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Comment by perokreco | Hacker News Reader

Khan Academy actually works really well for underachieving students, and especially well for students with learning disabilities. If you watch any of Sal Khan talks, you will see that one of the biggest emphasis of KA is to prevent students from getting stuck and losing interest in a subject. The whole goal is to increase the meaningful time students have to interact with teachers. Having lectures delivered online and then having students actually talk to a teacher and have things explained to them instead of sitting and listening to a one size fits all lecture works much better.

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If KA wants to be a nonprofit and do good, thats great. Charity is a good thing.

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.

Are you familiar with the school trials that they're doing ? - essentially giving the videos as homework and spending the class time with teacher helping the kids with problems they had with understanding. Their performance metrics are also miles ahead of everything else.

(fyi they are a non-profit)

selection bias? Is KA randomly selecting these schools for their trials? Or is it a convenience sample? In that case the schools that elect to work with KA are not likely to be typical American schools.

Atm the schools come to KA not the other way around and KA itself does sommerschools.

Here you'll find all you need: http://www.khanacademy.org/#khan-academy-related-talks-and-i...

They are still a subset of American schools.. if KA wins an A/B test wiher both A and B are at those schools, it is still a win. But the control had better be the same school!

Can't find the link at the moment, but this is incorrect. The first results that came out of the initial trial showed no significant improvement in student performance using KA's approach compared to the traditional approach.

Edit: here is the link http://blendmylearning.com/2011/08/31/the-results/

This is a very promising result - apparently Khan is roughly as good as a traditional teacher provided a teacher is in the room. Now the important question is to figure out how much of the teacher can be done away with.

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.

I don't think that's the way to approach this. Replacing teachers with videos isn't going to make education better -- in fact, I'd argue it would make it worse.

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.

Replacing teachers with videos isn't going to make education better -- in fact, I'd argue it would make it worse.

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.

> 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.

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?

You're link implies that had the study done in a better way, it would have also shown the khan students imrpovement in pre-algebra , while not so for the control group , and were much more efficient in learning algebra:

""" 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.

I didn't actually mean the kids performed better, I meant that the data and analytics about performance were better than anything else

I'm not sure what your alternative to a "startup" is, a lobby group or advocacy group? Should Khan, Resig and the others quit and become teachers in the school system or work for Obama?

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.

I think Khan should be a teacher at least for a year. He would realize his stuff is a great for those students who already have access to good mentors (parents, teachers). But for those students with parents who don't value education and are stuck in bad schools, these students need a good teacher not video lectures. My point is that let's not pretend KA addresses the fundamental problem in Ed.

Ah, and here is where you and I differ quite substantially in our opinions. Schools, school boards, books, and basically everything but parents and the quality of their parenting, comprise "education" to me, at least the "education" which society should tackle when they talk about education.

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 think the notion that the fundamental problem is that "smart" people don't want to be teachers is wrong. I think the real problem is that education simply, for lack of a better way to phrase it, has become more about careerism and a "hustle" than teaching anybody anything useful.Especially anything that's financially worth the costs involved. The "smart" teachers who don't like this eventually just throw in the towel and accept it, or are marginalized. The other "smart" ones who have no problem with this arrangement simply enjoy the ride and accept it as "life".

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.

So, KA as the Mozilla Firefox to Big Education's IE6?

KA does not solve the fundamental problem that smart people dont want to become teachers

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.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

KA only replaces teachers if it is competing to serve a need already filled. KA is far more impactful in filling a need that is NOT already being met for its population.

The biggest problem in education is that it doesn't scale well. Individual attention might be "best" but it requires access to a great instructor who can tailor instruction to the student. Sub-optimal teaching methods (like KA) take a different approach. It might not be the "best" way to teach an individual, but it might be the "best" way to teach a large group of people.

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