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Comment by ajays | Hacker News Reader

"First, Khan has never lectured." "Second, Khan has never taught."

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.

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This was exactly what came to my mind too. No professors that I know of were taught how to lecture, they just got thrown in and did it. When I've TA'd, I've totally winged it. What Khan does is no different, but at least he does it with charisma.

I remember winging teaching as a TA. After 10+ years I know I stunk, no offense.

I know dropping newly-learnt and vaguely-understood words loosely is generally a bad habit for people on Hacker News, but also consider the concept of pseudoteaching[1].

[1]: https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-...

Yes, but Khan academy also provides exercises to test your undestanding of the material, so I don't think it falls into this category.

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.

A cursory glance in Practice only shows maths-related exercises.

I haven't used the exercises, so it's perfectly possible that I missed something.

Gotta start somewhere. The website's only been around for less than a year.

Oh c'mon. Maths is the easy way to assess if someone's understood something. If it's equal to the result, it's correct. If it isn't, with the regular type of testing, it's going to be wrong. There are also other maths skill gauges to look into, but for now, Khan Academy sticks to a certain format.

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.

What? I'm just saying they haven't gotten there yet, so there's no use trying to evaluate whether Khan Academy will work on more subjective areas of learning.

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.

>I got rave reviews from students.

How many of them did you fail?

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