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Comment by arjn | Hacker News Reader

Khanacademy is neat but I find it odd that people on HN either aren't aware or dont care about other earlier sources such as :

  - MIT's OCW
  - USNW eLearning channel on Youtube (esp Richar Buckland)
  - TIMMS (Germany, possibly the first of the video resources)
  - UCBerkeley youtube channel
  - Dr. Adrian Banner (Princeton)
  - Harvard (esp Michael Sandel's lectures, amazing)

The above can be easily searched for and are hardly a comprehensive list as that would be large. Here is a website which is a sort of clearinghouse for video lectures: www.cosmolearning.com

A search of HN shows less attention given to these original sources than perhaps they deserve. In my opinion MIT OCW was the best known initiative till recent times and started this wave of online video learning. BTW, I highly recommend Michael Sandel's lectures on ethics and politics, available on YouTube.

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Khan Academy is miles better than any of those when it comes to design and ease of use, especially when it comes to presenting the material to elementary/middle school aged children. I certainly don't think a MIT lecture will appeal to 5th graders.

All the links I posted are undergrad-grad level which is what I'd expect most HN visitors to be interested in. I assume not many 5th graders frequent HN (perhaps I should account for parents of 5th graders).

While KA is definitely well organized, esp. for kids, "miles better" is hyperbole. There are other resources for young learners such as mathvids, brightstorm.com (and others) with little or no mention on HN.

There are also cheap/paid/freemium resources for kids - eg. mathtv.com and yourteacher.com (I think yourteacher has been around for a while.

My overall point is that - regarding this topic, HN seems to have a rather narrow view or is completely unaware of existing resources.

For me, the presentation is just better. There's something about 10-12 minute lessons, and obviously the thought that goes into distilling it to that size, that makes it digestible. (I'm really curious how much time goes into making one 10 minute lesson.) It sticks.

One caveat: I've been exposed to this material before in other contexts, so it's more like a phenomenal refresher. I can't know if this is a better way to teach from scratch. But, frankly, it's been long enough, or I was just that bad at it the first time, that it sometimes feels like I never learned it in the first place. This gives me some degree of confidence that it's at least one right way.

Superior products launched earlier ignored for lack of effective marketing, while an arguably less innovative and minimalist but attractively packaged product geared towards a grossly underserved niche succeeds in capturing attention because the competition in that niche is ossified and terrible?

One could almost try to extract a lesson out of that...

If I could change one thing about hackers, it would be their overall misunderstanding and attitude towards marketing.

Would you care to elaborate, or link to some page that does? It sounds like this could be important.

I covered some aspects of it in an old article of mine: http://programmingzen.com/2009/07/27/why-technical-marketing...

I have a theory about this. I think hackers come largely from the autistic spectrum part of the population. We are less fascinated with other people and more willing to be alone, or perhaps with a completely logical slave machine for company.

The desire to fit in and conform does not develop in the normal way, because we're not aware until later than neurotypical people of what other people are thinking and we never care about it quite so much. Normal children are obsessed with finding peer approval and young hackers stare in amazement.

I failed to grasp the basic mechanics of marketing until a kind MBA recommended "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoff Moore, after I had told him I didn't really see the use of sales and marketing. One of the ideas in the book is the need for marketers to convince different market segments that this product is suitable for them. A huge part of that is convincing them that they are not alone, that the product has already sold to a lot of other people and that they are not going to be doing something risky and independent by buying it.

This herd mentality, which dominates mass market sales, had not really figured in my earlier understanding because I am not in that same category. I'm in Moore's "innovators" category. It doesn't matter a bit to me whether anyone I know of has chosen some product or idea.

So I think many hackers have a poor grasp of marketing because it doesn't really work on them and they don't know how unusual that is.

I'm a big fan of OCW and other online resources, but they just move the traditional style into an online format. And I'm especially excited for the OCW scholar site to get more material (plus, I'm excited to go through their Physics courses, I was never satisfied with my physics classes). My favorite Harvard lecture series is the Science & Cooking Public Lectures (http://seas.harvard.edu/cooking).

But all those sites are evolutionary not revolutionary. They would never inspire the kind of use that Khan Academy has seen.

I think the one of key's to the Khan Academy system is the short 5-15 minute "lectures" that only teach a single concept at a time. That makes it more approachable and easier to go right to where you need to be; rather than a 50 minute lecture that covers a dozen different things at once.

Teaching it like a tutoring session may not seem like that big a change, but when you combine all the little differences from the traditional model it become something totally revolutionary.

I love OCW too and I don't agree with the evolutionary/revolutionary statement. Revolutionary would be OCW or TIMMS as they started this free online video lecture thing (there could be an earlier initiative which I'm not aware of). I also dont really like the 5-15 minute thing but thats individual preference.

If we consider views proportional to impact, then a glance at the viewcount of some OCW or Richard Buckland's lectures on youtube show they're in the same popularity range as KA.

Also, I should've mentioned the Stanford youtube channel in my list. Its pretty good, covers several undergrad/grad courses and also available via iTunes.

I think the biggest difference in making it revolutionary vs evolutionary is the target audience. OCW and their kin are all targeted at people that are highly motivated (and generally highly educated already) to learn something new.

While Khan academy is targeted at a mass audience. I think both serve their target audiences very well too. I'm nearly addicted to OCW, but it's heavy stuff, not something you can sit down with for 10 minutes at a time and make progress.

In regards to your comment on impact. Khan academy in its current form has only been around for months while OCW has been around for over 10 years. In my daily life I've only met one or two people that have even heard of it, while the Khan academy is already being mentioned by people I know independent of my experience with it.

Actually the entire premise of MIT OCW was to make superior educational material available worldwide i.e to a mass audience, and it was a pretty big deal when announced. After OCW, several other organizations started doing the same. I wouldnt be surprised if Sal got his inspiration from OCW. (The Univ. of Tubengin TIMMS predates OCW but is completely unknown). So imo OCW has the larger impact.

Also, I've been following KA for a while and its definitely been around a lot longer than a few months, its form has changed a couple of times, much improved now. IIRC Sal originally started by posting on youtube.

Aw, HN folks post from those sources all the time. We are definitely aware of them and think they're great.

But what this video especially pointed out is that Khan Academy is not just great content, but an extremely innovative system.

The problem with some of those is that their quality isn't consistent. I know with OCW, depending on what you pick, sometimes you might get video of a lecture, sometimes you might just get a powerpoint that doesn't really give you a ton of info.

I haven't looked at it for a while, maybe they've fixed it. But Khan Academy hit the ground running. I originally found him a few years ago when he didn't even quite have a hundred videos up. It blew my mind, I was just looking for some help with algebra but instead I found a rabbit hole of knowledge.

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