Misconceptions about the Khan Academy
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So the worry probably isn't that teachers will be replaced by software. It's that availability of teaching software that's almost as good as some teachers will erode the social prestige held by all teachers.
That prestige has been a central feature of the American political landscape over the last few decades. From a survey I happend to have on my desktop, taken during the Wisconsin Union Thing a few weeks ago [1] [2].
What's your overall opinion of:
Teachers 73% pos 10% neg
Teachers' Unions 47% pos 30% neg
Other Unions 38% pos 35% neg
Barack Obama 49% pos 35% neg
If I were a teacher, I think a slogan like "[We] aim to make the world bad teacher-proof" would sound very ominous.
[1] http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_Politics/_...
[2] This is a good time to point out that I'm trying to make this post politically neutral, because politics is first in the official list of topics best avoided on HN:
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.
There is one angle I'm not probably not seeing. I don't have kids myself, so I don't know what it's like to leave a child in the care of strangers for seven hours a day. You might have to ascribe positive motivations to those people to keep from going crazy. But then I think about how much unhappiness one incompetent teacher can inflict on a child, and that really gets my hackles up.
To deal with this problem, the sort of instruction provided by the Khan Acdemy has been around in South Africa for more than 20 years. The per topic videos, as well as call in tv shows provided by these organisations are extremely important to thousands of students.
The pioneers of this sort of learning in South Africa were the Learning Channel (http://learn.co.za/LC/index.php), and a newer competitor called Mindset(http://www.mindset.co.za/learn/).
Mindset uses Creative Commons licensing, but downloading their content or viewing online seems impossible, while the excellent (in my opinion superior) Learning Channel charges large fees for their content on DVD (although some used to be broadcast for free on state television).
My friends and I used Learning Channel VHS tapes to pass our school-leaving exams 13 years ago, as we didn't have teachers for many of our subjects. Unfortunately, because of the price, I could only purchase a limited number of topics.
It is a pity that massive repositories of Learning Channel content (some of it probably unused because of South Africa's recent ill-advised, and soon to be reversed curriculum changes) are hidden behind a 20th century paywall.
South Africa, despite expensive and limited bandwidth, has a long tradition of students actively using this sort of instruction (via vhs/dvd and tv broadcasts). Distributing Khan Academy videos and Mindset Learn, and especially freeing and distributing Learning Channel videos could make a huge difference to education here. If someone has a philanthropic need to save millions of children in a third world country from chronic unemployability, those would be the first easy steps to take.
that's absolutely deplorable! I'm clearly missing whole genres of conversation on this forum. So as to avoid charges of libel, let me encourage you to provide examples. Can you cite examples?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797920
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563941
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062454
SearchYC is always your friend. Literally a treasure trove.
Also, to misconception #4, I just finished reading Gowers' "Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction", where he tangentially makes the point that sometimes putting too much effort into trying to get students to understand "the meaning" behind some piece of mathematical technique may be misguided, in part because a given piece of math can represent multiple meanings (he uses the example of xa + xb = x(a+b), which can perhaps be taught more easily axiomatically, instead of teaching "exponentiation is really repeated multiplication").
However, why not start even just a year-long study as to the effectiveness of Khan Academy being used within a syllabus for coursework as a supplemental resource or help for the students.
Not all of the many video's of Khan Academy would be applicable to a teachers curriculum (like the category for Statistics as a whole has 66 videos).
Some studies on the effectiveness of lack thereof would put most of the argument to rest. Though a very comprehensive study would include a Bill Gates esque full-online Khan Academy only program, perhaps 50% usage, 25% usage, etc.
For homeschooling, I much prefer Miquon Math
http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml
for starting out my children, and then the Singapore Primary Mathematics materials (which now have an edition aligned to United States curriculums standards)
http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...
followed up by the Gelfand textbooks
http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817...
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathemati...
http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144...
appropriately supplemented by ALEKS
and EPGY
My wife's sister is in high school, taking chemistry this year. From time to time she'll get stuck on something, and I'll tutor her a bit. Earlier today she called and asked if I could help her out with "kinetics." I told her to go to Kahn Academy, watch the intro to kinetics video, and that I'd stop by on my way home from work. Later on, I stopped by and we went through a few pages of exercises together. There obviously were still a few gaps in her understanding, but all the basic hurdles (terminology, etc) were out of the way. We were able to just work on a handful of sticking points.
KA is great for handling the "busy work" of teaching.
what a poor state of the profession if practicing professionals can be scared that easy into thinking that they are that easily replaceable.
That is especially interesting considering the anecdotal evidence i see how private tutoring market is growing. People more and more feel the need to have their children provided with additional instruction at least in the areas they feel most important for the children to not fail at, usually math/science subjects.
After watching everyone from factory workers to call centers to programmers get their jobs replaced by machines and/or third-worlders, I wouldn't blame any profession for worrying about being made obsolete.
In other words, they're not that foolish, but they fear that their bosses (administrators, politicians, the general public) might be that foolish.
As a nation, we spend more one education than the military ($972B as of 2007 according to wikipedia, vs about $725B for the military including wars). A 1% increase in efficiency would save a little less than $10 billion, and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].
If the Khan Academy is not striving to reduce our need for human teachers, we should create an organization that will.
[1] Edit: I should note that education is paid for primarily by the state and local governments, so it wouldn't be directly possible to reduce the federal budget by such savings. I was solely trying to make an order of magnitude comparison.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. I spent four years in the military and can tell you that there's a lot of waste there. Your last sentence could very easily be applied to the military, or at least to military personnel.
I think a better way to think about teachers might be as force multipliers. There are parts of teaching that can be relegated to technology, but there are other (arguably more important) parts that probably can't or won't be for a long time, and KA seems like a great way to free up those resources for uses that are most effective.
I spent four years in the military and can tell you that there's a lot of waste there. Your last sentence could very easily be applied to the military, or at least to military personnel.
I'd love to reduce spending in the military as well. If a manufacturer of military robots said "we aren't trying to replace soldiers", my first question would be "why not?"
from your post above:
>and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].
that means anywhere between cutting 16% of cost while maintaining the same educational result and increasing the educational result by 16% while maintaining the same cost. I'd argue that in modern world (i mean today and the next 30 years at least) increasing the educational result would be much more important than cutting the cost.
A model I'd like to see attempted - 2 hours of lecture (video) + 1 hour of recitation (human supervised), in lieu of 3 hours of lecture+recitation by a human. Now a single human can teach 3x more classes. That's a massive reduction in costs, but I don't see how it can significantly increase educational outcomes.
There is one caveat - I expect lecture quality would improve a bit. If only the best teachers record videos, then lecture quality will be better than average. By definition, human-delivered lectures can only be average.
I really like Khan's model of doing lectures/learning at home -- and using the classroom time for exercises // with the teacher (or other students) mentoring those who are stuck on a problem set.
It's unclear to me that even a 1/3 reduction in lecture time is sufficient. I'd like to fundamentally change education so the teachers are really mentors and facilitators of learning and activities. Lecturing can be done via video almost exclusively -- at least for those topics where video lectures make sense.
That's an incredibly misleading claim. Consider this graph:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html
So we see that funding for public k-12 is roughly the same as defense, but let's consider the funding sources. IIRC, defense spending is funded solely by the federal government, whereas public school spending is sourced from federal, state, and local-- property taxes taking a big chunk out of it.
So if we compare apples to apples-- which is federal spending between the two, we see a very wide disparity. This of course is exacerbated by the military occupations currently taking place by the US gov't.
I could also argue how spending in education will have a better effect on GDP relative to defense spending, but I'm a little tired of googling things.
[edit] Here's a much clearer picture of the spending distribution: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...
Compare edu to defense and you'll see my point.
Now, as for my numbers: 2007, $972B total, the government portion of it was $809B. If you restrict to K-12, it is indeed slightly less than the military ($493B vs $653B). Government expenditures on education are still $150B more than the military as of 2007, the year I originally cited (including higher education and "education not definable by level").
For 2009 (the last year for which full data is available), the gap between government spending on the military and education is $50B (in favor of education).
Regardless of whether spending on education is better for GDP than defense spending, it would be better still to provide the same education for less money. When you spend this much money, small gains multiplied systemwide yield huge gains. A 1% increase in efficiency saves you $8.5B in gov spending and $9.7B in total spending.
Or, to put it another way, every teacher we replace saves $50-150k/year directly and removes a massive unfunded liability (their pension/future health care costs) from the government balance sheet. If Khan Academy isn't ambitious enough to try to do this, hopefully someone will step up and do so.
Who looks after the children?
If parents are working then, even if children are learning through a computerised system, children still need to be cared for.
Are you going to do away with teaching staff altogether? So no one to monitor and encourage the students, to watch that they're not going lord-of-the-flies and building a bonfire out of the learning terminals or are you going to mandate that parents look after their kids and take responsibility for what is currently [often] school based learning.
Don't get me wrong, teachers are not solely childcare professionals. But, children still need care without teachers.
Presumably non-teaching child care staff in a school like environment still need to be paid wages and pensions and have their health costs paid - did you account for that in your savings?
Are you planning on Khan Academy sorting out emotional education, social education, etc. too?
Is it your assertion that with 16% less adult supervision (to borrow a number from my first post), schools would degenerate into "lord of the flies"?
If anything, I expect the situation would improve. Rather than having 1 teacher trying to do double duty (lecture and impose discipline), we could have cheaper discipline-only employees handle the discipline side and leave the lecturing to Khan.
It sounds like you're planning on having a "person with a big stick" in a room of 35 kids playing a video on a screen. Or possibly in a room of 35 computers with kids at each one.
For sure, have a room of 1000 computers and one person with a machine gun ... sorted!??
What I want to know is how you're integrating Khan Academy (or similar) use into a pupils learning experience - eg give them a terminal to interact with for all their learning?
Also he seemed to be suggesting that we get rid of people in the role of teachers and have some form of child/youth minder. What's their actual role, what setting are they working in, how do they relate to the kids, are we shouldering kids/youth with the entire responsibility for their own education, is this the ultimate pupil-led learning or something else?
Preventing violence and hooliganism.
what setting are they working in,
The video lecture portion of the educational experience.
are we shouldering kids/youth with the entire responsibility for their own education,
In another post I suggested a model of 2 hours of video lecture, 1 hour of recitation with a human teacher. Thus, you allow 1 teacher to do the work of 3. The youth police would devote their full attention to overseeing the video lecture area and preventing hooliganism (as opposed to 50% on police work, 50% lecturing like a traditional teacher). Thus, the youth police would be lower skilled (and hence cheaper) and we would probably need fewer of them than teachers.
This is one possible model. I'm sure if you devoted 30 seconds of thought to it, you could come up with other possible ways (not just straw men) of doing it. I'm not proposing a solution, I'm asking why Khan Academy isn't trying to come up with one.
>"I'm not proposing a solution"
It pretty much sounds like you are, just a partial one.
The problem as I see it in implementing such a system is that basically you have to experiment with a whole load of people and if the experiment doesn't work then it's "oh dear we messed up your education, nevermind there are plenty more people to experiment on".
The least impacting way to trial this that I can think of would possibly be in a situation similar to that in Australia where some kids/youth in the interior belong to "schools of the air" and interact with teachers by webcam (eg http://www.emerge.net.au/~kalsota/information.htm, http://www.outbackwriter.com/education.htm). Having kids able to use video lectures to supplement in this sort of scenario seems less impacting and more easily trialled as the kids are using a computer in a similar way already - perhaps they've been doing such a thing, not sure. What is different about schools of the air is that they appear to be largely home-tutoring with support.
It's an amusing mental image, but let's be honest with ourselves. If the system is intended to prevent the students from going lord-of-the-flies, it's already failed. School systems don't even reliably stop students from engaging in outright physical violence on each other on a regular basis.
It makes sense to say we as a nation spend $XXX billion on defense because there's a central organization deciding how it's allocated.
It makes less sense to look at the total for education because each district largely gets paid out of its own property taxes - influenced by demographics, by the regulations of different states, and by the disparity in real-estate prices.
In some states, the great bulk of government expenditures for schooling come from the state budget, and the state budgets rely on other forms of taxation besides property taxes. It has been that way in my state since the 1970s, when I was still in K-12 schooling. All states have some funding of government-operated schools by state taxes and all states receive federal government expenditures for their school systems.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
But doesn't my point still stand? If each state has its own byzantine policies for paying for schools, it makes no sense to say the US spends $X on education. All you can say is that the federal govt spends x, california spends y, and so on.
Depends on what level you are talking about. There is close to zero advantage to having a lecturer explain first year calculus to 450 students. That practice should be eliminated immediately and replaced with Khan (or Khan like technology).
It's embarrassing how many higher level education institutions haven't cracked that part of the puzzle. Save the budget and populate the Math Labs with (reasonably paid) Grad Students where the students are doing exercises, instead of paying (a typically horrible at presentations) mathematics professor to "Teach".
Why? Schools work the way that they do because it is convenient. They ignore the needs of the bright (most of whom are bored out of their minds) and those who need some more help. We push kids through school, use outdated, repressive discipline to keep them in control, and spend alot of money in the process.
Education hasn't always been this way -- in rural areas as late as the 1950's 1 room schools taught K-12 successfully -- with one or two adults. How? The kids taught each other.
I could think of nothing more rewarding (for teachers and students) than designing schools to be institutions where kids actually enjoy learning. I don't think staffing needs would be reduced as much as one may think. It will by necessity shrink somewhat, total teacher compensation is growing beyond the ability of many communities ability to pay.
"at first, the workers were scared their job were being replaced with automation, then they realized somebody had to run and fix the automatons"
(There's a cartoon to the same point someplace, but I couldn't find it.)
Is it any wonder that the modern educational system, modeled on mass manufacturing techniques, is about to undergo the same kind of "manufacturing" revolution? The problem in the original model, of children as machined goods, is that children are participants in their own learning/building. With a car, you just weld here, screw here, paint this, hammer that. With a child, you show, you tell, you hand hold, you do all that, but in the end it's millions of years of evolution driving a self-organizing pattern recognition cognitive system that needs to do what it does best. You can't shape a mind like you shape a door frame.
Many also call it "the future of education" in a vein that it's meant to replace parts of the educational system.
I think Khan Academy is going to do wonders for the American K-12, if teachers are made aware of its advantages.