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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

That is a poor way to quantify the quality of an educational product. While quality can and sometimes does drive demand for a product it's frequently possible for demand to be driven instead by fads, trends, and hype.

If you want to measure the quality of something there are far more reliable metrics to use than demand.

With that said I like Kahn Academy. This is a single issue in a large body of educational materials. This one problem doesn't mean the qualify of the full product is bad just that is has room for improvement.

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If we assume that students are rational actors making decisions between traditional teaching methods and KA...and we assume that KA, students, and teachers all have the same end goal of teaching the kids the material.

It sure looks like, at an increasing rate, kids are choosing KA. After all they are held most directly accountable for their academic success or failure. Wouldn't demand then be a reasonable gauge of value?

Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. This lack of knowledge is a fundamental problem of markets in education.

Students might say that method A "feels better" or "is more fun" than method B. However, it is entirely possible that method A is worse because, in the end, students will actually not have learned what they would learn with method B.

This is not to say that students' opinions are irrelevant. After all, when students don't enjoy what they're doing, they will often block out the lesson and not learn anything due to the lack of fun.

Still, it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to.

> Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. . . . it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to.

It's easy to recognize good teachers. They are first, understandable and second, motivating. If a teacher is not readily understood, or if they do not motivate the student to learn, then they are not very good. Children as well adults naturally use these metrics to evaluate not just teachers, but communicators in general.

It's easy to evaluate a Teacher by those metrics but that does not guarantee that the content the teacher is teaching is correct or accurate. Thus my point above.

The best way to ensure good content is to ensure smart teachers, which is what these metrics are designed for.

Fractions and decimals are not difficult. I doubt that kids who have been learning math with Khan have problems understanding them. But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem. The lacunae of a smart teacher are easily fixed, unlike the confusion caused by a teacher who doesn't understand the material.

> But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem.

You must realize that this is an incredibly simplistic view of learning? How students learn is an extremely complicated process. While decimals are not difficult, understanding exactly where students struggle with the concept and determining a sequence of learning activities to help them overcome that concept is extremely difficult.

Your assumptions don't account for whether the content being taught is correct or not. Goals and rational actors notwithstanding one of the most relevant metrics here is the correctness of the content being taught and that is something the student is not capable of assessing. As a result student demand is no indicator of quality of the content. It may be an indicator of the quality of the learning experience but that should not be conflated with the quality of the content.

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