Khan Academy Gets 5 Million to Expand Faculty & Platform & to Build a School
hackeducation.com
hackeducation.com
The evidence suggests that its individualized instruction in a structured environment with clear expectations that is best -- of course you cannot scale this, but clever videos are no substitute.
The Khan Academy's audience tend to be good students-those who would thrive in any number of environments. Im not worried about these students.
Its the students who might have been great had they been exposed to a better environment that worry me. For this it takes good teachers and a system that attracts them to the field (which the current system does not).
But dont do it as a startup. What they are doing is not revolutionary, but another resource (albiet valuable). KA does not solve the fundamental problem that smart people dont want to become teachers. In time the hype around KA will fade as the problem in ed persist despite its efforts.
The problems in education are structural. Technology cannot revolutionize a government monopoly. The major players have no incentive to change.
I'm a big fan of changing (disrupting, making less relevant) systems from the outside. Maybe KA won't bring about the change you seek, maybe it will take homeschoolers, or the Internet, or society taking advantage of the technology we have so one parent can stay home.
The problem you speak of is a deficient family rearing environment. That can be addressed by programs like The Boys and Girls Club, YMCAs, and similar, but educators should not think it's their responsibility to overcome deficient parenting -- that's dangerous.
I'm mostly referring to middle to highschool (US) and (some) colleges, plus I am not including people who enjoyed the good fortune of an alternative education or being born to an educated parent that happened to be an engineer or something.
I think KA is an opportunity for people to congregate outside all of this chaos, hence slowly bypassing the "major players who have no incentive to change" and experiencing some kind of possible alternative. Hopefully it grows past the sterility of technology into new cultural norms that are beneficial. If not, it can't get any worse.. so who cares.
(fyi they are a non-profit)
Edit: here is the link http://blendmylearning.com/2011/08/31/the-results/
For example, can 1 teacher + Khan educate 80 students as well as 1 teacher without Khan educate 40? Or can we replace the (well paid) teacher with a lower paid day care worker for at least some of that time?
If Khan can reduce the number of teachers required to educate students, that would go a long way towards reducing our out of control spending on education.
There's a great deal of research in the effectiveness of different kinds of physics teaching, for example, and it all shows that the most effective method is interactive. Students often form misconceptions about concepts, and the only way to break those misconceptions is to engage them, have them think about problems, and tailor your explanations to address their confusion.
A video can't do this. Instead, a video could provide the groundwork so that a teacher could spend all his time working with students interactively.
So if you decide to cut down on teachers because of the videos, you're giving up the potential advantages in teaching that the videos would bring.
I can link to a few papers if you're interested.
Why argue? Why not simply test it?
There's a great deal of research in the effectiveness of different kinds of physics teaching, for example, and it all shows that the most effective method is interactive.
A video can't do this. But perhaps 2 hours of video + 1 hour of interaction might be just as good as the 2 hours of lecture + 1 hour of interaction provided by the current system. If so we can cut our teaching expenses by 2/3.
Khan provides a virtually free substitute for some pieces of our current educational system. The trick is to figure which pieces.
This is a big problem - the US spent $864B on government-sponsored education in 2009, more than it spent on the military.
Students often form misconceptions about concepts, and the only way to break those misconceptions is to engage them, have them think about problems, and tailor your explanations to address their confusion.
Khan is attempting to build automated systems that do exactly this.
Okay, but that doesn't improve education, it just makes it cheaper. It would certainly be a useful start; one could invest that money in hiring better-qualified teachers, or even a program where college students come in to do interactive tutoring.
> This is a big problem - the US spent $864B on government-sponsored education in 2009, more than it spent on the military.
How much of this is personnel and salary costs for teachers?
""" It is also interesting to consider that students in the treatment group spent approximately half of the summer working on pre-algebra skills. Because the Khan software is individualized, it identified that most of our students had significant pre-algebra skill gaps and delivered instruction and practice problems to address these deficits. Students in the Khan/treatment group therefore spent up to 50% less time than the control group on the algebra content that the MDTP exam measured. The treatment group, however, still performed at a similar level the control group on the algebra measures. """
Of course this is just an hypothesis, and would need to be tested.
Here you'll find all you need: http://www.khanacademy.org/#khan-academy-related-talks-and-i...
KA is creating a partial substitute for teachers. Instead of creating more teachers, KA is reducing the need for teachers.
You are correct, however, that the 6'th biggest political donor of all time is likely to go to great lengths to avoid being replaced by machines.
Citation, please? I'm reading a very good book about evidence for best practice in education,
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Learning-Synthesis-Meta-Analys...
recommended to me by a candidate in the current school board race in my school district, and I'd like to check what the research says with any source you recommend.
Do you have any evidence for any of other assertions in your comment? I will look it up if you would kindly provide citations.
But have you considered that videos, when dealing with a class of 30 is actually more individual.
A individual student can pause, rewind etc for his own needs. Where as in a class he could not do this. You can't rewind a teacher, if anything the teacher could get angry.
If anything this allows more time for tutoring, rather than lecturing. Allowing the teacher more time for one on one work.
Did you simply forget to add "and I'm stoked that Khan is obviously working to fix school for everyone!"?
That is what I'm seeing.
Be fuckin stoked!
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...
I wonder why people aren't trying to shut this down? Seems like "big education" companies would be making moves to squash the success of KA. Why buy a $300 textbook (like I just had to recently) on Meteorology when you can watch some YouTube videos?
It'll be interesting to see if this starts happening...I hope not, but at some point you have to imagine that bigger, older companies will try to step in.
Mitra has developed and proven a methodology for teaching children in-person using small groups and computers.
Mitra + Khan makes me jump out of my seat.
Here is an incredible introduction to Mitra's work : http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...
As hackers know and as Mitra showed, learning is fun. However it ceases to be fun when one is told what to study and pressured to compete for meaningless grades/scores/badges.
(IIRC, Mitra doesn't assess children directly in the sense of giving them grades.)
Also, now that Khan knows that children will be assessed on his video material, I expect that this will skew his future presentations in a bad way.