Comment by ahsanhilal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahsanhilal | Hacker News Reader

It is really hard to substitute good teaching for kids K-12 with a video of someone drawing things on a board and explaining it. I work with kids all the time, and I see implementation of Khan Academy in US schools not really working. The only kids it seems to work for are those are personally motivated and are driven hard by parents/guardians to learn.

The MOOC model though does a lot to solve the access to education problem. If there are kids in under-developed countries who are driven to learn, and are able to access to MOOC videos then the potential impact is huge. I have a really good friend of mine implementing this strategy in low-income schools in Pakistan, and the results seem quite mixed. The kids who are driven will learn, whereas, the kids who need more attention and guidance will need a lot more teacher attention. Unfortunately, this seems to be the majority of kids. Teachers in the US also report similar results. Though for society in general it seems a net positive.

The other part of the problem is to engage kids to learn more. Engaging kids to learn is a much harder problem to solve, and possibly the most valuable one. Anyone in the industry who can provide a content network that truly engages and educates kids will gain the most.

On teaching: different people absorb and understand any educational material in different ways. The best teachers have strategies built-up, through experience, to make different kids understand the same concepts. The real technology breakthrough could be when we can pre-empt the strategy required to teach a concept to a particular kid, automate the solution and engage the kid by providing loads of cool ways to play around with the material through immersive experiences.

This is another vague criticism mixed with some general platitudes. The platitudes are totally irrelevant in the context of people criticizing KA approach.

First, if someone is not motivated, be they adults or children they will not learn, especially in a medium like the internet where there is a lot more freedom in when and what to watch and practise. This has nothing to do with KA.

Second, good teaching can never be assumed just because it's done in a classroom setting. The major problem in education is getting good teachers. There is no system in any country where teachers are continuously evaluated and rewarded ( and get fired ) solely on the basis of performance. That is a big mistake. On the internet, real market forces work. ie people watch whichever course they want to watch. That's where KA shines through. He never forced a single kid to watch his short videos. But his viewership is now in the millions.

Khan describes his approach as "flipping the classroom" where kids would watch Khan's lectures at home or during lecture time at school, and then have a teacher who implemented activities and clarified any confusion with the material. I think it's a much preferable approach than one where kids are herded through concepts and tests.

And not only kids. I remember from my univ days (comp sci) we have this algorithm and data structures course. Typical lecture (2 hours) went like this:

-introduce some completely new (for most of the audience) algorithm or a data structure

-start doing advanced analysis of its complexity in various cases (or in case of data structure costs of various operations)

The problem with that is that when you encounter something new you usually need some time to get familiar with it, to play around with it for a while to get intuitive grasp of what that thing is and what properties it has. Without it it's very difficult to follow any advanced analysis because you probably don't even fully understand how the thing works for various inputs/doing various operations. As it was, 75% of the lecture was too difficult to follow for most of the audience which showed (most people zoned out and just mindlessly taking notes).

It would be much better if home assignment before the lecture was to read some theory and maybe try to implement the algorithm/data structure to see what problems you encounter and then you would come to the lecture with specific questions to answer and understanding what may constitute a hard part. This flipping approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's similar to learning by doing: you first get some very basic understanding and then try to do things and learn along. Traditional approach on the other hand is similar to reading several 500p+ books about OOP and Java and not writing a single line of code along the way.

we have a mathematics professor how makes it that way. he once recorded the lecture and now we must look at the videos at home and we must make a cloze but we have to go to the university twice for 3 hours and here we work in groups and he only goes around and looks who needs specific help.

Before I was never good at Mathematics because i would always be stack at that one point and i couldn't ask anyone now i can.

btw: i dont think that moocs can fix the lack of motivation. This is a job for the hole society. Moocs are for people that want to learn something and can't afford it.

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