argue that they aren't there already). In any case, replace the word "iPad" in his post with "mobile" and I think you are closer to what John, I, and the rest of the team are talking about.
Sorry for not addressing that first time-round. We are funded by the Google and Gates Foundation grants plus private donations. As far as "most", I am not totally sure. I have very gladly stopped worrying about the particulars there as we've got some great folks (Sal, Shantanu, and Jessica) focused on making sure we're funded well enough to keep making progress at the rate we want. That frees up me and the rest of the developers to focus on building the product. Charmed life, eh?
Actually, it was totally free in terms of the school not having to lay out any cash. The reason we chose to work with them, however, is that they committed a ton of time from teachers, students, administrators, and parents to help us make the Khan Academy work better for the classroom use case.
The experience working with them has been fantastic. The teachers are fearless in the face of the significant uncertainty that introducing something like the KA in a classroom can create. They've been creative about experimenting with different ways of integrating KA into the classroom (trying things we didn't anticipate). Speaking as a UX designer, having nearly unlimited access to teachers and students for interviews and observations has been invaluable. Plus the teachers aren't shy about letting us know if something isn't working out. If anything, it feels like we should be paying them.
More importantly, Yelp is most useful after you've already left home. There are tons of resources on the "web" for finding reviews of various local stuff, and a web search works pretty well for finding good stuff. When you are on the move, however, web search is (generally) a real pain, and non-mobile sites are (generally) a real pain. Yelp's app really fills a need.
I used the app extensively recently while trying to find an apartment, and I didn't see anything they were doing in the app that made me think, "This has to be a native app." I think what's being confused here are the two different "webs" that exist in todays tech parlance: the first is the one that you use a web browser to access and the second is the technology stack that allows you to deliver a device independent experience using a bunch of tools that helped build the first web (plus a bunch of new stuff). With the advent of things like PhoneGap, and the native platform fragmentation that's already begun, I suspect that we're going to see more, not less, efforts going into mobile web applications.
One side note: The extra emphasis placed on iOS and iPad in the article is also telling. Sure iOS may be winning in the tablet world, and doing a damn good job in smart phone world, but Facebook has 500+ million users. Even if you throw in Android, you're not even close the total number of Facebook users just in the US. If I was the Zuck, I would be thinking about a mobile strategy that wasn't caged in by specific device/platform growth too.
Good point! Fixed it in the main article too. Thanks.
Totally fair criticism. Like any design effort, it represents a careful priority balancing act. The Khan Academy is trying to do a lot of things, and communicating that effectively is a challenge. For example, not everyone is as knowledgeable as you are about what the Khan Academy offers and why they should care. The good news is that people don't have any trouble finding the videos, so I don't think the design is causing too much damage from the perspective of getting to the content you want.
That said, the sketches/mockups that led us to the current iteration of the design also included both the idea of featured content in the main video carousel and different homepage content for users who are signed in. They didn't make the cut yet, but we haven't forgotten about them.
Ultimately, I agree that we want to make it as efficient as possible to get to the content you want quickly, and I don't think we're there yet.
The really misleading thing about these statistics is that the budget is not 100% teacher salaries. I am guessing, it's not even close. That means to get your 16% savings you are going to have to cut a lot more than 16% of the staff.
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.
They are only charging $1100-$1200 for the upgrade. Where are you getting a high-quality aftermarket 512GB SSD for much less than that (forget that you have to install it yourself)?
edit: pricing differs slightly depending on model
The Khan Academy is not seeking to replace teachers/coaches/tutors. The good ones will take advantage of what resources like the KA have to offer. On the other hand, a bad teacher has the ability to damage a student's ability and desire to learn for years.
There is a chance that the Khan Academy could make the world bad-teacher proof by giving students a resource with high quality guided instruction that includes mechanisms to keep them motivated, and I think that is nearly equally important.
(disclosure: KA Designer)
Our current belief is that there are several game mechanics and game-like visualizations that will help students measure their progress and maintain momentum. We don't know this for certain, but there is already anecdotal evidence that these kinds of things are motivating students at the Khan Academy. In the short term, the plan is to collect a lot of data to see exactly how these kinds of features impact the students and teachers that use them.
I don't think that's the paper that this particular piece was take from, but maybe I am wrong. It looks to me like this is the actual paper:
http://www.kotlikoff.net/sites/default/files/Comparing%20Ave...
Maybe easier to read on screen, but not easier to type or say to someone else. There was a previous comment about reading punctuation over the phone, which I've found true. In addition, there are lots of folks who are generally confused by which punctuation mark is which. My wife recently had a 5 minute conversation with someone who simply didn't know what a dash was (it's in her company's domain). As the SO brand spreads beyond the hacker community memorable word-based URLS without punctuation will be even more important.
My biggest problem with the series vs. individual sites thing is that I already have to remember so many URLs and information about my identity on each site. Where do I log in to see all of my notifications from the various sites? How do I find my friends when I move from one site to another? How do I see that a bunch of my friends are now answering questions on a cool topic on a totally new SE site? A series approach would have provided a much more straight forward approach to answering these questions. I think the unique sites make leveraging the asset of users who participate in many communities harder.
Kiln gets you a pretty cool (if I do say so myself) code review system, an all-new web interface for managing your code and repositories, tight integration with FogBugz, and support from Fog Creek. If you don't need those things, then by all means, use the open source version.
There's a free trial of the hosted version that you can sign up for at http://www.kilnhg.com/. Also, Kiln and FogBugz are both free for Students and Startups (2 users or less). Give it a shot and let us know what you think.