This is Sal here. I wanted to respond directly on the author's page, but they seem to be having a problem taking comments.
The reason why I make history videos is that many people I know (many of whom are quite educated) don't even have a basic scaffold of world events in their minds (or the potential causality between events). Most American high school and college students would find it difficult to give even a summary of the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of these people have sat through years of traditional history classes (taught through state-mandated books by "experts"). Even more worrying is many experts who have taken one side or another of a historical issue and view their viewpoints as facts (this is the tone of most history books).
If the author really watched my videos, he would see that I start most of them telling the listener to be skeptical of anything I tell them or anyone tells them; that no matter how footnoted something is, in the end it is dependent on people's accounts--the people who weren't killed--which are subject to bias (no matter how well-intentioned). Very few history books or professors do this. If anything, they create a false sense of certainty.
As for the "one voice" issue, I don't see how a guy making digestible videos that inform and encourage skepticism (on YouTube where anyone else can do the same) are more dangerous than state-mandated text books. I don't see how lectures that are open for the world to scrutinize (and comment about on YouTube and our site) are more dangerous than a lone teacher or professor who can say whatever they like to their classrooms with no one there to correct or dispute them.
Finally, there is nothing I would like to see more than other teachers/professors/experts adding their voice to the mix. Rather than wasting energy commenting on other people's work with pseudo-intellectual babble, why don't they produce their own videos and post them on YouTube? If someone can produce 20 videos that seem decent and want to do more as part of the Khan Academy, we'll point our audience at them. If our students respond, we'll figure out a way that they can potentially make it a career.
The most valuable thing you do is provide a basis for intuition in the topics you teach. Getting people to understand the "big picture" early on actually increases the appetite for curiosity, makes topics less intimidating and easier to learn.
I don't need all the facts, but I do need an understanding of why certain historical events (or any other topic) are important. Having that latticework in my mind allows me to kickstart learning the details, and synthesizing all that information.
Criticism of various learning models will always be around. Its important to listen to it, but at the same time, these ideas are coming straight out of people's heads - about what they "think" is a better approach. On the other hand, Khan Academy's success is a direct function of its wide-spread adoption. If it didn't work as well as, if not better than, what people learn in a classroom, people simply wouldn't watch. Not only that, I'm sure feedback (positive and negative) from actual users is much more useful than from someone ingrained in the old model (and most likely views himself as teacher only, and not a learner).
I'm an avid user of the site and I see this all the time:
Sal- "In the last video, I seemed to have confused people about so and so.. let me clarify that now." The videos and site are developing iteratively, and they have data to understand what people need/having trouble with.
Please continue to teach in this manner. Anyone who grew into, and succeeded in an academic environment (as virtually all professors have) will not see how transformative KA is for people who do not learn that way.
Sal,
You wrote
>
Rather than wasting energy commenting on other people's work with pseudo-intellectual babble, why don't they produce their own videos and post them on YouTube?
>
Precisely! One of the things that appeals to me about your education model is its democracy. Anyone who wants to learn and commit the time for it is free and welcome to it.
The Education Profession has managed to create a number of gates and gatekeepers in an apparent attempt to control access to education and to control whom learns what. That model was somewhat shaken when the printing press was invented and then a little more with digital media and the internet. It maintains control through the accreditation business and the granting of degrees.
My kids have taken some online college courses and it appears that few traditional universities really understand how the make the most of online media, because those courses were so poorly conceived and executed. The Khan Academy is a stark and shining contrast to those.
A college degree remains, as the equivalent of yesteryear's high school diploma, the ticket to getting employed in many of the better jobs. It is my hope that someday there will be an open, free (or extremely low cost), accredited college degree program available to everyone who has access to internet!
I think it is awesome that a guy like Sal is the "rock star" of the future.
Thank you Sal for great videos! You are inspiring me to study maths.
I have a Ba in history and agree with the criticism raised in the article, however I also think it is a problem that many people dont even have a basic scaffold of world events.
History is about making choices, what to say and what not to say, and the way to say it, it is not merely about being familiar with major world events. What is a major world event? Lets go with WW2 , then when you dig into WW2, what would you say is a major event? Fall of France, D-Day, Fall of Yugoslavia, or Stalingrad? Whatever you choose you exclude another event, your choices influences the further storytelling. You have to make choices.
The solution for this problem is very difficult, since you have to begin somewhere in your story-telling, and even when choosing where to begin you take a side. And that side is with you for the rest of the story telling.
History is not merely about events it is also about connecting dots, you can begin by choosing any event and really digging into it until you begin to see the wider picture. Going the other way around is far more difficult, when you attempt to give an overview of the wider picture. You get exactly what you would if you picked 2m wide brushes to draw on a wall.
My suggestion instead is to pick really small pencils and draw thinner lines, introduce the students to any event in world history and work out from there. Only then the students could enjoy seeing (and make themselves) the wider connections.
A teacher in a classroom faces the same problems as you (and more, imagine 20 teenagers), so dont worry about it. :)
Its interesting to see your reaction to the criticism, especially that of being defensive (understandable first reaction). But if you look at the article objectively there are a lot of opportunities it creates for Khan Academy to be even more impactful than what it is today.
You are certainly a great teacher, orator and have the understanding of math and finance. However, one person cannot be good at grasping, understanding and teaching ALL subjects. Thats where you have an opportunity to enlist the best the the brightest teachers from US to create videos for you on subjects they are most passionate about. Why not create a video contest to identify in a democratic way who are these top teachers??
Also, just to answer your point about a teacher's ability to put 20 video online rather than writing criticism. The thing is that you have already gained a lot of fame and respect for your work and its a very difficult thing to do. Its unreasonable to expect a teacher to gain the same level of viewership now like you have. Thats why I say that take the interest that you have developed around you to uplift other teachers to bring up education as a 'whole'.
Otherwise, Kahn Academy will remain a closet work... Just my two cents...
He seems to think you're on the verge of becoming the only educator on the planet, which is nonsense. He also doesn't discern between what you teach, and how you teach. YouTube accounts are free; He can get one.
Thanks for doing what you do. I think you're exploring what will become a incredibly valuable piece of the puzzle, especially for those without the advantages of a western public school system.
I'm amazed at the breadth of subjects that you cover in your videos. Do you have to undertake a lot of research before covering a subject, particularly in math and science? Thanks for helping me get through Linear Algebra.
Hi Sal,
I have started to use Khan Academy this year and it has helped me to pass all my college math classes. I haven't seen your history videos, but it seems to me that Clemens thinks that your videos are the only resource we use to study the various topics your cover. That's like saying I only watch your math videos, but I'll never open my text book to do practice problems on differential equations.In the same respect if I were to watch your history videos I would be looking for a timeline and overview to give myself structure for what I should study and look at in more depth.
Thank you for all your hard work, we all appreciate it.
The real issue I come out with from that article is not the content of your courses but the danger of potentially having one uniform history curriculum for the whole world. You can still be the most unbiased and thorough teacher and this will still remain a real issue. The more subjective a subject, the more different ways it must be taught.
Unfortunately, time and attention are scarce. The best you can do is to impart the understanding that all historical accounts are biased, and balance that bias by encouraging your students to research opposite points of view on their own time.
I was taught both Haitian History from Haiti and from France almost at the same time when I was in school (I was in a French distance learning program in Haiti). The Haitian account was glorifying its heroes and the French account was attenuating the magnitude of the first successful Black revolution. I really appreciated your account of the Haitian revolution since your personal bias was much less impregnated in your video.
Are you starting to use videos from other people? I'd love to see 3rd party content on the site provided it scored well with both students(attention) and teachers(content).
If the author really watched my videos, he would see that I start most of them telling the listener to be skeptical of anything I tell them or anyone tells them; that no matter how footnoted something is, in the end it is dependent on people's accounts--the people who weren't killed--which are subject to bias (no matter how well-intentioned). Very few history books or professors do this. If anything, they create a false sense of certainty.
Thank you for emphasizing this. It seems that some have forgotten that history is written by the victors.
Sal, I appreciate your response. You make videos that try to be helpful. Many have found them very helpful. Up until now, nobody forces people to use them so I am often puzzled by the opposition you face from some. I am a chemistry professor in a rural Western US state - I know these kinds of instructional supplements can be very helpful to many students in my state - where legislative decisions limit a school district's ability to hire and retain qualified science teachers. I've been making videos about chemistry for many years but I didn't put them on Youtube - you did, and that's what makes your efforts valuable. Congratulations!
I have many more than 20 videos made - but I find my students use them more frequently when they are created to coach them through specific problems. They use them as often as they visit me in office hours. I've also just completed a series of 35 videos for a textbook publisher that walk first year college students through very difficult chemistry problems that use multiple concepts. These are not short single topic videos so we will see how useful they are in practice. They are meant to help a chemistry student learn to think like a chemist and the jury is out as to whether that can be taught by video.
I would be happy to talk about helping with your effort in science, specifically in chemistry. I am sure there is much to be done and surprisingly, not that many working to create more content using this medium. A mix that can also provide real-time Q & A is particularly interesting. I can be reached at fletcher at uidaho dot edu. Here is an example of the kind of vid that students use to help them solve a specific problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49k88Alfh88
The only thing novel about Khan Academy is accessibility. Its the same old teacher-centered lectures we've endured for the past hundred years, with a somewhat more charismatic instructor.
Most of the criticism I've seen of your work isn't "pseudo-intellectual babble," its merely pointing out what I've stated above, and that it isn't in line with what research tells us about how students learn. Your challenge for your critics to produce their own videos misses the point entirely.
I happen to think your videos are fine overall, and while I find some specific science content oversimplified and focus too much on mechanics rather than conceptual understanding, it serves very well for student review. For learning new content, however, I happen to believe that there is a better way.
Sal Khan represents not just one curriculum, but a new way to thinking about education: teaching basic principles behind the scenes and bringing student participation/collaboration to the fore.
We created ShowMeApp.com exactly for this reason - so that any teacher can easily create these kinds of videos through the iPad and share them online.
>The reason why I make history videos is that many people I know (many of whom are quite educated) don't even have a basic scaffold of world events in their minds (or the potential causality between events
I think this problem can be generalized. There's a predisposition for lopsided development across intelligence domains. Like the cliche nerd that has the social intelligence of a rock and viceversa. Modern society re-enforces this tendency by rewarding people to specialize into increasingly narrower intelligence domains. This sort of tunnel vision bias just isn't sustainable in a modern democracy.
Here are some videos of a teacher trying to implement research based teaching. Is it entertaining? No. Are student being encouraged to think? yes.
Using number of site visits to denote good teaching is very problematic. You might consider catching up on the work of the late Neil Postman for more on this.
>Most American high school and college students would find it difficult to give even a summary of the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That is a broad assertion on your part and one that I have yet to find true; esp. after meeting many former high schoolers in my college History classes.
> [most people] don't even have a basic scaffold of world events in their minds
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, many other people do have a scaffold, a derelict one at best, provided to them through their politically tainted education and validated by their social systems.
I respect that at least you're making an attempt to enable people to stimulate their interests and seek out a more detailed education on those topics.
The comments thus far show exactly what is wrong with HN. HN has become an echo chamber where we all love certain people/companies/ideas and immediately dismiss any counter viewpoint.
Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some valid points. You learn a lot more by examining both sides of a story than being a fanboi.
I read it and normally consider myself pretty open minded. But then you read things like this.
"Here Mr. Khan stands exposed as possessing a historical perspective steeped in academia’s standard issue, postmodern, left-leaning narrative of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and moral equivalence. "
And in my mind the author is exposed.
I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't present history as fact but as I believe it is – a perspective.
I would rather that my son grasp a few things about history and don't get the exact dates or details right. That he understands what history is as much as he knows what went into it.
So in my mind the valid points you talk about are nothing but the authors own idea about mainly his own field which is history. In other words his own interpretation – how ironic.
I agree that Kahn probably shouldn't be teaching history and I am sure with time that will be changed. But to claim that he is dangerous is simply missing the grander scheme of things.
I welcome opposing opinions but this itself doesn't present both sides of the argument, nor any context to the one example given, and sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.
What I got from the article is that the author is blaming Khan for not explaining a few things in his history videos that may not be immediately obvious to a viewer.
I think this is a _much_ bigger issue in classrooms. I've had many instructors and professors at my university skip over the details. Because (1) they assume we know it already, (2) they are too lazy to discuss or write it, (3) there is not enough time.
Khan does an excellent job teaching in his math videos. Almost never have I felt like my questions weren't answered by him. He probably thinks as a beginner would and tries to make it as simplified as possible. He writes down everything. Even uses different colours for different concepts. Why? I don't know, maybe he wants to make sure his viewers benefit from his work. A classroom teacher couldn't care less, they still get paid at the end of the day.
Much of the practical value in history is found when you examine events in some depth. For example, taking a deeper look at the German encryption system or the code breaking infrastructure at Bletchley. Or examining how an entire nation managed to keep the D-Day invasion secret until the very last minute.
So, while this article might itself be a little breathless, I think it's valid criticism that glossing over History is unforgivable.
That is why SCOTUS allows dissenting opinions. Sometimes we just don't get it right the first time around and it is good to have a record of what we could have done better. But I'll be damned if I'm wrong on the internet!
Has a point. The Khan Academy approach is very good for maths, and most sciences. These are cases where you can distil knowledge into a few examples and cases, and it works well. The viewer now has a working, and accurate mental model of whatever they were learning, without having to go through -everything- involved.
However, this approach to history and other topics can be a problem. While some of the criticism is somewhat overblown, it is valid. Distilling history and other social sciences down, to the degree that Khan does is very hard to do properly, and likely to introduce all sorts problems into the mental model of history the viewer has.
It's not a case of "taking sides" or whatever. But, if the Academy really does want to be "the classroom of the world", then it -should- go into enough detail to build accurate mental models. How much stuff do you think people learn in a classroom, and never have a chance to "relearn". How many incorrect mental models are formed, and then never corrected until catastrophe. The responsible thing to do, if attempting to be come the classroom of the world is to realize that if they are successful, then for many people, the Academy will be their sole source of information for some topics (as in, not the only source of information, but the only source that they go to), and teach accordingly. Either have the lesson be able to provide an accurate and correct mental model, or make the learner explicitly aware that what they are learning is incomplete/unprecise/whatever.
"Either have the lesson be able to provide an accurate and correct mental model, or make the learner explicitly aware that what they are learning is incomplete/unprecise/whatever."
Khan does the latter, it is called an overview. I think this aspect of the original critic's article displayed his lack of understanding of an incremental and iterative approach. If we waited until he had completed every lecture on history, we'd never have any. Given the current state, and even considering the future state, it is nonsensical to judge it on the basis of being the "sole source" of information on a subject.
The second bad assumption is that Khan's work is somehow inferior to other high school teachers' presentations of the subject. In my experience, at a high school frequently referred to as the best in the US, we barely even made it through the Vietnam war, and the "mental model" presented was merely a random collection of facts.
If only this author could see the average high school history teacher in action, he would be demanding that they stop teaching kids to glue garbage on a piece of poster board and teach his version of the subject. The difference with Khan is that it's all out there. He's open for review, and the videos can be improved.
"if the Academy really does want to be "the classroom of the world", then it -should- go into enough detail to build accurate mental models."
We have no context about the video here. Is it for 4th graders? High schoolers? For me, elementary school consisted of brief snippets of historical events (Christopher Columbus discovered America. Indians and settlers got along and had Thanksgiving), while high school consisted mostly of un-learning all of the stuff that they got wrong in elementary school (Columbus was actually a failure! Oh, native Americans hated us).
I don't think you can expect somebody getting their feet wet in history to pay attention to or care about historical subtleties.
I totally agree with you. I don't think history and many of the humanities can be distiller into 10 minute chunks. I don't think it would be fair to distil World War II into 15 minutes, much less the last 100 years. Trying to distil romanticism into 15 minutes seems just as impossible, since to understand romanticism, you need to understand the changing, industrializing world that birthed it.
My daughter's history class this year did not focus on dates at all. It didn't even really focus on facts. Instead, it focused on why events were taking place, what the impacts of those events were, and why that is important to understand today. This is the way to teach history, but it's a lot harder because it requires interpretation.
The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.
Fact is, Khan's videos are considered good because the actual history education that most students take away from classrooms is even worse. Like most other subjects, that's what you get when you try to deliver a comprehensive, objective, detail-oriented education to students who (within a small margin of error) couldn't give a shit. Never mind the Bolsheviks or the timeline -- what percentage of randomly sampled American high school graduates would even know that there was a Russian Revolution if you asked them?
If we can replace zero history with a fifteen-minute-chunk version of history, I'm for it.
A visit to the wikipedia entry on the National Association of Scholars may help you understand the author's perspective.
The first half of this article makes a reasonably convincing case that Mr. Khan is a much worse history teacher than math tutor. The second half of the article makes a totally convincing case that the author understands the Internet worse than Khan understands anything.
I guess in his nightmare scenario the "algorithms of the Internet" will one day cause everyone's web-browsers to redirect every request to one of Mr. Khan's fizzy history lectures where he just glosses right over the moral infallibility of the US, the inherent superiority of western culture, and the fact that Jesus died for your sins. The same algorithms will doubtless prevent the author from creating his own history videos clarifying those topics for people. After all, Mr. Khan appeared on Charlie Rose!
So, their biggest problems with Khan are that he doesn't go into enough detail and that he doesn't pick sides in the wars?
Wow, that -is- dangerous. He might teach children to think for themselves or something!
As for the Skinner Box, the internet is anything but. Yes, you tend to only see things you want to, etc... But there is nothing stopping you from seeing other things, and most sites will step out of your comfort zone quite a lot.
They honestly believe that somehow Khan's videos could become the -only- resource for learning about history. Not a chance.
+1 for the idea that history is more than an "incoherent torrent of factoids"
I heard Khan say recently on the Colbert Report that he read the Wikipedia article on the French Revolution as his source before making his video on the subject.
That's fine for his purposes, but somewhere up the information food chain someone must actually read the sources, weigh them, interpret, compare, and do all the other work of understanding and transmitting history. It's hard to imagine that those 'educated' by Khan can take up this work, or if they do, that by the time they become competent, they will regard his videos as anything other than inconsequential in their effort.
However, I do think it's overblown to say that Khan is any more dangerous than Cliff's notes or similar supposed shortcut to education. And I suspect his math and finance videos might be quite good, based on the response, and on the fact that he actually spent time in school learning math and finance. (But I haven't watched them.)
It's quite apparent to me that Mr. Clemens' political leanings and the exigencies of blogging culture have worked together to transform a worthwhile small point into a pretty overbaked big point. Mr. Clemens demonstrates ably, I think, that Mr. Khan is a lousy history teacher. I haven't taken any of his science courses, so I can't speak about them, but it's clear that when it comes to history Mr. Khan lacks the depth of knowledge and fluency with the facts to teach effectively. So he ends up missing things, leaving things unexplained, falling back on pop culture depictions, oversimplifying motivations.
On the other hand—what does this have to do with pretty much anything else? I think it's not a stretch to see how every deficiency displayed there can be directly derived from a lack of familiarity with the material. Do you really need to try to make the overheated claim that being waffly with facts and simplistic with the human narrative is the result of an academia-enforced political and epistemological philosophy? Mr. Khan isn't exactly saying, you know, 'As we learn from a cursory reading of Baudrillard, the concept that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in any meaningful, substantial way is clearly a fiction of the necessities of realpolitik.' He's just fudging it. Mr Clemens continues to spiral outward, proposing a grim reality where all our education is mediated through Facebook and thus (because of the nature of Facebook's algorithms at the moment) through political conformity, confirmation bias, and groupthink—which results in Mr. Khan's own pernicious beliefs being beamed, unopposed, into the minds of our modern youth. All this from “from FDR’s point of view, Hitler definitely was in the wrong here” and a reference to _Saving Private Ryan_.
Mr Clemens should have restricted his aim to a more manageable and germane topic: the unfortunate fiction that we can teach history, or anything else, by reading out loud from the textbook, or by stringing together a sequence of pictures of famous people. Teaching is hard, and many people in lecture halls and seminars all across this great nation do it poorly every day. Unfortunately, when it comes to World War II, Mr. Khan is a member of their ranks. I'm not sure that Bill Gates' neoliberal plans for a New World Order history course necessarily enter into it.
As someone who has been a teacher and trainer of various kinds, removing your own bias from your teaching does not come naturally or easily. So I think the points made (while exaggerated) have at least a kernel of validity. However, ranting on a blog is not a productive response. Instead, I'd document them as constructive criticism and send them to Mr. Khan directly. I've got to believe that anyone who is passionate enough about education to put the Khan academy together in the first place is also willing to hear suggestions on improvements.
On the facts reported in the submitted article, I would have to suggest that Mr. Khan bring some expert historians (preferably of multiple cultural backgrounds and different nationalities) on board his project to produce the history videos. He could well devote his own time to producing more videos on more elementary levels of math, as elementary mathematics is still very poorly taught in much of the English-speaking world.
The author's complaint seems to be that the Khan Academy's history lectures give an overly simplified view of history and that this, along with their availability, will make them more attractive to students who, the author fears, will watch Khan Academy videos in lieu of studying the topics in depth. This, he fears, will lead to a cultural forgetfulness of what the author considers to be the important moral lessons of WWII.
It's an important objection. There is a real tendency towards laziness among human begins and an easy availability of a simplified history could discourage people from deeper study. A simplified history from only one viewpoint is even worse. But I think he's pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Wikipedia is already a far greater threat on that matter and their are plenty of simplified versions of history available, some even taught in schools. Sal is only example of this (and possibly a product as the author alludes.) The proper solution would be more, and more in depth videos from other perspectives. I know some people who might be willing to do just that...
The thing I remember was almost always missing in the education process I went through right up to the university was the big picture. A brief summary, a TL;DR, an idea, an answer to questions like "what does it mean?" or "why should I care?".
My experience with education is that for most of the time, we are being taught 'the form', not 'the contents'. It was after I've watched SICP video lectures that I finally understood many computer science concepts that I was being taught (read: forced to memorize for the exam) at university and even in high school.
I strongly believe in what Einstein said: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." If Khan can summarize almost entire XX century into a 15-minute talk while staying correct with the facts, then that's great. It's what we call a 'high level overview'. It might be not sufficient, but it's a good start, as it constructs a skeleton which makes the details stick easier in our brains.
Okay, so the first part of this is nitpicking the obviously impossible task of summarising the history of the world (perhaps it was Khan's intention to simply get students interested in the subjects so that they could study them further), and then the second part verges on parody by putting together some poorly connected thoughts and trying to pass them off as an argument.
If this is representative of the type of person against the Khan Academy, I'm for it even more.
I agree strongly with the Author's issues with presenting history in this manner. History is a living document of clues that are merely interpreted by us- very little is fact.
I've been studying Egyptology for about 6 years now and it's amazing what perspectives have changed in that time. We're even starting to see stories now that are challenging the "Out of Africa" theory. Whenever I hear a teacher/lecturer describe something historical as fact, it makes me cringe because so much is left to interpretation.
Khan doing history in this manner is dangerous. But at the same time, the ways our schools do history is dangerous as well. Presenting singular perspectives and presenting them as fact only breeds misinformation.
I believe khan academy is superb for math and sciences, especially for quick overviews of concepts. But the format is absolutely terrible for presenting historical topics. Understanding history requires reading from many resources and coming to logical conclusions. A copy/paste job from wikipedia is simply pathetic.
>I pulled up his video “U.S. History Overview 3—World War II to Vietnam”
Well, there's your problem. If you concern yourself primarily with US History, as Khan does (and declares what he is doing), you're going to necessarily ignore a lot of non-US perspectives, like, y'know, Leningrad, Churchill, the rape of Nanking, Japan's lack of oil reserves, the whole bit. The real question is not whether Mr. Khan did a poor job of explaining US History, it is whether the idea of teaching "$country history", when we concern ourselves primarily with foreign affairs as Mr. Khan does, whether focusing on the actions of $country in an era of global politics gives a skewed and ultimately inaccurate perspective. The answer to that should be a rather obvious 'yes'...
I do doubt however that Mr. Khan truly hopes to achieve or at least does not really believe that he can achieve a monopoly in education. Perhaps his format will be copied but I doubt his lectures themselves will become the status quo especially if they are as lacking in depth as the example shown (I am not really familiar with the Khan Academy). The graver problem shown in the article does not really concern the Khan Academy but rather our method of consuming information from a general standpoint, and the dangers of the personalization of news; but this is a rather tired complaint, and the author does not suggest a novel approach for combatting it.
I believe it's still a very good way to get students to actually read a book. In 15 minutes, Khan does a great job, and the author of the article... well, he fails to get that.
The idea behind it is getting children interested in history enough that they would pick up a book. It's not, as I understand it, the only account of history they're expected to have. And to think otherwise is to think stupid.
It seems to be pretty nitpicking. He says things that plenty of educators would likely say in describing events such as, "as you'd imagine".
His point about FDR's viewpoint of Hitler's invasion of Poland is really weak and I just don't get it. Everything actually is relative. The Germans probably thought it was just as fine (if not moreso) to invade Poland as in the US Bush thought it was ok to invade Iraq. Of course history is written by the victors. Had Germany won, it would have been written as a good action from their perspective.
So in 15 minutes he doesn't dig into terribly much detail. Let's face it, even after a teacher spends an entire semester going over this with 8th graders, in 10 years time do they remember all the details? Details are something that can come after interest is solidified. Pushing details on 8th graders misses the larger point often as it is buried in dates, maps, names and such. If you get them hooked on the main point, they will find the details.
To the author of the article, Mr. Clemens, and other academics annoyed by Mr. Khan's compressed description of important topics, I ask the following question:
Other than criticize this new source of education, what are YOU doing to address the needs of people hungry for learning other than continuing on the same well worn path that you've been on for decades?
Professional academics whining about Khan Academy ignore the fact that their customers are telling them something by flocking to Khan's videos. They're saying that higher education today doesn't always meet their needs, and they need these services packaged, priced, and delivered in new ways.
If Mr. Clemens doesn't like Khan's treatment of a particular topic, how about recording your own video that does it right.
It does seem easier to criticize and keep to your own cloistered little world rather than put yourself out there and try to innovate. But that's just my perspective.
I think this article is very interesting, if only to get a look at what objections might exist to an educational paradigm similar to KA. If we're serious about fighting for an efficient education system, we must be prepared to answer objections like this.
He brings up a few valid points that I haven't thought of before. Presumably, as systems like KA are adopted the amount of total educational material decreases, as individual curricula are replaced by a standard set of materials. This decreases diversity in the type of education available for students, which can be seen as a good or a bad thing. I bet the author would be all for the system if the videos were "conservative" and they were replacing curricula of "liberal" educators teaching our children filthy subjectivist lies.
The article is full of FUD, but Khan himself probably shouldn't be teaching humanities (like history) or social sciences (other than for his own specialization, economics) or the life sciences (and any other discipline he is not too familiar with).
[+] [-] salmankhan|15 years ago|reply
This is Sal here. I wanted to respond directly on the author's page, but they seem to be having a problem taking comments.
The reason why I make history videos is that many people I know (many of whom are quite educated) don't even have a basic scaffold of world events in their minds (or the potential causality between events). Most American high school and college students would find it difficult to give even a summary of the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of these people have sat through years of traditional history classes (taught through state-mandated books by "experts"). Even more worrying is many experts who have taken one side or another of a historical issue and view their viewpoints as facts (this is the tone of most history books).
If the author really watched my videos, he would see that I start most of them telling the listener to be skeptical of anything I tell them or anyone tells them; that no matter how footnoted something is, in the end it is dependent on people's accounts--the people who weren't killed--which are subject to bias (no matter how well-intentioned). Very few history books or professors do this. If anything, they create a false sense of certainty.
As for the "one voice" issue, I don't see how a guy making digestible videos that inform and encourage skepticism (on YouTube where anyone else can do the same) are more dangerous than state-mandated text books. I don't see how lectures that are open for the world to scrutinize (and comment about on YouTube and our site) are more dangerous than a lone teacher or professor who can say whatever they like to their classrooms with no one there to correct or dispute them.
Finally, there is nothing I would like to see more than other teachers/professors/experts adding their voice to the mix. Rather than wasting energy commenting on other people's work with pseudo-intellectual babble, why don't they produce their own videos and post them on YouTube? If someone can produce 20 videos that seem decent and want to do more as part of the Khan Academy, we'll point our audience at them. If our students respond, we'll figure out a way that they can potentially make it a career.
regards, Sal
[+] [-] sbaqai|15 years ago|reply
I don't need all the facts, but I do need an understanding of why certain historical events (or any other topic) are important. Having that latticework in my mind allows me to kickstart learning the details, and synthesizing all that information.
Criticism of various learning models will always be around. Its important to listen to it, but at the same time, these ideas are coming straight out of people's heads - about what they "think" is a better approach. On the other hand, Khan Academy's success is a direct function of its wide-spread adoption. If it didn't work as well as, if not better than, what people learn in a classroom, people simply wouldn't watch. Not only that, I'm sure feedback (positive and negative) from actual users is much more useful than from someone ingrained in the old model (and most likely views himself as teacher only, and not a learner).
I'm an avid user of the site and I see this all the time: Sal- "In the last video, I seemed to have confused people about so and so.. let me clarify that now." The videos and site are developing iteratively, and they have data to understand what people need/having trouble with.
Please continue to teach in this manner. Anyone who grew into, and succeeded in an academic environment (as virtually all professors have) will not see how transformative KA is for people who do not learn that way.
[+] [-] ImproperUser|15 years ago|reply
Precisely! One of the things that appeals to me about your education model is its democracy. Anyone who wants to learn and commit the time for it is free and welcome to it.
The Education Profession has managed to create a number of gates and gatekeepers in an apparent attempt to control access to education and to control whom learns what. That model was somewhat shaken when the printing press was invented and then a little more with digital media and the internet. It maintains control through the accreditation business and the granting of degrees.
My kids have taken some online college courses and it appears that few traditional universities really understand how the make the most of online media, because those courses were so poorly conceived and executed. The Khan Academy is a stark and shining contrast to those.
A college degree remains, as the equivalent of yesteryear's high school diploma, the ticket to getting employed in many of the better jobs. It is my hope that someday there will be an open, free (or extremely low cost), accredited college degree program available to everyone who has access to internet!
I think it is awesome that a guy like Sal is the "rock star" of the future.
[+] [-] DrCatbox|15 years ago|reply
I have a Ba in history and agree with the criticism raised in the article, however I also think it is a problem that many people dont even have a basic scaffold of world events.
History is about making choices, what to say and what not to say, and the way to say it, it is not merely about being familiar with major world events. What is a major world event? Lets go with WW2 , then when you dig into WW2, what would you say is a major event? Fall of France, D-Day, Fall of Yugoslavia, or Stalingrad? Whatever you choose you exclude another event, your choices influences the further storytelling. You have to make choices.
The solution for this problem is very difficult, since you have to begin somewhere in your story-telling, and even when choosing where to begin you take a side. And that side is with you for the rest of the story telling.
History is not merely about events it is also about connecting dots, you can begin by choosing any event and really digging into it until you begin to see the wider picture. Going the other way around is far more difficult, when you attempt to give an overview of the wider picture. You get exactly what you would if you picked 2m wide brushes to draw on a wall.
My suggestion instead is to pick really small pencils and draw thinner lines, introduce the students to any event in world history and work out from there. Only then the students could enjoy seeing (and make themselves) the wider connections.
A teacher in a classroom faces the same problems as you (and more, imagine 20 teenagers), so dont worry about it. :)
[+] [-] americandesi333|15 years ago|reply
Its interesting to see your reaction to the criticism, especially that of being defensive (understandable first reaction). But if you look at the article objectively there are a lot of opportunities it creates for Khan Academy to be even more impactful than what it is today.
You are certainly a great teacher, orator and have the understanding of math and finance. However, one person cannot be good at grasping, understanding and teaching ALL subjects. Thats where you have an opportunity to enlist the best the the brightest teachers from US to create videos for you on subjects they are most passionate about. Why not create a video contest to identify in a democratic way who are these top teachers??
Also, just to answer your point about a teacher's ability to put 20 video online rather than writing criticism. The thing is that you have already gained a lot of fame and respect for your work and its a very difficult thing to do. Its unreasonable to expect a teacher to gain the same level of viewership now like you have. Thats why I say that take the interest that you have developed around you to uplift other teachers to bring up education as a 'whole'.
Otherwise, Kahn Academy will remain a closet work... Just my two cents...
Cheers Ritu
[+] [-] seaco|15 years ago|reply
Thanks for doing what you do. I think you're exploring what will become a incredibly valuable piece of the puzzle, especially for those without the advantages of a western public school system.
[+] [-] colkassad|15 years ago|reply
I'm amazed at the breadth of subjects that you cover in your videos. Do you have to undertake a lot of research before covering a subject, particularly in math and science? Thanks for helping me get through Linear Algebra.
[+] [-] sephiroth42|15 years ago|reply
Thank you for all your hard work, we all appreciate it.
Adam
[+] [-] donjaber|15 years ago|reply
The real issue I come out with from that article is not the content of your courses but the danger of potentially having one uniform history curriculum for the whole world. You can still be the most unbiased and thorough teacher and this will still remain a real issue. The more subjective a subject, the more different ways it must be taught.
Unfortunately, time and attention are scarce. The best you can do is to impart the understanding that all historical accounts are biased, and balance that bias by encouraging your students to research opposite points of view on their own time.
I was taught both Haitian History from Haiti and from France almost at the same time when I was in school (I was in a French distance learning program in Haiti). The Haitian account was glorifying its heroes and the French account was attenuating the magnitude of the first successful Black revolution. I really appreciated your account of the Haitian revolution since your personal bias was much less impregnated in your video.
Don't stop doing what you are passionate about.
[+] [-] useful|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rooshdi|15 years ago|reply
Thank you for emphasizing this. It seems that some have forgotten that history is written by the victors.
[+] [-] TRickFletcher|15 years ago|reply
I have many more than 20 videos made - but I find my students use them more frequently when they are created to coach them through specific problems. They use them as often as they visit me in office hours. I've also just completed a series of 35 videos for a textbook publisher that walk first year college students through very difficult chemistry problems that use multiple concepts. These are not short single topic videos so we will see how useful they are in practice. They are meant to help a chemistry student learn to think like a chemist and the jury is out as to whether that can be taught by video.
I would be happy to talk about helping with your effort in science, specifically in chemistry. I am sure there is much to be done and surprisingly, not that many working to create more content using this medium. A mix that can also provide real-time Q & A is particularly interesting. I can be reached at fletcher at uidaho dot edu. Here is an example of the kind of vid that students use to help them solve a specific problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49k88Alfh88
[+] [-] chem21st|15 years ago|reply
The only thing novel about Khan Academy is accessibility. Its the same old teacher-centered lectures we've endured for the past hundred years, with a somewhat more charismatic instructor.
Most of the criticism I've seen of your work isn't "pseudo-intellectual babble," its merely pointing out what I've stated above, and that it isn't in line with what research tells us about how students learn. Your challenge for your critics to produce their own videos misses the point entirely.
I happen to think your videos are fine overall, and while I find some specific science content oversimplified and focus too much on mechanics rather than conceptual understanding, it serves very well for student review. For learning new content, however, I happen to believe that there is a better way.
Please view the video below:
Effectiveness of Science Videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8
While you're there, consider his videos a part of your final challenge. http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium
I am very interested in your thoughts about his approach to instructional videos.
[+] [-] sankim83|15 years ago|reply
We created ShowMeApp.com exactly for this reason - so that any teacher can easily create these kinds of videos through the iPad and share them online.
Here's a guy who's done a ton of awesome Chemistry lessons: http://www.showmeapp.com/jr_orinion
We're huge fans what Sal is doing and would love to see more teachers embrace his approach.
We're still in beta, but I'd love to hear any feedback on the site and the app.
[+] [-] da_dude4242|15 years ago|reply
I think this problem can be generalized. There's a predisposition for lopsided development across intelligence domains. Like the cliche nerd that has the social intelligence of a rock and viceversa. Modern society re-enforces this tendency by rewarding people to specialize into increasingly narrower intelligence domains. This sort of tunnel vision bias just isn't sustainable in a modern democracy.
[+] [-] jerridkruse|15 years ago|reply
Using number of site visits to denote good teaching is very problematic. You might consider catching up on the work of the late Neil Postman for more on this.
http://www.youtube.com/user/kruseteacher#grid/user/05DAAF89A...
[+] [-] woodall|15 years ago|reply
That is a broad assertion on your part and one that I have yet to find true; esp. after meeting many former high schoolers in my college History classes.
[+] [-] krmmalik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jsavimbi|15 years ago|reply
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, many other people do have a scaffold, a derelict one at best, provided to them through their politically tainted education and validated by their social systems.
I respect that at least you're making an attempt to enable people to stimulate their interests and seek out a more detailed education on those topics.
[+] [-] maukdaddy|15 years ago|reply
Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some valid points. You learn a lot more by examining both sides of a story than being a fanboi.
[+] [-] ThomPete|15 years ago|reply
"Here Mr. Khan stands exposed as possessing a historical perspective steeped in academia’s standard issue, postmodern, left-leaning narrative of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and moral equivalence. "
And in my mind the author is exposed.
I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't present history as fact but as I believe it is – a perspective.
I would rather that my son grasp a few things about history and don't get the exact dates or details right. That he understands what history is as much as he knows what went into it.
So in my mind the valid points you talk about are nothing but the authors own idea about mainly his own field which is history. In other words his own interpretation – how ironic.
I agree that Kahn probably shouldn't be teaching history and I am sure with time that will be changed. But to claim that he is dangerous is simply missing the grander scheme of things.
[+] [-] hnhg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jswinghammer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Deestan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reledi|14 years ago|reply
I think this is a _much_ bigger issue in classrooms. I've had many instructors and professors at my university skip over the details. Because (1) they assume we know it already, (2) they are too lazy to discuss or write it, (3) there is not enough time.
Khan does an excellent job teaching in his math videos. Almost never have I felt like my questions weren't answered by him. He probably thinks as a beginner would and tries to make it as simplified as possible. He writes down everything. Even uses different colours for different concepts. Why? I don't know, maybe he wants to make sure his viewers benefit from his work. A classroom teacher couldn't care less, they still get paid at the end of the day.
[+] [-] mmaunder|15 years ago|reply
So, while this article might itself be a little breathless, I think it's valid criticism that glossing over History is unforgivable.
[+] [-] woodall|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icegreentea|15 years ago|reply
However, this approach to history and other topics can be a problem. While some of the criticism is somewhat overblown, it is valid. Distilling history and other social sciences down, to the degree that Khan does is very hard to do properly, and likely to introduce all sorts problems into the mental model of history the viewer has.
It's not a case of "taking sides" or whatever. But, if the Academy really does want to be "the classroom of the world", then it -should- go into enough detail to build accurate mental models. How much stuff do you think people learn in a classroom, and never have a chance to "relearn". How many incorrect mental models are formed, and then never corrected until catastrophe. The responsible thing to do, if attempting to be come the classroom of the world is to realize that if they are successful, then for many people, the Academy will be their sole source of information for some topics (as in, not the only source of information, but the only source that they go to), and teach accordingly. Either have the lesson be able to provide an accurate and correct mental model, or make the learner explicitly aware that what they are learning is incomplete/unprecise/whatever.
[+] [-] mattmcknight|15 years ago|reply
Khan does the latter, it is called an overview. I think this aspect of the original critic's article displayed his lack of understanding of an incremental and iterative approach. If we waited until he had completed every lecture on history, we'd never have any. Given the current state, and even considering the future state, it is nonsensical to judge it on the basis of being the "sole source" of information on a subject.
The second bad assumption is that Khan's work is somehow inferior to other high school teachers' presentations of the subject. In my experience, at a high school frequently referred to as the best in the US, we barely even made it through the Vietnam war, and the "mental model" presented was merely a random collection of facts.
If only this author could see the average high school history teacher in action, he would be demanding that they stop teaching kids to glue garbage on a piece of poster board and teach his version of the subject. The difference with Khan is that it's all out there. He's open for review, and the videos can be improved.
[+] [-] natural219|15 years ago|reply
We have no context about the video here. Is it for 4th graders? High schoolers? For me, elementary school consisted of brief snippets of historical events (Christopher Columbus discovered America. Indians and settlers got along and had Thanksgiving), while high school consisted mostly of un-learning all of the stuff that they got wrong in elementary school (Columbus was actually a failure! Oh, native Americans hated us).
I don't think you can expect somebody getting their feet wet in history to pay attention to or care about historical subtleties.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|15 years ago|reply
My daughter's history class this year did not focus on dates at all. It didn't even really focus on facts. Instead, it focused on why events were taking place, what the impacts of those events were, and why that is important to understand today. This is the way to teach history, but it's a lot harder because it requires interpretation.
[+] [-] mquander|15 years ago|reply
Fact is, Khan's videos are considered good because the actual history education that most students take away from classrooms is even worse. Like most other subjects, that's what you get when you try to deliver a comprehensive, objective, detail-oriented education to students who (within a small margin of error) couldn't give a shit. Never mind the Bolsheviks or the timeline -- what percentage of randomly sampled American high school graduates would even know that there was a Russian Revolution if you asked them?
If we can replace zero history with a fifteen-minute-chunk version of history, I'm for it.
[+] [-] ajscherer|15 years ago|reply
The first half of this article makes a reasonably convincing case that Mr. Khan is a much worse history teacher than math tutor. The second half of the article makes a totally convincing case that the author understands the Internet worse than Khan understands anything.
I guess in his nightmare scenario the "algorithms of the Internet" will one day cause everyone's web-browsers to redirect every request to one of Mr. Khan's fizzy history lectures where he just glosses right over the moral infallibility of the US, the inherent superiority of western culture, and the fact that Jesus died for your sins. The same algorithms will doubtless prevent the author from creating his own history videos clarifying those topics for people. After all, Mr. Khan appeared on Charlie Rose!
[+] [-] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
Wow, that -is- dangerous. He might teach children to think for themselves or something!
As for the Skinner Box, the internet is anything but. Yes, you tend to only see things you want to, etc... But there is nothing stopping you from seeing other things, and most sites will step out of your comfort zone quite a lot.
They honestly believe that somehow Khan's videos could become the -only- resource for learning about history. Not a chance.
[+] [-] bbg|15 years ago|reply
I heard Khan say recently on the Colbert Report that he read the Wikipedia article on the French Revolution as his source before making his video on the subject.
That's fine for his purposes, but somewhere up the information food chain someone must actually read the sources, weigh them, interpret, compare, and do all the other work of understanding and transmitting history. It's hard to imagine that those 'educated' by Khan can take up this work, or if they do, that by the time they become competent, they will regard his videos as anything other than inconsequential in their effort.
However, I do think it's overblown to say that Khan is any more dangerous than Cliff's notes or similar supposed shortcut to education. And I suspect his math and finance videos might be quite good, based on the response, and on the fact that he actually spent time in school learning math and finance. (But I haven't watched them.)
[+] [-] crux|15 years ago|reply
On the other hand—what does this have to do with pretty much anything else? I think it's not a stretch to see how every deficiency displayed there can be directly derived from a lack of familiarity with the material. Do you really need to try to make the overheated claim that being waffly with facts and simplistic with the human narrative is the result of an academia-enforced political and epistemological philosophy? Mr. Khan isn't exactly saying, you know, 'As we learn from a cursory reading of Baudrillard, the concept that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in any meaningful, substantial way is clearly a fiction of the necessities of realpolitik.' He's just fudging it. Mr Clemens continues to spiral outward, proposing a grim reality where all our education is mediated through Facebook and thus (because of the nature of Facebook's algorithms at the moment) through political conformity, confirmation bias, and groupthink—which results in Mr. Khan's own pernicious beliefs being beamed, unopposed, into the minds of our modern youth. All this from “from FDR’s point of view, Hitler definitely was in the wrong here” and a reference to _Saving Private Ryan_.
Mr Clemens should have restricted his aim to a more manageable and germane topic: the unfortunate fiction that we can teach history, or anything else, by reading out loud from the textbook, or by stringing together a sequence of pictures of famous people. Teaching is hard, and many people in lecture halls and seminars all across this great nation do it poorly every day. Unfortunately, when it comes to World War II, Mr. Khan is a member of their ranks. I'm not sure that Bill Gates' neoliberal plans for a New World Order history course necessarily enter into it.
[+] [-] synnik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html
http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf
[+] [-] astine|15 years ago|reply
It's an important objection. There is a real tendency towards laziness among human begins and an easy availability of a simplified history could discourage people from deeper study. A simplified history from only one viewpoint is even worse. But I think he's pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Wikipedia is already a far greater threat on that matter and their are plenty of simplified versions of history available, some even taught in schools. Sal is only example of this (and possibly a product as the author alludes.) The proper solution would be more, and more in depth videos from other perspectives. I know some people who might be willing to do just that...
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|15 years ago|reply
My experience with education is that for most of the time, we are being taught 'the form', not 'the contents'. It was after I've watched SICP video lectures that I finally understood many computer science concepts that I was being taught (read: forced to memorize for the exam) at university and even in high school.
I strongly believe in what Einstein said: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." If Khan can summarize almost entire XX century into a 15-minute talk while staying correct with the facts, then that's great. It's what we call a 'high level overview'. It might be not sufficient, but it's a good start, as it constructs a skeleton which makes the details stick easier in our brains.
[+] [-] hnhg|15 years ago|reply
If this is representative of the type of person against the Khan Academy, I'm for it even more.
[+] [-] bstar|15 years ago|reply
I've been studying Egyptology for about 6 years now and it's amazing what perspectives have changed in that time. We're even starting to see stories now that are challenging the "Out of Africa" theory. Whenever I hear a teacher/lecturer describe something historical as fact, it makes me cringe because so much is left to interpretation.
Khan doing history in this manner is dangerous. But at the same time, the ways our schools do history is dangerous as well. Presenting singular perspectives and presenting them as fact only breeds misinformation.
I believe khan academy is superb for math and sciences, especially for quick overviews of concepts. But the format is absolutely terrible for presenting historical topics. Understanding history requires reading from many resources and coming to logical conclusions. A copy/paste job from wikipedia is simply pathetic.
[+] [-] scythe|15 years ago|reply
Well, there's your problem. If you concern yourself primarily with US History, as Khan does (and declares what he is doing), you're going to necessarily ignore a lot of non-US perspectives, like, y'know, Leningrad, Churchill, the rape of Nanking, Japan's lack of oil reserves, the whole bit. The real question is not whether Mr. Khan did a poor job of explaining US History, it is whether the idea of teaching "$country history", when we concern ourselves primarily with foreign affairs as Mr. Khan does, whether focusing on the actions of $country in an era of global politics gives a skewed and ultimately inaccurate perspective. The answer to that should be a rather obvious 'yes'...
I do doubt however that Mr. Khan truly hopes to achieve or at least does not really believe that he can achieve a monopoly in education. Perhaps his format will be copied but I doubt his lectures themselves will become the status quo especially if they are as lacking in depth as the example shown (I am not really familiar with the Khan Academy). The graver problem shown in the article does not really concern the Khan Academy but rather our method of consuming information from a general standpoint, and the dangers of the personalization of news; but this is a rather tired complaint, and the author does not suggest a novel approach for combatting it.
[+] [-] eyko|15 years ago|reply
The idea behind it is getting children interested in history enough that they would pick up a book. It's not, as I understand it, the only account of history they're expected to have. And to think otherwise is to think stupid.
[+] [-] tibbon|15 years ago|reply
His point about FDR's viewpoint of Hitler's invasion of Poland is really weak and I just don't get it. Everything actually is relative. The Germans probably thought it was just as fine (if not moreso) to invade Poland as in the US Bush thought it was ok to invade Iraq. Of course history is written by the victors. Had Germany won, it would have been written as a good action from their perspective.
So in 15 minutes he doesn't dig into terribly much detail. Let's face it, even after a teacher spends an entire semester going over this with 8th graders, in 10 years time do they remember all the details? Details are something that can come after interest is solidified. Pushing details on 8th graders misses the larger point often as it is buried in dates, maps, names and such. If you get them hooked on the main point, they will find the details.
[+] [-] hillel|15 years ago|reply
Other than criticize this new source of education, what are YOU doing to address the needs of people hungry for learning other than continuing on the same well worn path that you've been on for decades?
Professional academics whining about Khan Academy ignore the fact that their customers are telling them something by flocking to Khan's videos. They're saying that higher education today doesn't always meet their needs, and they need these services packaged, priced, and delivered in new ways.
If Mr. Clemens doesn't like Khan's treatment of a particular topic, how about recording your own video that does it right.
It does seem easier to criticize and keep to your own cloistered little world rather than put yourself out there and try to innovate. But that's just my perspective.
[+] [-] natural219|15 years ago|reply
He brings up a few valid points that I haven't thought of before. Presumably, as systems like KA are adopted the amount of total educational material decreases, as individual curricula are replaced by a standard set of materials. This decreases diversity in the type of education available for students, which can be seen as a good or a bad thing. I bet the author would be all for the system if the videos were "conservative" and they were replacing curricula of "liberal" educators teaching our children filthy subjectivist lies.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|15 years ago|reply