Khan Academy Competitor? Alison.com founder on the future of Online Ed | Hacker News Reader

Khan Academy Competitor? Alison.com founder on the future of Online Ed

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40 pointsdaviday21 comments

The whole site feels really cheap. I closed it at first because I thought I typed the URL in incorrectly and had landed on a parked domain.

The best thing about Khan Academy is its personality, which makes the learning very accessible. It's a no bullshit content delivery system, but this feels like it's straight out of Generic Corporate Designer™.

Also, if you want a clickable url: http://alison.com

I agree with you on the site's looks, very uninviting... And that damn animated button in the right corner drives me crazy.

I went to the site and it was virtually empty. A split second later I realized I had AdBlock Plus on. I disabled it and what I've seen looked like a spam site. I think the comparison with Khan Academy is extremely unjustified here.

I agree the comparison is unjustified. What makes Khan Academy so good is the quality of Khan's explanations and teaching on the videos.

I actually want to see an educational process/technique that produces content, even half as good as Khan Academy, repeatably.

My question has always been - will Khan Academy lose relevance after Sal Khan ? Or is there a recipe that allows the creation of more Khan Academys.

My question has always been - will Khan Academy lose relevance outside Sal Khan? He can't be an expert in everything. In order to scale, I'd expect that he'd have to be able to pick people who are great teachers and also domain experts.

And he's not an expert in 90% of the things he teaches. He's just quite good at understanding things quickly and explaining it to others, like Feynman was. Being called Khan Academy is apropro, it's mostly about his teaching and he is irreplaceable. Fortunately, video lives forever and most of the subjects are not transient.

Feynman only taught physics. Sal Khan teaches maths, astrophysics, economics, history, etc etc...

The potential for misinformation from someone who is teaching a subject that they are not an expert in, and have just "understood it quickly" is quite worrying. he has been criticised on this before, see http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=2029

Economics is a lot like maths, and there is crossover so it's no surprise that he is good at both. But History is a different kind of subject.

If he is really irreplaceable, then there are severe limits on it. I hope and expect that even if Sal Khan is a trailblazer, others can do follow his example.

I've learned about a lot more than physics from Feynman. I also see little evidence that classes are taught by experts in their subject matter except at the university level, and even then only rarely.

But let's post a link to Khan's comments/rebuttals to the claims of the NAS article you cited.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2633796

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634324

exactly - "outside" the same question as "after". Sal Khan is one of the best educators out there, without a question. But how do you scale it up ?

Get non-domain expert, smart teachers to study and try to teach a subject ?

Non-free content? A scrolling marquee and pulsating Join Now buttons? And calling your well established and much-loved competition 'buzz-heavy'.. yeah right. This isn't going anywhere.

If anyone is interested in a less corporate, more fun version of Alison, I started Curious Reef a while back. It's a social learning website.

For an example of someone actually learning something, here's a post by someone who just finished the MIT 6.00 Intro to Comp Sci class on Curious Reef: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

It looks corporate and soulless - not fun at all.

This is the polar opposite of what the Khan Academy is all about: reducing barriers, open transfer of knowledge, transparency, no middle men.

This article seems to be an ad for this guy's product, which is non-accredited college degrees from an online school. There's a lot of organizations doing online degrees, this is not very unique.

The comparisons to Khan are bizarre.

I am happy to see innovation happening in how people get 'an education'. As usual, some of the most interesting stuff is being done by people outside the established providers (cf. The Innovator's Dilemma).

It's interesting - Khan Academy has such massive following, but from a technology standpoint I've seen much cooler stuff... www.smart.fm comes to mind.

Sometimes, clear and intuitive explanations can go a lot farther than technology.

how can they win UNESCO award. Besides design, they are only promoting there diploma courses(paid) everywhere.

Khan Academy provides an easy way to download content for later offline viewing. This site, however, seems to try to do the exact opposite!

Using flash to restrict consumption and bugging users with registration offers is not a better way to learn.

Competing in what? They don't offer the same courses!

Alison has stuff like "personal development", "touch typing" and even adobe products and a bit of Mathematics and Science, while Khan Academy is mostly Math and Economics in detail.

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