Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm really starting to believe that these "critiques" of Khan Academy are just teachers and professors terrified of becoming irrelevant.

I try not to ascribe unstated motives to people, but I really wonder at the smell of pedantry and elitism in an article like that.

Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD.

People are logging in to his site to learn things. Khan has created a whole model for learning online that has some people enthusiastic about learning more than they could by sitting in class -- yet the criticism from this article is that the Khan videos aren't ideal in using the latest buzz-wordy techniques approved by academia?

Maybe the authors of the articles/papers could interact with Sal Khan and offer help. Or if the authors really felt strongly about their qualifications vs Khan's, maybe they could offer free online teaching videos that were more "correct".

This type of headline sensationalism designed to take down someone doing a good thing is just sad.

> Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD.

Yes, because when something is popular and free, its got to be good. cough religion anyone cough.

If that is considered to be the measure of quality these days, our society is doomed. Education is an important thing, ignoring it and treating this one man as some "messiah" of education when he clearly introduces wrong and obtrusive concepts for the sake of "getting it out to the masses" is not education.

Besides learning about his project online, I don't have any use of or interest in Khan Academy. There's no religion on my part, just a little disgust that a for-profit company would try to smear KA over minutia.

It would be like if Khan Academy was giving out free meals to homeless people and McDonalds fabricated reports on how the food was unhealthy and used their influence to get the Washington Post to carry the smear and add to it.

wrong and obtrusive concepts

Now who is showing a religious level of bias?

I'm a pragmatist. If something is free that I need, I use it. If something is for-pay that I need and the price is justifiable, I use it. My commercial software architectures often mix proprietary and open source solutions and I don't make excuses for either business model.

One thing about free, you can always get a refund on your investment and you have to really suspect the motives and the character of someone who attacks "free". Not real surprising that the attacker in this case was a for-profit competitor, was it?

I don't know if we are talking about the same article, I'm talking about this one "How well does Khan Academy teach?" by the Michigan University math prof who outlines, in detail, basic concepts like adding decimals and multiplication that are taught at Khan Academy in a way that goes against research.

There is no religious bias, its a difference between a ineffective and wrong way vs. an effective right way. The professor performed no smear against Khan Academy, but the fact he only saw two videos that cause confusion in basic math concepts, it should make one skeptical, especially when someone like you justifies it on the basis of popularity, pragmatism and "minutia".

It seems like you read one article from the Washington Post that wasn't written very well and from that one article, deduce that WP is on some smear campaign. Absurdity of the highest order.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com