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How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education

120 points by sophiebits 15y ago

tokenadult 15y ago
For a long, long time it has been possible to organize classes so that students work at their own pace, http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html and indeed my mother must have learned that way in the rural one-room school for grades 1 through 8 that she attended during the Great Depression. It's good that now pervasive technology is helping teachers relearn that children who occupy the same classroom don't all have to literally be "on the same page" at the same time. That allows more able (or more motivated) learners to move ahead of the meager expectations of the United States curriculum, http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ an improvement that is long overdue. "Critics argue that Khan’s videos and software encourage uncreative, repetitive drilling." I agree that the Khan Academy exercises currently are just that, exercises, and have suggested here on HN that the Khan Academy exercise writers do the hard work of building genuine online problem sets. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663 Fixing the nature of the online exercises and turning them more into problems would help with one defect noted in the article: "Of course, kids who’ve grown up on computers are quick to spot the weaknesses in Khan’s system. They discovered ways to cheat on the drills: In the logarithms unit, for example, they noticed that the third multiple-choice answer was always the right one." But as the article points out throughout, what online reporting and pratice has allowed is for children who are already attending school anyhow to use their class time to discuss what are actual PROBLEMS for each learner, with interaction with a live teacher, saving drill for times of the day when the teacher is not available. That's not a bad improvement at all. I should mention that in my own family we spend money on the ALEKS program http://www.aleks.com/ http://www.aleks.com/ for our homeschooled children, and we find that very helpful. It has many of the same strengths of the Khan Academy program (but is not free, nor does it have audio explanations) with a more complete syllabus and more challenging problems. The "knowledge spaces" theory underlying ALEKS http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/Science_Behind_ALEKS.pdf http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/Science_Behind_ALEKS.pdf is quite interesting and will probably have to be reflected by any complete K-12 mathematics program anywhere in the world. None of our children actively enjoy ALEKS, but they acknowledge that it is helpful for learning math, and I teach about the more cool aspects of math in the in-person math classes I teach through my local nonprofit organization.
- spicyj 15y ago
  Providing problems automatically on a website like Khan Academy is technically very challenging, because problems are hard to write. Currently, the many exercises are generated automatically with random numbers every time but such a scheme is impossible with harder, deeper problems – instead the problems need to be written thoughtfully and carefully, something that is hard to do on a large scale. In addition, answers to problems are usually significantly harder to verify than answers to exercises and so would be hard to implement on a large scale like Khan Academy is trying to do. Like you point out in this post, problems are probably best left (for now) to individual teachers who can spend more time and effort on individual students than is currently possible on a larger scale.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Creating problems may need to be done carefully, but there is no reason it can't scale. Khan and a few others can create thousands of good problems and distribute them to every internet user. Individual teachers creating problems adds little value. Timmy in NY can do 1000 of Khan's problems and so can Samir in Pune. What does it matter if Timmy's problems are different than Samir's?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- wisty 15y ago
  Cognitive psychologists (unlike education PhDs, who rarely have a clue) argue that drills create a solid cognitive foundation for students to apply the material to other areas. "Deep" problem solving is a good IQ test, but doesn't improve IQ. "Shallow" problem solving lets students master the elements of the subject, which does increase their intelligence.
  - psykotic 15y ago
    > "Deep" problem solving is a good IQ test, but doesn't improve IQ. "Shallow" problem solving lets students master the elements of the subject, which does increase their intelligence. As you have defined the terms here, what you say makes no sense to me. It seems to imply as a direct corollary that solving deep problems does not make you any better at deep problems, whereas solving shallow problems does make you better at deep problems. I can believe the last half so long as it is only a supplementary form of training (a crude analogy might be of a virtuoso musician practicing scales), but the first statement beggars belief and is contrary to all my experience.
jgamman 15y ago
any ideas why this page crashed my ipad browser?
yters 15y ago
The thing that revolutionized my learning was wanting to create computer games. Not only does that motivate me to learn math, but it prompts me to start developing my own theories of reality to test within games.
ImperatorLunae 15y ago
"Critics argue that Khan’s videos and software encourage uncreative, repetitive drilling—and leave kids staring at screens instead of interacting with real live teachers." I don't know where these critics have been, but that description sums up most of my math instruction in school.
- invalidOrTaken 15y ago
  Amen. My math instructors were great---I can't say the same for the methods they had to use.
edtechdev 15y ago
I posted a comment there but it never showed up, I guess because it had some links in it. I mainly recommended reading some educational research that could help improve the khan academy's work. Especially research in math education. See for example a report by Harold Wenglinsky called 'Does It Compute?" that found much better learning gains when kids did exploratory math activities and simulations and spreadsheets and so forth. When they did drill activities, their performance actually decreased. http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICTECHNOLOG.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICTECHNOLOG.pdf Then there are these two books (which are free online), the first of which I'd recommend everyone interested in creating educational activities read: How People Learn http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853 How Students Learn http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126 In math, it helps to use gestures and embodied analogies and representations of many concepts. In other areas like science and history that helps, too, but also students have a lot of strongly persistent misconceptions that have to be brought out into the open in your videos or text, plus it helps to have supplementary constructivist learning activities like simulations, games, and modeling/design tools (including programming).
dennisgorelik 15y ago
"The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school." That's exactly right - there is no point for human teacher to do what video can do better. Human teacher show help students when they stuck during exercise.
ph0rque 15y ago
This article got me thinking about the constructivist theory of education... and I realized that as a self-taught programmer, this theory hasn't worked for me except in very limited ways. I think constructivism works within a certain radius of mastered knowledge. No amount of 'fumbling around' is going to allow me to write a parser, or an operating system. Even for something that I have (or had) the motivation to do, which is to write a very simple learning game [0], the lack of knowledge was a show-stopper. I think constructivism works for tasks that are just outside of your scope of knowledge. So if I really wanted to create a rails app, I could do that, since that's what I've been doing. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032484 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032484

120 points by sophiebits 15y ago

For a long, long time it has been possible to organize classes so that students work at their own pace, http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html and indeed my mother must have learned that way in the rural one-room school for grades 1 through 8 that she attended during the Great Depression. It's good that now pervasive technology is helping teachers relearn that children who occupy the same classroom don't all have to literally be "on the same page" at the same time. That allows more able (or more motivated) learners to move ahead of the meager expectations of the United States curriculum, http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ an improvement that is long overdue. "Critics argue that Khan’s videos and software encourage uncreative, repetitive drilling." I agree that the Khan Academy exercises currently are just that, exercises, and have suggested here on HN that the Khan Academy exercise writers do the hard work of building genuine online problem sets. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663 Fixing the nature of the online exercises and turning them more into problems would help with one defect noted in the article: "Of course, kids who’ve grown up on computers are quick to spot the weaknesses in Khan’s system. They discovered ways to cheat on the drills: In the logarithms unit, for example, they noticed that the third multiple-choice answer was always the right one." But as the article points out throughout, what online reporting and pratice has allowed is for children who are already attending school anyhow to use their class time to discuss what are actual PROBLEMS for each learner, with interaction with a live teacher, saving drill for times of the day when the teacher is not available. That's not a bad improvement at all. I should mention that in my own family we spend money on the ALEKS program http://www.aleks.com/ http://www.aleks.com/ for our homeschooled children, and we find that very helpful. It has many of the same strengths of the Khan Academy program (but is not free, nor does it have audio explanations) with a more complete syllabus and more challenging problems. The "knowledge spaces" theory underlying ALEKS http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/Science_Behind_ALEKS.pdf http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/Science_Behind_ALEKS.pdf is quite interesting and will probably have to be reflected by any complete K-12 mathematics program anywhere in the world. None of our children actively enjoy ALEKS, but they acknowledge that it is helpful for learning math, and I teach about the more cool aspects of math in the in-person math classes I teach through my local nonprofit organization.

spicyj 15y ago
Providing problems automatically on a website like Khan Academy is technically very challenging, because problems are hard to write. Currently, the many exercises are generated automatically with random numbers every time but such a scheme is impossible with harder, deeper problems – instead the problems need to be written thoughtfully and carefully, something that is hard to do on a large scale. In addition, answers to problems are usually significantly harder to verify than answers to exercises and so would be hard to implement on a large scale like Khan Academy is trying to do. Like you point out in this post, problems are probably best left (for now) to individual teachers who can spend more time and effort on individual students than is currently possible on a larger scale.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Creating problems may need to be done carefully, but there is no reason it can't scale. Khan and a few others can create thousands of good problems and distribute them to every internet user. Individual teachers creating problems adds little value. Timmy in NY can do 1000 of Khan's problems and so can Samir in Pune. What does it matter if Timmy's problems are different than Samir's?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
wisty 15y ago
Cognitive psychologists (unlike education PhDs, who rarely have a clue) argue that drills create a solid cognitive foundation for students to apply the material to other areas. "Deep" problem solving is a good IQ test, but doesn't improve IQ. "Shallow" problem solving lets students master the elements of the subject, which does increase their intelligence.
- psykotic 15y ago
  > "Deep" problem solving is a good IQ test, but doesn't improve IQ. "Shallow" problem solving lets students master the elements of the subject, which does increase their intelligence. As you have defined the terms here, what you say makes no sense to me. It seems to imply as a direct corollary that solving deep problems does not make you any better at deep problems, whereas solving shallow problems does make you better at deep problems. I can believe the last half so long as it is only a supplementary form of training (a crude analogy might be of a virtuoso musician practicing scales), but the first statement beggars belief and is contrary to all my experience.

jgamman 15y ago

any ideas why this page crashed my ipad browser?

yters 15y ago

The thing that revolutionized my learning was wanting to create computer games. Not only does that motivate me to learn math, but it prompts me to start developing my own theories of reality to test within games.

ImperatorLunae 15y ago

"Critics argue that Khan’s videos and software encourage uncreative, repetitive drilling—and leave kids staring at screens instead of interacting with real live teachers." I don't know where these critics have been, but that description sums up most of my math instruction in school.

invalidOrTaken 15y ago
Amen. My math instructors were great---I can't say the same for the methods they had to use.

edtechdev 15y ago

I posted a comment there but it never showed up, I guess because it had some links in it. I mainly recommended reading some educational research that could help improve the khan academy's work. Especially research in math education. See for example a report by Harold Wenglinsky called 'Does It Compute?" that found much better learning gains when kids did exploratory math activities and simulations and spreadsheets and so forth. When they did drill activities, their performance actually decreased. http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICTECHNOLOG.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICTECHNOLOG.pdf Then there are these two books (which are free online), the first of which I'd recommend everyone interested in creating educational activities read: How People Learn http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853 How Students Learn http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10126 In math, it helps to use gestures and embodied analogies and representations of many concepts. In other areas like science and history that helps, too, but also students have a lot of strongly persistent misconceptions that have to be brought out into the open in your videos or text, plus it helps to have supplementary constructivist learning activities like simulations, games, and modeling/design tools (including programming).

dennisgorelik 15y ago

"The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school." That's exactly right - there is no point for human teacher to do what video can do better. Human teacher show help students when they stuck during exercise.

ph0rque 15y ago

This article got me thinking about the constructivist theory of education... and I realized that as a self-taught programmer, this theory hasn't worked for me except in very limited ways. I think constructivism works within a certain radius of mastered knowledge. No amount of 'fumbling around' is going to allow me to write a parser, or an operating system. Even for something that I have (or had) the motivation to do, which is to write a very simple learning game [0], the lack of knowledge was a show-stopper. I think constructivism works for tasks that are just outside of your scope of knowledge. So if I really wanted to create a rails app, I could do that, since that's what I've been doing. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032484 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032484