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Comment by maxjaderberg | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 ?

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