alt Hacker NewsOverall, I do agree with the thesis but:
> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?
> Watch a video.
I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.
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Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
Khan Academy is a treasure, and is how I re-learned math in my 20s after not taking it seriously in school. Then moved on to MitX for science [re]fam.
I am having my kids learn math with Kahn academy if we don't have anything better by that point.
Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos.
"Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."
Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea is for the students to watch the videos outside of class and this frees up time for the teachers to provide individual help.
The attacks on Khan here personally irked me.
I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. I still remember watching Sal Khan's videos on calculus after struggling to get any grip on it from my frustratingly uninterested teacher who was forced into the position after our actual teacher retired. After I saw them I came back with a fire in me because for the first time he exposed me to the beauty of calculus.
This guy is completely wrong about Khan not inspiring students to care. Sometimes all students need is to see what caring looks like to ignite it in themselves. You can feel how much he cares just by watching him because the video is the product of all that caring, and he does it for millions of people.
But thank you to this blog author for being brave enough to call out Khan's failures, I am sure it'll help education much more than Khan did.