
Khan Academy Gets 5 Million to Expand Faculty & Platform & to Build a School - apievangelist
http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/11/04/khan-academy-gets-5-million-to-expand-faculty-platform-to-build-a-physical-school/#.TrYurm_MG4Y.hackernews
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hokua
Most of good teaching is not about well delivered lectures or clearly
explained examples. Cookie cutter youtube lectures are just another resource.

The evidence suggests that its individualized instruction in a structured
environment with clear expectations that is best -- of course you cannot scale
this, but clever videos are no substitute.

The Khan Academy's audience tend to be good students-those who would thrive in
any number of environments. Im not worried about these students.

Its the students who might have been great had they been exposed to a better
environment that worry me. For this it takes good teachers and a system that
attracts them to the field (which the current system does not).

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perokreco
Khan Academy actually works really well for underachieving students, and
especially well for students with learning disabilities. If you watch any of
Sal Khan talks, you will see that one of the biggest emphasis of KA is to
prevent students from getting stuck and losing interest in a subject. The
whole goal is to increase the meaningful time students have to interact with
teachers. Having lectures delivered online and then having students actually
talk to a teacher and have things explained to them instead of sitting and
listening to a one size fits all lecture works much better.

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hokua
If KA wants to be a nonprofit and do good, thats great. Charity is a good
thing.

But dont do it as a startup. What they are doing is not revolutionary, but
another resource (albiet valuable). KA does not solve the fundamental problem
that smart people dont want to become teachers. In time the hype around KA
will fade as the problem in ed persist despite its efforts.

The problems in education are structural. Technology cannot revolutionize a
government monopoly. The major players have no incentive to change.

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ig1
Are you familiar with the school trials that they're doing ? - essentially
giving the videos as homework and spending the class time with teacher helping
the kids with problems they had with understanding. Their performance metrics
are also miles ahead of everything else.

(fyi they are a non-profit)

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hsparikh
Can't find the link at the moment, but this is incorrect. The first results
that came out of the initial trial showed no significant improvement in
student performance using KA's approach compared to the traditional approach.

Edit: here is the link <http://blendmylearning.com/2011/08/31/the-results/>

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yummyfajitas
This is a very promising result - apparently Khan is roughly as good as a
traditional teacher provided a teacher is in the room. Now the important
question is to figure out how much of the teacher can be done away with.

For example, can 1 teacher + Khan educate 80 students as well as 1 teacher
without Khan educate 40? Or can we replace the (well paid) teacher with a
lower paid day care worker for at least some of that time?

If Khan can reduce the number of teachers required to educate students, that
would go a long way towards reducing our out of control spending on education.

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capnrefsmmat
I don't think that's the way to approach this. Replacing teachers with videos
isn't going to make education better -- in fact, I'd argue it would make it
worse.

There's a great deal of research in the effectiveness of different kinds of
physics teaching, for example, and it all shows that the most effective method
is interactive. Students often form misconceptions about concepts, and the
only way to break those misconceptions is to engage them, have them think
about problems, and tailor your explanations to address their confusion.

A video can't do this. Instead, a video could provide the groundwork so that a
teacher could spend all his time working with students interactively.

So if you decide to cut down on teachers because of the videos, you're giving
up the potential advantages in teaching that the videos would bring.

I can link to a few papers if you're interested.

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yummyfajitas
_Replacing teachers with videos isn't going to make education better -- in
fact, I'd argue it would make it worse._

Why argue? Why not simply test it?

 _There's a great deal of research in the effectiveness of different kinds of
physics teaching, for example, and it all shows that the most effective method
is interactive._

A video can't do this. But perhaps 2 hours of video + 1 hour of interaction
might be just as good as the 2 hours of lecture + 1 hour of interaction
provided by the current system. If so we can cut our teaching expenses by 2/3.

Khan provides a virtually free substitute for some pieces of our current
educational system. The trick is to figure which pieces.

This is a big problem - the US spent $864B on government-sponsored education
in 2009, more than it spent on the military.

 _Students often form misconceptions about concepts, and the only way to break
those misconceptions is to engage them, have them think about problems, and
tailor your explanations to address their confusion._

Khan is attempting to build automated systems that do exactly this.

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capnrefsmmat
> A video can't do this. But perhaps 2 hours of video + 1 hour of interaction
> might be just as good as the 2 hours of lecture + 1 hour of interaction
> provided by the current system. If so we can cut our teaching expenses by
> 2/3.

Okay, but that doesn't improve education, it just makes it cheaper. It would
certainly be a useful start; one could invest that money in hiring better-
qualified teachers, or even a program where college students come in to do
interactive tutoring.

> This is a big problem - the US spent $864B on government-sponsored education
> in 2009, more than it spent on the military.

How much of this is personnel and salary costs for teachers?

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spacefungus
The Khan Academy is such a beautiful idea. I can't wait to see if they try any
new, whacky stuff at the brick & mortar school.

I wonder why people aren't trying to shut this down? Seems like "big
education" companies would be making moves to squash the success of KA. Why
buy a $300 textbook (like I just had to recently) on Meteorology when you can
watch some YouTube videos?

It'll be interesting to see if this starts happening...I hope not, but at some
point you have to imagine that bigger, older companies will try to step in.

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kvnn
Is anyone from Khan here? Are you guys aware of Sugata Mitra's work?

Mitra has developed and proven a methodology for teaching children in-person
using small groups and computers.

Mitra + Khan makes me jump out of my seat.

Here is an incredible introduction to Mitra's work :
[http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...](http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html)

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vitrifying
It seems to me that by cooperating with schools and introducing assessment,
Khan risks losing his way. The educational value will not be improved by
becoming more schoolish -- schools are the problem.

As hackers know and as Mitra showed, learning is fun. However it ceases to be
fun when one is told what to study and pressured to compete for meaningless
grades/scores/badges.

(IIRC, Mitra doesn't assess children directly in the sense of giving them
grades.)

Also, now that Khan knows that children will be assessed on his video
material, I expect that this will skew his future presentations in a bad way.

