The success of the Khan Academy is by orthodox educational standards surprising. That it is surprising ought to tell us something: that the orthodox understandi

The success of the Khan Academy is by orthodox educational standards surprising. That it is surprising ought to tell us something: that the orthodox understanding of how education should be "delivered" is at least partly wrong. We should be particularly suspect of the belief that higher production values are worth pursuing. Before KA, if you suggested that you could deliver unusually effective education through a series of ten-minute videos having truly horrible production values, the mainstream education industry would have ignored you. After KA, they can't. What the success of the Khan Academy suggests is that production values are not important and, perhaps, that the pursuit of high production values is wasteful and even counterproductive. Now that's an interesting hypothesis.