

The video lectures at the Khan Academy are terrible. - AndrewDucker
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2332277.html

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kjksf
That's a really shallow criticism of what might just turn out to be the most
significant revolution in teaching in the last century.

Khan Academy is significant because of its scale (they want to systematically
cover all of the basic educational material and they've already covered a
lot), because it's free and because it builds the on-line system to provide a
combination of self-learning and tutoring.

The important thing: do those videos work for students? KA is in very early
stages but the early results show that yes, as imperfect as some guy on the
internet might think they are, they do seem to work. Children learn from them.

Could they be better? Maybe, but existing videos are a solid baseline. When
there was nothing like that, anything was better, so kudos to Sal for doing
the videos. But now that we have a baseline, the standard for making an
improved version is higher: we can't just throw (and implement) random
suggestions like "less repetition", "prepare better for the lectures" or "do
it faster". Given that human psychology is often counter-intuitive, those
"improvements" can actually turn out to be worse at teaching so new ways of
doing things should be tested against current way to see how they affect the
desired final outcome.

In fact, Sal Khan says that the style of his videos (the lecturer is not
visible, you just see a whiteboard and his voice) was incidental and at some
point he thought that it would be better to make them in a more traditional
lecture style i.e. where the lecturer is visible in video.

This sounds like a reasonable idea given that most on-line lecture videos work
that way but it turns out that having lecturer in the video detracts from
learning. It puts the focus on the lecturer and not on the material.

So when people criticize Khan Academy videos and propose various ways of
improving them, we shouldn't just assume that just because an idea for
improvement seems plausible, it'll improve the effectiveness of videos.

Finally, just like in open-source "code speaks better than e-mails", the
criticism would be much more credible if he re-did at least one of the videos
in a style he thinks is better and let us judge based on that.

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us
I don't think they're all bad, but they are slow. I do have gripes with some
of the VC and investments vids. Having built and sold a startup, I know first
hand that some of these concepts aren't just over simplify but some are just
dead wrong or severely lacking information that could have easily been
included. Of course, Khan was a hedge fund manager but never actually built a
scalable startup or was an investor so I can't really fault him entirely since
books aren't the greatest coverage in this area.

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jkic47
I disagree. The lectures are aimed at a demographic that probably does not
have the background that hacker news readers likely have.

He's given every child in the world with internet access an MIT-educated tutor
who cares enough to make these videos available for free.

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maxharris
_The video lectures at the Khan Academy are terrible._ _Slow, not to the
point, lecturer repeating himself because it was taking an age to actually
write anything on the ridiculous blackboard they're using, and he's trying to
fill dead air._

No, they're great, and the very things Ducker criticizes are what makes them
great. Most people that need help working problems find Kahn's "ridiculous
blackboard" very helpful (myself included). His repetition is also useful if
you're not an expert. And the pace? It's perfect if you're seeing the material
for the first time.

Not everyone is Andrew Ducker. What's obvious to him is not necessarily
obvious to someone else.

