

Bill Gates on why the brilliant Khan Academy is a force of social change - DanielRibeiro
http://curiositycounts.com/post/3608748427/bill-gates-on-why-the-brilliant-khan-academy-is-a

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patio11
Teachers have historically resisted attempts to get them out of the business
of pedagogy and curriculum development, which many of them are _manifestly
unsuited for_ , and instead have them concentrate on classroom management,
progress tracking, and _limited_ individualized instruction.

I'm a big fan of that transition taking place, which may involve taking 100
units of work currently done by teachers (i.e. people who are, aspirationally,
highly skilled and highly educated) and replacing it with 40 units of work
done by teacher's aides (semi-skilled labor like, ahem, many teachers in the
status quo), 40 units of work done by teachers (close to the ideal of today's
teachers), and N units of work done by a handful of curriculum experts whose
amortized cost per class taught is rounding error next to the teacher's
salary.

I mean, last year BCC essentially added twenty full time teachers to the US
just by preventing people with masters degrees from preparing for class by
cutting construction paper with scissors and then writing on the construction
paper with markers for more than an hour at a time. That's hideously
inefficient use of resources... and there are still _hundreds of thousands_ of
teachers who do it the bad way.

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T-hawk
> I mean, last year BCC essentially added twenty full time teachers to the US
> just by preventing people with masters degrees from preparing for class by
> cutting construction paper with scissors and then writing on the
> construction paper with markers for more than an hour at a time.

I love the description and love your HN contributions as much as anyone, but
that sounds just a wee bit inflated. I would think BCC purchasers more likely
to use the hours saved as leisure rather than as additional professionally
productive time. You also dismiss the possibility of these teachers finding
another satisfactory program in BCC's hypothetical absence.

(Unless you've already factored out those factors before you arrive at the "20
full time" figure. Then please ignore me.)

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fourspace
My wife and I were discussing tonight the hilarity of the Wisconsin teachers
union situation, about how everyone involved (and screaming) seemingly misses
the point.

If society wants public school, that is a school that is administered and
funded by the government, then by definition you are choosing to have
teachers' salaries decided by politicians and bureaucrats. In order to change
salaries, legislation is required. In order to enact legislation, you have to
form special interest groups (in this case unions) to represent large swaths
of voters, as politicians only listen to votes.

Instead, consider the idea of eliminating public school. With all of the money
back in the public's pockets instead of in government coffers, the public
could choose to fund education in a manner that each individual sees fit.
However, the common argument (and legitimate concern) is that poor people
would be left out. Poor parents who don't have the money to send their kids to
school, let alone GOOD school, are left raising uneducated kids who then end
up poor. The idea that charity would solve this problem is not entirely
unreasonable, but it seems to be a cop out.

This is where I think the Khan Academy has the potential to have a major
impact. With individual teachers teaching small classes, you're required to
have many hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country, leading to an
extremely high production cost for education. If instead you have groups like
the Khan Academy producing educational materials that are easy to consume,
available across a huge breadth and depth of topics and easy to distribute,
the production costs for education go way down.

The reason that poor people can't afford private school is because private
schools are expensive. Using technology allows organizations like the Khan
Academy to produce high quality education at a fraction of the cost. I'd love
to see private schools set up to take advantage of this material and educate
the public without government involvement and its requisite politician
silliness.

~~~
jerf
The other thing that people tend to have a hard time imagining as their
independence has been slowly-but-surely squeezed out of them is that this does
not have to mean that the only other schooling option is a kid alone in front
of their tablet watching Khan's videos at home. Khan's videos are a tool that
can be applied in many ways. Five families can band together to trade off on
who is watching what on what days and share questions and answers, or a day
care organization can use it to bootstrap themselves into an affordable
private school. Online companies can bootstrap into having banks of problems,
using that as the content. And of course it doesn't just have to be Khan doing
this, anybody can.

This doesn't just enable one thing, this and all the things that will happen
enable an amazing multiplicity of ways to approach the problem of teaching.
(And I started to say "teaching children" but even that is being too
specific.)

(This is just one example, there's a lot of others. Too often people think the
choice is "government run service" or "people scrabbling for scraps in the
street as the wolves howl in the distance", but that's not how it works.
Government-run services may not always be a bad idea but they do have a strong
tendency to freeze in The One True Approach for decades after they are no
longer optimal. 19th-century-style schooling's days are numbered, no matter
how much the unions protest in the early 21st.)

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stralep
Completely agree, but I believe that change can come only by example.

Majority of people plays safe. There is nothing wrong in that. If someone can
show them better choice, not by talking, but by creating better private school
for underprivileged kids, they will start sending their kids in such schools.

When some percentage of people accepts that there are more options, I believe
that more intelligent debate will emerge.

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dreamux
Simple access to well indexed/searchable information through the internet was
a very positive and disruptive change to education, but didn't really change
the way education was delivered. I think education-on-demand and open
textbooks are fundamentally going to change _how_ people learn.

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sarahmccrum
It seems that the world would only need a handful of teachers to provide all
the basic (and I mean basic) education anyone ever needs. Then we could all
concentrate on developing our personal potential, individual talents and
performing to the very high levels most of us would be capable of if we could
only have enough time. They say it takes 8,000 hours of anything to become an
expert. That's never going to happen in a modern school with a curriculum
crammed full of obsolete knowledge and subjects. but if we had more experts
around who had more time to teach children, the sky's the limit.

~~~
lotusleaf1987
While I agree with your premise, there are times you have a question or the
teacher's explanation just doesn't click for you. Sometimes you need to be
able to have 1:1 learning, however I'm sure there are a number of solutions to
this problem.

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TGJ
I would think that it should not be too long before Khan like education is
available for every topic sometime in the next 100 years. Once these topics
are available, I see distributing these videos to every child in replacement
of national school. It's probably overly optimistic to think this could happen
without having politicians infecting their ideology into the material but
whatever, it's a dream. I would love to join an organization interested in
doing just this if there was one.

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gcheong
An interesting interview with Salman Khan:

[http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/23-squares/the-math-of-
khan-b...](http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/23-squares/the-math-of-khan-by-par-
parekh/)

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Miserlou57
I'm a big fan of Salman Khan and his videos, but I think what he does can be
done better.

He is a great teacher, and his ideas of watching lectures for homework and
actually working with teachers in class is great.

But, he cannot teach everything. The world is full of fantastic teachers, but
ultimately only the students can recognize who they are. I have recently
launched a simple online platform, organized like a textbook, for the Salman
Khan's of the world to contribute any form of instruction for a given subject
or to ask questions and give answers, ranging in form from Youtube videos to
hand-drawn diagrams, where the community will rate what is good and what is
not. This will filter the mediocre content, and eventually, only the highest-
quality submissions will remain. As an incentive, I have pledged to give every
penny earned via advertising through June to the top 10 highest rated
submissions. I am currently testing the idea with Calculus 1, Physics 1,
Linear Algebra, and Classical Mechanics. I am young, stupid, naive, and have
limited web design skills, and I could really use any kind of help or input
with this, particularly in forming curricula. It is still a work in progress
(in every aspect), and you can see it at ForgetTheTextbook.com

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wrkonce
I never heard about the Khan Academy but as of today I am a fan! I have always
wondered how we can make advancements on education using technology and
especially love the "learn at your own pace" and what you want to learn. I
think this is a fantastic concept and looking forward to the involvement of it

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vannevar
While the Khan Academy is a great resource for teachers, parents, and self-
motivated students, the idea that it is a revolutionary replacement for
schools is a pipe dream. The 'Academy' boils down to a bunch of admittedly
well-done videos and a chatroom. And I'll bet the vast majority of children
who use it are motivated by the desire to do better in their 'real' school.
Kids don't know what they don't know, and simply piling a bunch of videos in
front of them with no guidance is hardly a substitute for our public (or
private) school system. I think what Khan is doing is great, but it's
essentially just a well-executed set of study aids.

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ericxtang
Khan academy is a huge step forward, delivering key concepts in video forms.
However, this approach only goes so far. Human interaction becomes important
when higher-level concepts are introduced. For example, I can't imagine
getting through my O.S course without the help of TAs, office hours, etc.
Recreating that experience on-demand would be the holy grail.

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clu3
what's the name of the software/tool that he(Khan) uses to write ?

~~~
joshstaiger
He used MS Paint for a long time (seriously).

But apparently he's upgraded to something called SmoothDraw3 and a Wacom
Bamboo Tablet.

<http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq#equipment>

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clistctrl
This has been a thought running through my mind for a while. The Khan Academy
is fantastic! I've had a few great teachers/professors in my time, but I still
think of him as the best. I would love to see Rosetta Stone style software
mixed with his lessons.

Personally I was really interested in pursuing opportunities in educational
software a while ago (If changing the world is your goal as an entrepreneur
education is a pretty low hanging fruit) So I went to one of my old teachers.
She has won several awards over the years, and is the kind of person open to
new ideas. I decided to spend a few hours with her to learn how school has
changed, and how we can use technology to make learning better. Going into the
conversation I had the idea of a social network for students/teachers. However
while talking I soon learned that what she really wants, and what would really
help is more data. Students take various assessments, but the tests are fairly
infrequent. In the time between assessments things change for each child, but
the progress of the lesson may not proceed in proportion. It was at this point
I changed my way of thinking. I don't think the most efficient education is
had by retrofitting new technologies into the classic classroom. Instead like
Khan described, the role of the teacher could be shifted to software that
guides a student through learning while tracking their progress, repeating
concepts as needed or advancing difficulty in a very dynamic manner. The
teacher can than transition into a role as a guide, perhaps helping students
learn more offline, helping students find answers to questions etc.

~~~
aik
That's exactly what needs to happen. The teacher as a knowledge spout doesn't
make sense anymore in most places since we can get the knowledge from 100
other sources faster and probably better.

In addition and regards to your assessment point -- I agree assessments still
need to happen, and perhaps even more regularly than now, but there needs to
be a shift in the mindset around the purpose of the assessment. It's common to
think of assessments as the primary method of getting "grade/mark points" and
that's it, however the most beneficial part of assessing are the learning
aspects.

Assessments:

1\. Give the student a chance to use the knowledge they now have and
strengthen it as a result,

2\. Figure out where the student is for the benefit of the "teacher"/"guide"
to better guide the student in further learning and,

3\. Help the student figure out where they are themselves and where they're
struggling and doing well.

