Why I Love the Khan Academy
patrickmylund.com
patrickmylund.com
And if you've got another minute, nominate Paul Graham, too!
(edit: I'm an employee of Y Combinator, making PG my boss, but I'd nominate him regardless of that fact.)
1/. Videos are short, 10-15min digestible bits. Long enough to teach a concept, short enough not to lose my attention.
2/. He's a huge advocate of teaching intuition behind concepts instead of memorization. This makes learning less stuffy and more informal.
3/. Everyone has "holes" in their knowledge, but they are in different areas. Schools have a hard time to individually address weak points in each student's knowledge (particularly if you should have learned them in a prerequisite course). Videos organized by concepts allow you to address these weaknesses systematically.
4/. He makes mistakes! Those mistakes are quite insightful and give a glimpse into an art of solving problems that usually isn't presented in most lectures. You usually see a problem, and a solution thats a finished product.
5/. He doesn't have an ego. He's not breathing down your neck or thinking you're an idiot if you don't understand anything the first time. You can pause, google something, repeat, watch it anytime, etc.
In the online SICP lectures there's a nice point about names and how they give you power over things, but I couldn't find it right away.
(Actually, probably London Plane trees, but don't let my ignorance get in the way of my point.)
Names obviously matter - language and communication matter if we're going to collaborate on anything - but when it comes to science, to make new discoveries, the ability to look something up in a book is useless without the ability to understand how things actually work and fit together... and sometimes, books, and even the majority of people, are actually incorrect...
It's disingenuous to take that Feynman quote out of context and argue that it's an argument against naming... it's certainly not.
Judging from Google, the collected knowledge of humanity on the brown-throated thrush consists only of this Feynman anecdote in different variations.
There's also another anecdote written by Feynman where he describes creating his own notation for trig, or maybe calc. At some point he had to abandon it because no one else understood him. The anecdote is not as quotable, but it correlates with what you said -- it gives you the ability to talk about it with other people, so Feynman is not ignorant of this.
In short, are there boundary conditions to the Khan Academy approach? And if so, what are they?
That doesn't mean it won't work, just it probably won't be as effective for some other stuff as it has been for math and such.
Between Khan Academy and wikipedia education is pretty much limited by the amount of time you have to invest.
There was a character in a book that tried to learn by memorizing an encyclopedia, which as 'learning by rote' is not the most useful thing. But in wikipedia everything is interlinked, and you can dig down in to a subject as deep as you want, the references will give you the background. It's quite amazing how much you can learn about something just from there.
The Khan Academy is another part of education embodied in bits, a really good instructor that knows how to make subjects both interesting and understandable.
We should be particularly suspect of the belief that higher production values are worth pursuing. Before KA, if you suggested that you could deliver unusually effective education through a series of ten-minute videos having truly horrible production values, the mainstream education industry would have ignored you. After KA, they can't.
What the success of the Khan Academy suggests is that production values are not important and, perhaps, that the pursuit of high production values is wasteful and even counterproductive.
Now that's an interesting hypothesis.
But as to his teaching style, the videos I've seen have caused me to react less like Patrick Mylund and more like this MetaFilter poster:
http://www.metafilter.com/78770/Welcome-to-the-Khan-Academy#...
Perhaps there's an ordered curriculum you're meant to go through, but every time I've sampled Khan's videos at random they've been structured as "if these are the exercises you need to do right now, now you can see me solve one."
Sure he does a good job of narrating his steps, explaining details and side-effects, and making illustrative mistakes. I just feel like he's all about the how and never about the why.
I don't want to disrespect the effort he's going through setting up all the online content, that's clearly something very useful to those that don't have access to real people to learn with. But to hold him up as as especially awesome and unique seems to ignore the thousands of equally awesome teachers that are out there teaching like that every day.
Some professors are able to teach you complex things in such simple terms that it damn well blows you away. I remember being tought van der walls equation's proof using some very basic concepts and the taylor series. I can't find that simple a proof on wikipedia now, and unfortunately I have forgotten much of physics. SICP is also a good example of a good teacher making complex problems simple.
He doesn't have to be 'outstanding' or even 'great' to have an enormous impact on the world.
There are books where you can learn physics and math, and while they aren't free but neither is the computer you need to look at his videos...
Computers and internet connections reach places on the planet where very few physics books go, and embody potentially every book ever written + all the free content available out there.
Of course, make it interactive and with lots of visuals for better learning.
There you have it, a great idea for a startup.
With a good teacher you can learn more with less time. If you are in a small group you can ask the teacher and you will learn that he can give you not only the answer you are looking for but a new perspective about that subject.
So Khan Academy is a good resource in certain occasions, but never as a good teacher should be.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-...
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magn...
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-03-physics-iii-vibratio...
I haven't been able to figure out if this is a good thing or bad thing, rather it may come down to how students learn and what is the actual job/purpose of the instructor. If you learn the material before his lecture then there is no problem but then there is little reason to come to class other than it being a requirement and to enjoy the half of class he isn't instructing, discussing random topics and shooting the shit.