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"First, Khan has never lectured." "Second, Khan has never taught." Odd, because I'm pretty damned sure that through his lectures, he has taught me a good deal
by burgerbrain 16y ago
"First, Khan has never lectured."
"Second, Khan has never taught."
Odd, because I'm pretty damned sure that through his lectures, he has taught me a good deal of basic chemistry.
Results are the only thing that matters. If and only if people find Khan's material valuable, it will become popular. Guess what? It's pretty damned popular.
- arnorhs 16y agoExactly. Also: > What do you expect from a good lecture? Depth, > insight, introspective. It shouldn’t be just > regurgitated material from a textbook and it > shouldn’t be a “how-to” manual on tape. Is it possible that students don't feel the same way? For my part, the fact that the courses get down to it and don't over complicate things makes it better. If the courses were filled with "insights" and other off topic things I'd find myself fast forwarding all the time. I think this is a prime example of how having no domain knowledge actually can help a lot and free you from years of this-is-how-it's-always-been-done.
- burgerbrain 16y agoIt could be that students don't in fact place the same value in those things. However, in my humble experience, the Khan videos are actually much better at providing those things than most of the lecturers I have ever had. Sure he doesn't go off on tangents about work he did as a grad student in some tenuously related topic two decades ago, but I consider that a win and unrelated to "Depth, insight, introspective"
- pixcavator 16y agoOK, how about a practical example? In all Khan’s lectures on linear algebra find an explanation of how it contributes to calculus.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoTeaching solely to the test - if that is indeed what Khan does - does lead to decent test scores, and probably a decent education. I don't want to distract from Khan's work: a scalable system of decent education would truly be great. But offering a deeper understanding really is quite valuable to (some) students - even to some students who would not otherwise seek out this understanding. There are perhaps too few good teachers, or good students, to make this work at scale; but education can be more than transferring a list of facts and tricks from a textbook into a student.
- glenra 16y agoKhan's current lectures are best thought of as placeholder material. A rough draft. Having a free, competent, standardized tutoring job available on every little subject is SO MUCH better than nothing at all that clearly the low-hanging fruit at this point is to just cover more parts of more subjects. Once you've got lots and lots of subjects covered, it would make sense to assess the field to figure out which lectures are working the least well and invest effort on improving those. Khan Academy is a system that lets us set a baseline and then incrementally improve from there. If this "deeper understanding" can be conveyed in lecture form, it seems inevitable that as the lectures improve, some of them will impart "deeper understanding". Or maybe they'll just add an extra "deeper understanding" course in addition to the current ones.
- pixcavator 16y agoThis book has taught me a good deal of algebra. It's self-teaching.
- juretriglav 16y agoI'm betting a business (not just yet, but soon) on making good teachers out of people who never taught. I think I'm on the right side of that bet.