Sal Khan is MIT's 2012 Commencement speaker
tech.mit.edu
tech.mit.edu
Khan Academy is to OpenCourseWare as a castle is to a small, below ground, flat.
Edit: BTW I wholeheartedly think Kahn Academy is awesome.
Khan Academy material is generally better than a recorded college lecture because it is designed specifically for web video. Even in the good OpenCourseWare lectures, or similar videos from Stanford, at least half the video is wasted time.
I was pretty excited when videos of real classes from respected universities became available online for free. I have watched quite a few from places like MIT and Stanford. One unexpected result I've had is that I have been mostly unimpressed. The lectures were not better than the lectures I went to at the no-name college I attended. My conclusion is that college lectures really aren't an efficient way to disseminate education, and they are even less so when they are recorded on video. I am now much more excited for Khan Academy's expansion into more advanced topics.
I'm curious about how you came to the conclusion that lectures are less efficient when they are recorded on video. It seems to me that (for the student which doesn't speak up and engage the instructor in class -- most students?), that a recorded lecture would provide a near identical experience. I would expect that recorded recorded lectures would also allow students to slow down, decompose, repeat, and revisit portions of the lecture in order to better grasp the information at their own pace.
Is it the issue of not being physically surrounded by students or faced by an instructor that you're not keen on? Perhaps a lack of physical accountability to keep students attentive and on-point?
College lectures, or classroom lectures are non-ideal [1], in an ideal world, each student would have a corresponding teacher. The beauty of technology and Internet is that now we can simulate one-to-one lectures for masses.
[1] There are probably some situations where classroom lectures are better, when the lecture is enhanced by questions via discussion.
What I'd like is something at the MBA curriculum level (e.g. Wharton Finance) or the training programs used to bring physics phds up to speed on finance as quants), and executed well. Unfortunately this is probably considered a proprietary/competitive advantage for these firms, so they won't release it.
MIT’s OCW by contrast is a gold mine.
The two are just aimed at entirely different audiences.
MIT OCW could definitely learn something about design and ease of use from Khan Academy, though.