Khan Academy: the bad
inperc.com
inperc.com
Odd, because I'm pretty damned sure that through his lectures, he has taught me a good deal of basic chemistry.
Results are the only thing that matters. If and only if people find Khan's material valuable, it will become popular. Guess what? It's pretty damned popular.
Also:
> What do you expect from a good lecture? Depth,
> insight, introspective. It shouldn’t be just
> regurgitated material from a textbook and it
> shouldn’t be a “how-to” manual on tape.
If the courses were filled with "insights" and other off topic things I'd find myself fast forwarding all the time.
I think this is a prime example of how having no domain knowledge actually can help a lot and free you from years of this-is-how-it's-always-been-done.
Sure he doesn't go off on tangents about work he did as a grad student in some tenuously related topic two decades ago, but I consider that a win and unrelated to "Depth, insight, introspective"
But offering a deeper understanding really is quite valuable to (some) students - even to some students who would not otherwise seek out this understanding. There are perhaps too few good teachers, or good students, to make this work at scale; but education can be more than transferring a list of facts and tricks from a textbook into a student.
Khan Academy is a system that lets us set a baseline and then incrementally improve from there. If this "deeper understanding" can be conveyed in lecture form, it seems inevitable that as the lectures improve, some of them will impart "deeper understanding". Or maybe they'll just add an extra "deeper understanding" course in addition to the current ones.
This is such BS. When I came to the US on an assistantship, I was assigned to TA an intro to programming course. The problems were: a) I didn't have an undergrad degree in computer science, having taken only 1 course in programming (officially), b) I had never taught, c) my degree was from India, and here I was in a different education system in a different country.
But you know what? I got rave reviews from students.
It doesn't matter whether you've taught or not. What matters is how well you can explain the subject at hand, and how passionate and patient you are.
[1]: https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-...
Also, Sal doesn't write the exercises and the people that write the exercises don't use Sal's videos exclusively as far as what to put in a module. There are videos with no specific exercises and modules that cover multiple videos and bits that are left out of video that use the same techniques.
So, student can see if they really understood the concepts or just thought they did.
I haven't used the exercises, so it's perfectly possible that I missed something.
As far as maths is concerned, Khan Academy is a great educational tool. But "maybe eventually" can't exempt it of concerns in the other regards, like what has been argued.
We are giving the OP a lot of flack and singing the highest praises of Khan Academy while doing it. The critics might as well deserve the benefit of the doubt as well as Khan Academy.
Just for the sake of summing up the comment branch, pseudolearning is a factor to consider - with ajays's anecdotal evidence as well as Khan Academy. Khan Academy's tests also serve as tests for Khan Academy's didactic merit. And so far, we can only assess the merit of the maths material.
I do see maths as being the easiest subject to use this method with and only time will tell if it can be extended successfully to more subjective subjects.
How many of them did you fail?
I think Salman Khan's biggest point in the talk seems to address this guy's complaint. He's not aiming to replace the teacher, he's aiming to replace the lecture. Students go home, watch his videos at whatever pace suits them, and then they go to school and have the really important interaction with the teacher and other students, which can also happen at the student's desired pace.
But I think the implicit point in the article is that using Khan Academy in a school classroom is just one use case and that Khan Academy should still be useful for people who want to use it but don't have a teacher to talk to the next day about questions. And that's a difficult issue; while changing the education system is American public schools is amazing and all, the real humanitarian benefits to the site is that it can bring education to people who don't have access to other forms of education, and I have to agree that, as is, it doesn't handle that case spectacularly. I trust that it is on their minds and planned at some point, though (maybe though a better Q&A interface or something).
The fact that you can assign a lecture as homework is amazing, it totally changes the dynamic of what you can do in a classroom. That being said, these tools they're developing seem useful only because they track student engagement with lectures and problem set success rates.
i always thought (and dreamed) that the future would be a better textbook, something really humane and well designed, but this (for lack of a better word) paradigm shift makes a textbook more like a learning journal rather than an immobile one-size fits all beast.
If you watch his (excellent) TED talk [1], you'll see that his organization isn't just about video lectures, but rather an all-encompassing suite of tools that allows students to learn at their own pace, repeat lessons that they didn't understand at first, and provides teachers with analytics to target their attention towards those students who need help.
- Shows how the work was done in a step by step manner
- Cuts the subjects up into short, easily digestible chunks
(note that both of these could be attributed to the medium, as screencasts require showing nearly everything unless you want to edit heavily, and YouTube has a length limitation)
The poster's points are valid - Khan's videos exist pretty much in a vaccum, and having no active feedback means that people who don't get a concept are sunk.
That said, there are solutions - I could imagine a teacher assigning "Watch videos 1-3 on subject X" to a class, then in the class sessions students would have to demonstrate competency and could get help.
I don't know anyone who thinks that Khan's work is the end-all solution to teaching problems.
In fact, this is exactly how Khan advocates that his site be integrated into existing education.
My experience is that they prefer the lecture/test format. It allows them to slack off. A couple of days before the test they will study. The prefer to go through this cycle 4 or 5 times a semester than to continually have to work.
Your particular failure to successfully implement an idea doesn't indicate a flaw in the idea as a whole.
Between tests a student can slack off for a couple of weeks. Then spend a week catching. Going to the math center or talking to a tutor. They take the test and then repeat the cycle. Most teachers give practice tests and for the most part it's obvious which type of problems are on the test. Just need to learn those types of problems. The material covered in the class is much more than the few problem types covered on the on the test.
Obviously my particular failure doesn't indicate anything. That's why I wrote:
"My experience is...."
The flaw is that when students don't watch the video it can't be hidden in class. When doing group problems or in when discussion occur it's clear they are lost. It's cleat that the work wasn't done. It's this embarrassment - the confrontation with the reality that they didn't do the work - that is upsetting to them. It causes problems and is a great pain to deal with.
I believe that the format proposed only works with motivated students. My belief might be wrong. I don't think it is.
In fact, I did this a couple weeks ago myself for a course in which I had no particular interest and yet was forced to take as a graduate student, doing the minimum amount of studying necessary to be reasonably certain I would get an A (spending my nights and weekends hacking instead of studying archeology).
The wider problem then, I suspect, is people studying things they aren't all that interested in, which encourages procrastination and cramming. This may be a necessary feature of any sort of broad curriculum -- people should show competency in areas even if they don't have a particular interest in them. If so, then this does indicate "a flaw in the idea," insofar as the presumed idea will not work across a large spectrum of people and thus may not be implementable at the collegiate level.
That said, you could theoretically modify it to have more frequent gradable quizzes on the lectures that people are supposed to watching at home, forcing them to watch them at the assigned times instead of attempting to assimilate the information at the last minute before the test.
I'm bad at motivating people. I suspect that to be a great teacher one should be great at motivating people. Knowledge of the subject isn't as important as I once thought it was.
What is a problem now is that there is no current mechanism for the self motivated to use Khan Academy or MIT's open courseware and get credit for it.
I have no explanation for the split personality these students show. Theories, anyone?
One hypothesis is it's the energy between students and professor: Ones with higher energy in the class make change faster. In order to keep up, you have to think and do faster.
Then I've been in classrooms where the professor did not want to be there. He knew it, the students knew it, and the interactions cemented it. The 'energy' was completely in the shitter. At best, it was rote memorisation and drudge work. Big surprise: most of the class slacked off and cheated, and did the 12 hour cram before tests.
There is the 3rd category: in which the professor cares, but the student had to take this class for one reason or another. The general idea here is the student only minimally cares. I've seen this, where the student says to others "I dont care as long as I get a C." I'm guessing these are the most infuriating to professors.
So if I were teaching, say, a math class, and I wanted to use Sal Khan's videos for the lecture content, here's what I would want to do:
1. Have less class time. They're watching videos outside of class, so it all balances out, and makes the videos seem like a more legitimate part of the class.
2. Let the students know that, if they just cram before tests and don't watch the videos, they'll probably flunk. Contrariwise, if they keep up with the work, they should do just fine, and if they're having trouble, I'm happy to help.
3. Keep grading standards high enough that the preceding statement is true.
4. Have the first test be difficult but not weighted heavily, as an official kick in the pants to stir laggards from their lethargy.
I think this would go a long way toward creating the right mind-set in students, if it's matched with the corresponding respect from the teacher.
I like math, I worked hard, paid attention and learned as much as I could.
I wasn't nearly as interested in what was taught in my English classes, so I did everything at the last minute, and did just enough to get the grade I wanted.
I think past 10th grade or so, the value of forcing a wide liberal arts education on people declines significantly.
However, for me, the issue isn't the desire to slack off. Instead the problem is that I'm taking a bunch of other classes. I find it quite difficult to slice up my subjects into small pieces that I work on each day. So, I tend to get things done in a serial manner, and my natural lack of organization means that the priority usually depends on how soon the work is due. The result is that I often don't study or finish a problem set until just before the due date or test day.
(Meta: I'm disappointed you're getting voted down for sharing your real world experience. That's bullshit in my book.)
edit: grammar
There is also the problem - at my institution - with a large percentage of students not being interested in learning. They are there for the degree, the piece of paper. It's an economic reality that they need this paper for a better life But still, to get it, one does have to learn and learning is not easy for a lot of people. It requires work and the payoff isn't immediate.
I don't know what can be done. I have my own version of Khan videos. I have video book, if you will, and I've tried several times to get students to watch the videos at home and concentrate on problem solving in class. It just doesn't work for me and I suspect there are fundamental problems with the idea.
Did you have pop quizzes or anything to test their knowledge of the videos? As non-students, we think of a "watch-this-video" assignment as being really easy and something that surely everyone will do, but to students they probably interpret such an assignment as "it's-not-important-that-I-do-this," and thus don't waste their time unless they're particularly driven or bored. But I wonder if somehow quickly testing their knowledge on the subject in the videos could completely turn that structure on its head.
Also in a lecture room you cant participate in the lecture 40 times so you really understand... unless you record the lecture, but in the khan academy.. if you need to watch a video 300 times.. goahead
Salman Khan is not an insider, and therefore I reject his attempts at disruptive innovation.
OP is an insider, and therefore I reject his criticism of an outsider.
Umm - Millions of people are learning. I'd say the good >>> the bad.
Khan has never lectured? So what? I know plenty of people who have lectured every day for decades and they're still no good at it. It doesn't seem like (professional) experience lecturing is necessary to be an effective teacher.
Khan has never taught, so he hasn't needed to deal with the difficulties of the classroom? Yes, and to think that's a problem is to deny the premise of The Khan Academy - that if people are allowed to learn autonomously, the problems of the classroom go away. That argument basically reduces to "No, they don't". That's hardly reasoned.
For me the greatest benefit of The Khan Academy is the fact that Khan is a great teacher. We know there are teachers who are more engaging and stimulating than their peers and we know there's very few of them. I see The Khan Academy as an exercise in scaling great teaching. The institutional effects are very interesting and important, but secondary to me.
If you want to actually improve the education kids are getting, there are a huge number of moving parts you have to address. In this sense, as a classroom implementation tool, Khan is just getting started. There's nothing to judge yet!
I've spoken with them a bit, and they're still trying to decide on the direction they want to take, how much they want to get involved in what they call "change management" in the classroom, i.e. making sure the tool gets used effectively. In my opinion, this is essential, but it takes manpower, and that's not something they can offer for free.
Of course, that requires having an understanding of how such a tool should be used, and as has been said, they're not teachers. The importance of them not having any classroom educational expertise is that they don't actually have a clear idea of how the tool would be used effectively. I work as an on-site PD specialist for Reasoning Mind, my job is to help teachers use this kind of technology. Khan learned a lot from their pilot in Los Altos, but they weren't being used as the primary curriculum there.
They're looking to be a full curriculum, what they call a "textbook replacement system". Doing that kind of thing effectively in communities that aren't as well-off (economically and teacher-quality-wise) as Los Altos is really, really hard. It takes a huge amount of work on the "change mgmt" side, high quality material, a ton of training for the teachers in the new classroom paradigm. This isn't the first foray into 100% differentiated classrooms, it's just the first one to go viral.
In sum, take a step back guys. Give them a chance to grow into a mature organization.
But when I look behind this little logical error, I find a quite valuable analysis. Before I really thought K.A. might be the "university killer". Now I see it more as opening up the spectrum of ways, we can teach and learn.
The Academy has already started a revolution in education. Wouldn't it benefit from more/better instructors, better production values, etc?
Also, I'd love to see Khan Academy-sponsored videos on the humanities. Of course, I'm not sure how liberal arts content could fit into the automated testing of the new exercise dashboard.
And then there's the part where he doesn't realize that Khan Academy is supplemental, and not a replacement.
To cover all topics of high school and college curricula doesn't necessarily mean supplanting high school and college or redefining education. If that is the case, I think the OP has a point. I don't think it is the case, though. No reason to worry.
That's what his guided exercises are for http://www.khanacademy.org/exercises?exid=linear_equations_1
Teaching is roughly the same as it was 50 years ago. We're yet to harness the power of computational revolution and Khan Academy shows the way.
It isn't meant to replace a top quality teacher at a highly selective institution teaching an elite group of students. It's intended to make decent education available on a large scale and accessible to learners in highly diverse and non-traditional situations, e.g. home schoolers, adult learners, and intellectually gifted individuals.
It still suffers from many of the issues that the factory model has because it is still the factory model - just different and hopefully improved.