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.