Other than that: great move.
Furthermore, your opinion of the Biology content may be spot-on, but there are thousands of students who say it's making their lives measurably better. Maybe it would be 100,000 if the content was better; it's hard to know for sure. I'm just not sure that it is directly affecting scale at this point, or that there's not a greater effect on scale trying to get more people to use our existing content.
Disclaimer: I'm the lead designer for KA.
Rather, that's a recipe for stagnation and complacency.
Employee response: "It's good enough/better than even worse options."
That's a poor response, and not what I would expect from a team with the culture to make a great product.
> This is an ongoing falsehood.
> but there are thousands of students who say it's
> making their lives measurably better.
Depending on what you mean by "educators," I might prefer that Khan Academy (and a bajillion different competing providers) offer up content by actual domain experts rather than content by "educators." It is, of course, possible for a person to be both a domain expert in actual fact and a secondary school teacher by occupational category--I've seen Richard Dedekind described as an example, although I'm not sure I'd describe his teaching position as one resembling that of a high school teacher in the United States. But anyway the correct idea that content has to be both factually accurate and appropriate to guide the development of young learners does not constrain content-creation only to persons with the formal credentials of schoolteachers. Many of the best learning materials for young people today were produced by authors who were not K-12 schoolteachers in any stage of their career.
> Depending on what you mean by "educators," I might prefer
> that Khan Academy (and a bajillion different competing
> providers) offer up content by actual domain experts
> rather than content by "educators."
I suspect that they're going to be PhDs and practitioners as opposed to K-12 schoolteachers -- but I really don't give a damn about credentials. There are fantastic high school teachers out there. There are PhDs and masters in their respective fields who are ridiculously bad educators, especially at the level of teaching that KA provides.
I dunno.
I've been studying cell biology on my spare time. I've been using The Molecular Biology of the Cell (http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/d...) that in my opinion is a great book, and as far as I know, is well-respected in general.
Still, watching Sal's biology videos has been of great help. Although I think e.g. his organic chemistry videos are better executed (~10 minutes per video, a bit less packed, better splits by content), I still think that his biology videos are a super-valuable resource. I've been watching some MIT lectures too, but visualizations, which are necessary for biology, aren't properly visible in them. Of the free biology content in the web, Sal's videos are the best IMO.
Beth Harris and Steven Zucker (http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/)
Vi Hart (http://www.youtube.com/user/vihart)
Brit Cruise (http://www.youtube.com/user/ArtOfTheProblem)
Hire teachers, hire experts, hire anyone who either has deep knowledge or experience transferring knowledge. Hopefully both. A doctorate in education, alone, provides neither.
(this comment brought to you by small sample size interactions with real-life Ed.D. dunces)
Education seems to test the wrong things (knowledge, ability at tests, not practical nor personal skills), and changes at glacial speeds (conservative, and aiming for politically motivated outcomes).
> Khan said that they are currently working on a platform
> to make it easier for anyone to add things to KhanAcademy
Not what I find exciting about KA. Educational standards should be enforced, which necessitates the hiring of educators. I'd be disappointed if Khan falls into the good ol' Silicon Valley trap: believing that it's all about technology and platforms.
People saying "they don't hire educators" really mean that they don't hire as many people with Masters degrees in Education, which is known to be one of the degrees that attracts the lowest possible GRE scoring students, and which produces legions of incompetent "teachers" that have created a nation of ignoramuses.
It's a good thing they don't hire more of these folks. They are the ones that have destroyed education in America, why would we want them to have anything to do with Khan Academy?
PS: The Head first series is an example of what happens when you add educators into the mix. They might seem fluffy but they sell well and do teach people surprisingly well. http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/java/059600...
If you are saying that Kathy and Bert are educators because they educate, then I agree, and that was my point in saying that obviously Khan Academy is populated by educators.
PS: Funding is clearly an issue, but there is a long history of education and some extremely valuable lessons have been learned the ridiculously expensive way. Leveraging that history does not take a lot of resources just a willingness to use them.
In general 'educators' generally are not so great.