Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Since learning is my greatest love, school has always been my greatest enemy. I've been enamored with the Khan Academy from about the first 30 seconds of the first video I watched.
I've come across a few references to the idea that the biggest factor in education is the skill of the teacher, and that there is no way of guessing which teachers will be better than others. Apparently, there is no correlation between teaching ability and experience or education level. The Khan Academy model lets us leverage the impact of the greatest teachers and make excellent education available to anyone who wants it.
[edit: typo]
Clearly there is controversy in this statement. Conservatives insist that receiving a "quality education" at the university level should cost $40k+ a hear. A man that shatters this notion by providing free videos superior to many university courses cannot do so without creating an uproar from the old-fashioned.
In any case, Khan has done a great service to this world. I hope this publicity will help his videos reach the corners of the world.
*I am not from the US and the word "conservative" does not carry political connotations for me.
For the record, conservative is actually a pretty poor adjective for the US political movement that bears the name. While some old fuddy-duddy white dudes may hanker for the days of old and wish we could go back - most people my age are 'conservatives' because we are against the growth of government and its encroachment into our affairs. We dont want to conserve anything, we want to change it and make it better.
Meanwhile, "progressives" have somehow managed to capture a label which is pretty much an unalloyed good, even though many folks would think that the kind of "progress" which "progressives" want is not progress in the right direction.
It ought to be possible to reframe the debate, but unfortunately that would require people to fully and honestly comprehend the differences between various political ideologies, and very few people seem interested in understanding what their political opponents actually believe.
don't confuse the shitty government collusion in the education industry with a free market in education.
http://khanexercises.appspot.com/video/raising-money-for-a-s...
One thing that would be absolutely fantastic is if there were physics lectures that don't only list the facts but explain how the famous physicist got there. For example in my quantum mechanics course they just put the Schrodinger equation on page 1 and then derive things from that, never even mentioning experiments. Surely that is not how Schrodinger did it. And frankly this way of teaching is not very convincing. You get the feeling you're just learning a bunch of stupid mathematical tricks.
This also applies to mathematical lectures. I'd love to see theorems demonstrated experimentally and explain how the mathematician that got the theorem invented it. For example if we prove that the number of primes less than n is roughly n/ln(n) it would be lovely to have that demonstrated by writing a computer program that counts the primes less than n (or do this as an exercise), or to have some heuristic reasoning as to why it's true. This shows that the theorem is really saying something about our universe, instead of having just a bunch of steps in a proof.
I urge everyone to watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8
Khan lays out the future development goals for Khan Academy. There's software, peer-to-peer learning, and better allocation of teacher resources.
It makes me realize that the way education is taught right now has to be one of the most archaic traditions.
http://www.khanacademy.org/video/introduction-to-differentia...
Khan Academy will change the world!
Alas!
Quizlet.com is the startup I'm working on and we're also hiring. We're a for-profit but strongly educationally focused web company trying to help improve the way people study online. Different than (complementary to) Khan Academy, but gaining traction with 1M+ registered users. Get in touch if your interested.
That the rest is turning in to a giant billboard is a pity, but those few sites and the open source movement make it more than worth it.
They're some of the best things to come out of all this and for the most part they were completely unpredictable.
The Khan academy is the use case for youtube to put forward as to why they exist. There are many more, but hardly any on that level of dedication and quality of content.
Wikipedia does the same thing for text and has left 'old' encyclopedias in the dust.
Now we need something similar for scientific papers that develops real traction, so that those that use for instance the Khan academy have access to all the underlying materials.
anyone in science care to chime in?
People in this scientific community are quite aware of the advantages that these kind of open repositories bring to their disciplines.
Edit: looks like newer videos have better rendering - http://www.khanacademy.org/video/linear-algebra---eigenvecto... versus http://khanexercises.appspot.com/video/raising-money-for-a-s...
I checked out one of the videos on the Napoleonic wars. It's a subject I have interest in and have read about, but there's no way I could give a lecture on it. Khan gave a very nicely prepared lecture with plenty of details.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/
In all, it’s a well-deserved feat for Khan Academy.
Or more likely, he'll simply augment his children's already (probably) incredible education with some online lectures.
I don't think Harvard et al are in any danger yet. Too much vested in the current status quo. Again back to the social signals, a cocktail party, were did you go to school, etc. Unless you are uber-rich, this is important.
http://edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#gelernter
Roger Schank's ideas about just-in-time, story-centric curricula may also be interesting:
I don't mean this to be a prejudiced statement, I understand there are prejudices and nuances, but I live in a very blue collar neighborhood, and I hang out in the library and interact with the middle school and high school students here. The percentage of people in my town who would feel comfortable admitting an interest in watching a Khan Academy video is very low.
If you want to remember more try taking notes, quizzing yourself, reading up on related areas, applying what you learned to your daily life, etc.
The next thing is to apply it. If you don't apply it, don't sweat it; you've only lost the time you spent watching the video.
Cliched line but true ... : things like this restore my faith in humanity.
There is no denying that what Mr. Khan is doing is fantastic. But it would be wrong to de-emphasis the value that a community of learners adds to your education, like a university or a college. I am not a conservative (I not exactly old enough to be a conservative), but I see the point in the university model. First of all, I am not for the high fees and the bureaucracy, nor am I for the heavy course work with no explorations and grades for minimal work. I cannot loath them enough. But why do you want to take away the community that a place like the university would generate?
You do not want to be a lone wolf just watching a few tutorial videos and call it an education. We all know we learn more from each other than from anyone of the faculty members. (Here I am talking about students who really want to learn, not the one's who just want the elite degree. Thought the number is less, but it may increase if we work on making the system reward excellence rather than exam papers).
Also you may be able establish a lab for UG studies of software engineering or electronics (upto a certain extent), but subjects like mechanical engineering and Instrumentation & Control require quite expensive labs. Not feasible for an individual to buy.
Why not pool many student's money and buy those. We would need a common place to meet, so lets buy some buildings. Hey we would definitely need recreation and food, so lets make a recreational centre and a canteen. All this can be managed by students, but if not lets hire some MBA's to manage all this. WALA you have a ditto university but without bureaucracy.
Berkeley, MIT, Yale and other top universities in the past decade have made hundreds of courses available in audio and video form. I've been hooked on Berkeley courses for a few years now, actually wishing sometimes that my commute were longer.
Try watching some of his videos.
By the way, I'm not sure how listing his credentials is supportive of your claim that "his ability to teach far outperforms the majority of university professors."
Finally, it's not the anonymous 'majority of university professors' that I'm comparing him to, but the top people in their fields at the top American universities. Those people must excel both in research and teaching, otherwise they simply don't make it there.
Also, I think having a huge depth of knowledge is really not that important when teaching introductory topics (as long as you don't get anything wrong!). Having tutored students for many years, I'm quite certain that the biggest impediment to learning such topics is motivation, which is addressed more by a teacher's enthusiasm and speaking ability than the depth of their knowledge.
Absolutely, and as I said, that levels out the playing field for him a lot. Partially I was misled by the enthusiasm of the HN users here for the lectures; I didn't expect the crowd here to be so excited about high-school material.
"OK, we're going to cover (insert topic here). Now suppose we want to solve 2X=5, that's, uh, 2x, uh twoooo, (wiggles stylus, then writes 2), uh X (wiggles stylus, then writes X, eeeeequals, (wiggles stylus, then writes the equals sign), equals (wiggles stylus, writes 5) five..." Ad nauseum.
I have heard literally NO ONE mention this in any discussion about Khan Academy. Why? I haven't hallucinated this behavior - it's on EVERY video, because, well, it's his STYLE. And I've never seen this behavior at a blackboard by any instructor, no matter how crummy they were (and, whoo, have I seen some crummy ones!).
Please, someone tell me that I've fallen into some universe where I've become the character Monk, and I'm the only one who's bothered by Khan's presentation!
It's an unfortunate fact of teaching that certain styles just don't work for specific personalities. One person's harmless eccentricity is another's grating lesson-derailer. There are going to be some people you can't do much to help, no matter how good you are, or how attentive the student is. And it's not anyone's fault.
http://www.khanacademy.org/video/carnot-cycle-and-carnot-eng...
I've read the first book of the Feynman lectures during the last six months, only for fun, to compare the insights of Feynman with the education I've received during my school time, twenty years ago.
In that lecture Khan was ALMOST right, but I think it's not good. He mentions in one moment "the energy given to the system was the higher potential energy of the rocks" which is wrong. There's no the same amount of rocks, so the energy of the remaining (less) rocks is the same as the energy of more rocks before in the process he described.
Feynman's approach to actually understand that the energy transferred was to "speed up" the movement of the gas molecules is right, this is not.
He also "derives" the formula with delta U = Q - ... where he should have just written Q = ... because that was what was intentionally done.
So I'm not satisfied, I believe Khan was able to deliver much better lecture had he first prepared himself a little more. Maybe using some simpler book as the start but using Feynman for the insight to be able to explain what's really going on.
My experience of both real-life lectures and podcasted ones suggests otherwise.
Regarding research professors, the chair of the department I was a graduate student at once said that your teaching can only hurt your career; it can never help it.
Put another way, if you are someone who is primarily interested in teaching at the college/university level, and are not as interested in research ("grants and papers"), there are very, very, very few stable employment opportunities for you.
[1] which non-US readers might call simply "college"---a typically two-year program, post-secondary, often with a large number of vocational programs but usually also teaching a general education curriculum that might enable one to transfer into the second or third year of university.