
Parody Critiques Popular Khan Academy Videos - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/parody-critiques-popular-khan-academy-videos/37543?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
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duopixel
I do agree with some of the issues presented here. Khan teaches you how to
solve many math problems, but he rarely mentions _how you could use it in real
life_. But if you go to the Q&A section you will rarely see this brought up.

I do find it appalling that their approach is _making a parody video_ instead
of presenting a better solution. Instead of wasting their time—and mine—
making fun of Khan, it would have been immensely more useful presenting a
video of _how_ their approach is better.

This is something I love about the development community (even though I'm not
a developer myself). If someone thinks he has a better solution to your
problem he sends a pull request and boom: the better solutions are often
obvious.

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jgrahamc
If you sit and watch the video itself it's a very mild form of parody. They
are actually commenting on the presentation given by the Khan Academy video
and their comments make clear how they believe multiplication of negative
numbers should be taught.

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s_henry_paulson
That, plus it's a way to get attention.

A mild critique written up in a small corner of the internet is likely never
to be seen by most.

Any publicity is good publicity, and I think these individuals definitely want
to help.

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schiffern
FTA:

>Salman Khan, uses positive and negative signs inconsistently and mixes up
transitive and associative properties.

Oh, the irony: Khan actually confused the _commutative_ and transitive
properties. The parody video gets it right:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC0MV843_Ng#t=3m14s>

This stuff is hard. To be fair, I don't think Khan is doing any worst than a
first-year teacher in his first class of the day.

Youtube provides annotations – I wonder why KA doesn't insert crowdsourced
corrections the instant a mistake is made? It seems like a good middle ground
between his "write-only" philosophy (which has made him incredibly prolific)
and the legitimate criticisms that quality has suffered as a result. This
video was corrected, but I'm sure there's countless other small mistakes that
could benefit from a change in process, not just a PR band-aid.

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p2e
I think that this is a serious issue. Khan usually just hits record once,
publishes, and never revisits his videos again. By his own admission, he takes
some initial feedback (first few video comments) from his videos but only
applies it to his subsequent lessons not bothering to fix the prior lessons.
This allows him to produce a lot of content, but it can end up doing more harm
than good by keeping a lot of bad lessons out there.

I've seen quite a few of his videos that have had serious problems in them,
20-second long stretches of silence when he's erasing or fixing mistakes, and
places where he talks himself (and the listener) into a circle. I just don't
see why Khan doesn't take the time to fix obvious mistakes/issues in his
videos -- or have someone else do it! Sure, it means more video development
time but it's for the purpose of producing superior lessons and not spreading
misinformation.

Traditional educators revisit topics/lessons and learn from their previous
attempts and from student feedback. This allows future lessons on the same
topic to be more refined and better serve the student. Who honestly believes
they get something right the first time, or doesn't try to improve something
when they, or someone else, identifies an obvious problem?

Khan has an excellent framework in place, but he needs to revisit his content.
Or let someone else do it -- do these videos have less value if someone other
than Khan comes in to fix things up? I'm sure there would be plenty of
volunteers. Obviously the guys in this video had some good insight that could
have helped Khan's video.

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tocomment
My own critique from watching a few videos on Khan Academy is that I hate how
he makes mistakes sometimes and just leaves them in. (And corrects them in the
next video)

I know that's his philosophy. But as someone who's a rules-based learner, it
makes it really hard to learn anything when I start focusing on a mistake and
wondering how does this fit with the general rule, etc.

And beyond that I find it much harder to unlearn something wrong than to learn
the right thing to begin with.

It might be a good philosophy and practical for classroom teaching, but he
needs to use the advantages electronic media offers and do some editing. At
least to remove anything that's really going to throw a student off and
possibly even discourage them.

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kiba
_It might be a good philosophy and practical for classroom teaching, but he
needs to use the advantages electronic media offers and do some editing. At
least to remove anything that's really going to throw a student off and
possibly even discourage them._

Leave the mistake in and then correct it.

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tocomment
I don't understand. Are you disagreeing?

I think leaving the mistake and correcting later is very confusing and
possibly discouraging to students. What is your response to that?

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kiba
_I think leaving the mistake and correcting later is very confusing and
possibly discouraging to students. What is your response to that?_

In the same video, note your mistake and correct it.

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tocomment
That would be better. I think a lot of times he doesn't realize the mistakes
until they've been published. And maybe he has a rule he doesn't re-edit
videos after they've been published?

I just remember getting incredibly frustrated after basically learning the
wrong thing in the first video and then having it corrected in the second.

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p2e
My guess is that he doesn't edit videos after publishing because he likes the
youtube stats?

Maybe youtube isn't the best medium for his videos and he should instead find
an option that allows and easily facilitates future edits.

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d3r42
I went to a government high school in the 90's in South Africa. Experienced
teachers were given early retirement and replaced by younger teachers who,
through a combination of ineptitude and inexperience, struggled to teach.

My grade 10 and 11 maths teacher couldn't factorise polynomials consistently.
She'd often get stuck while halfway through a problem while working on the
blackboard. Euclidian geometry was a challenge, and she failed to communicate
theorem proving techniques. My Grade 12 (final year) maths teacher was
promoted out after 3 months, and replaced by someone who didn't appear in
class regularly.

I went for additional after-school maths tution, and I did very well during
the exams in the topics that were covered there, but unfortunately we couldn't
redo the whole syllabus. So my Higher Grade C for maths, although better than
the majority of students in my school (and the country I guess, which has very
low, and still-dropping educational standards) was disappointing.

We also had serious problems with our science teacher - retired, and replaced
with someone who also never really used to pitch up. My parents bought me
physics videos from the Learning Channel, a video-based system, and I managed
to get an A. Unfortunately their budget didn't stretch far enough to buy the
maths videos as well.

I have watched Khan's videos and I always wish that that sort of service was
around back when I was in school. Yes, I, and most of my friends may have been
deprived of some conceptual understanding, but at least we would have gotten
some teaching. Something is better than nothing, at least for those of us who
don't live in US College towns.

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krupan
I'm reading these comments and I'm seeing these things:

* Khan makes mistakes and just leaves them in.

* Khan doesn't tell you how you could use these things in real life

* He's just using a procedural rule-based approach.

Um, did none of your school teachers ever make those mistakes!?!? Because mine
did, all the time. And I had nowhere else to turn. The beauty of Khan, and all
the other educational videos on youtube, is that you can get a second (or
third or fourth or tenth) opinion on the matter by asking your school teacher
or by doing some more google searching. This is amazingly better than it used
to be.

The great thing about Khan is he's obviously having fun teaching you. He's
laughing and having a good time, he makes little mistakes and he has to
scribble things out or correct himself later, and it's OK. He draws in pretty
colors. What does that convey to a kid? Math can be fun! There are people that
like it! You can like it too! It's OK if you mess up, even the pros do! The
first time my kids watched a Khan video they were simultaneously cracking up
and getting excited about their new-found knowledge. They begged for more. It
was awesome. I wish more teachers taught like Khan.

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surgeterrix
"But the professors say their bigger gripe is with the procedural, rules-based
approach in all of Mr. Khan’s videos."

Well, that's how they teach it in public school, here are the steps, no
explanation of why it works, just accept that it works and memorize the steps.
So if you want to attack teaching the procedure instead of the concept, look
at just about every math teacher in K-12 first.

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jmcqk6
Your problem here is that you are using your own experiences and extrapolating
to the general. You think any math teacher you see teaches like that. This is
not the case. The teachers that have been the loudest critics of Khan tend to
be _really excellent teachers_. You know why? Teachers who teach like you
describe don't care enough about their teaching let alone worry about what
some website is doing.

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jroseattle
//-- sarcasm --//

Wow, fantastic work guys! Your condescending commentary on the methods and
content of the Khan videos is _sooo_ helpful to a bunch of people who have
benefited because of them. I know that my own kids, who augment their math
from school with the Khan videos, really appreciate your mocking sentiment
toward totally free content that has raised their knowledge, acumen and
confidence toward math.

//-- end:sarcasm --//

Seriously, you want to "raise the level of the discussion" with this type of
piss-poor commentary? The only thing you're accomplishing at the moment is
simply re-inforcing the stereotype that traditional education teachers are
threatened by this content.

Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off
your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better
approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise
-- nobody will care.

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jmcqk6
>Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off
your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better
approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise
-- nobody will care.

This is the problem when hacker news tries commenting on Education. Readers
here tend to be wildly ignorant about what's actually going on Education. How
do you know that these teachers aren't doing things? Do you mean, they should
be making a website? What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an
effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the
evidence)?

You see this video and you don't know about the years of criticism that has
been laid against Khan. You don't see the suggestions that have been offered
(and ignored). You don't see these things because you're not a member of that
community. Just like these teachers probably have no idea about what's going
on in the Rails community, you really don't know what's going on in theirs.

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jroseattle
I know what's going on with my own kids and the KA content. Mocking that
content, while producing nothing else as worthy alternative that I can find,
is counter-productive at best and offends me at its worst. If they think
something different is better, why didn't they produce a video that explains
that and then -- better yet -- offer that up as an alternative?

> What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of
> learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

I don't care about criticism of KA, I care about results for my kids. And I
see positive results, so I have my own evidence that's contradictory, I guess.
Given my "wild ignorance" of the education community, that's apparently the
only measure I can use anyway, right?

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peterwwillis
This video is perfect as a Khan Academy parody - they just throw some shit
together, and maybe it isn't very good, but it's better than nothing.

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sanderjd
What is a good non-rules-based approach to teaching why a negative times a
negative is a positive? I've seen a proof-through-absurdity showing that if -1
* -1 = -1, then you can make 0 = 2, and a proof using all three negativity
permutations, and setting two different distributions equal, showing that ab =
(-a)(-b), but the math for both of those approaches seems to be more advanced
than the rule.

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hdevalence
Say that multiplication by -1 is a 180 degree rotation of the number line.
Then -1 * -1 is a 360 degree rotation -- which is the same as a 0 degree
rotation.

Note that saying it like this is non-intuitive, but the point is that it's
actually a geometric interpretation, so you draw a picture. This also helps
students with the idea that there's actually some connection between algebra
and geometry --- even though this is really fundamental, it's often omitted
from mathematics education.

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raldi
I guess this shows that people threatened by Khan Academy are in the midst of
a transition from the "then they laugh at you" phase to the "then they fight
you" one.

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jmcqk6
Raldi, I respect you a lot, but this statement is hardly reflective of what's
been going on. Criticism of Kahn academy, especially by math teachers has been
going on for years, only to be consistently ignored. This is them going 'well,
I'm not being heard any other way, so let's try this.'

The worse part is that you describe this as a fight. It's not a fight, and I
know that those teachers who are most outspoken against khan don't want it to
be a fight. They want a collaboration, but it's not happening. It's really too
bad that any criticism of khan is viewed as coming from the 'what's wrong with
education' side of things. Pedagogically speaking, Khan academy is stuck with
stuff known bad decades ago. Khan academy is like using rocket ships to
transport telegrams. Yeah, the technology is cool, but the teaching practices
need to be there too. That's what's currently missing from Khan academy, and
there has been very little apparent effort on their part to actually fix that.

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raldi
Based on the sarcastic tone and comments of the two people in the video, I
find it hard to believe they have any interest in cooperation. They're going
for the lowest possible form of criticism. They even make fun of the guy's
ethnic name at one point.

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utopkara
While making a parody of Khan's teaching, they have become the parody of being
a critic.

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option_greek
Would it not have been better to create a genuine video on how the concepts
can be explained better instead of making fun of the course videos. Or better
yet, launch a competing site instead of nitpicking.

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Kaffkaff
Never used Khan Academy, but Udacity's been really great

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zerostar07
The more criticism, the better

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NonEUCitizen
Sour grapes.

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bogdand
Haters Gonna Hate!

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kiba
If you want people to learn "problem solving", not just "following the rule to
solve a particular equation", learn programming and apply your mathematical
skill to a programming problem?

