11 ms·

Khan Academy iPad app launched

182 points by spicyj 15y ago

garraeth 15y ago
My first post, and not directly to the point, apologies. But if you haven't checked it out, please do check out Khan Academy. One of my favorite videos is his ~1.5 hour informal session at MIT: http://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/v/salman-khan-talk-at-the-mit-club-of-northern-california http://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/v/salman-kha... I really hope he can actually take his ideas to fruition. Getting rid of the "blob" (industry term he uses sometimes). Getting students to understand 100% of a topic before moving onto topics that use the previous topic as a foundation. Paying fewer, good, teachers $100k+ (this may sound bad, please watch the video to understand what the entails) rather than many (maybe good) stretched-too-thin teachers the wages they get now. etc. Amazing watch and well worth an hour of your time. edit: clarity.
tedmiston 15y ago
(It's not available in the US App Store on my iPad for some reason (iOS 5.0.1).) Navigation by subtitles is interesting. I wish that existed on the website. Sites like MIT's Udacity have broken away from the barrier of losing the user's focus or being redundant by dividing videos into even smaller segments of just a few minutes with continual questions / exercises for instant feedback. I wonder if Sal is considering something similar. I've seen the Exercises feature, but it lacks exercises for most of the videos.
- spicyj 15y ago
  Sometimes the search index takes a while to update -- if you make sure to follow the direct link then I think it should work.
  - tedmiston 15y ago
    I noticed you're a KA intern. Can you comment on any interesting problems addressed or aspects of the iPad implementation? It appears to be fully native as opposed to a wrapped web app. Is that correct?
    - spicyj 15y ago
      See kamens's post here for some comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691076 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691076 The "right side" (video, subtitles) of the app is a single web view, but the outer shell and navigation is done natively.
- ig1 15y ago
  It doesn't appear in the app store for me either (UK), but I can get it by following the link here.
- kamens 15y ago
  Note that we are currently a/b testing the effects of offering a "transcript" button under each video on the website itself which does just this. If you're lucky, you may already have the button. We'll almost certainly launch it to everyone soon even though the test hasn't told us much, just b/c we think it's a useful feature.
  - bphogan 15y ago
    Just passing this along - transcripts of videos would potentially make this more useful for low vision, blind users, and the hearing impaired.
neebz 15y ago
apparently it is developed with jQuery and jQuery mobile. Would love to see how it fares on Android devices. Our experience with Sencha Touch (wrapped with PhoneGap) has been not so good on Android performance-wise.
- nathos 15y ago
  Sencha Touch 2.0 is supposed to have significantly better Android performance: http://www.sencha.com/blog/announcing-sencha-touch-2/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/announcing-sencha-touch-2/
benbjohnson 15y ago
First off, I'd like to say that Khan Academy is awesome. I've started using it with my 8-year old daughter to practice math and she loves it. That being said, I have a few criticisms of the iPad app: 1. The title of "Watch. Practice. Learn almost anything for free" is deceptive. I think the strongest point of the Khan Academy web site is the practice section but it's not available on the iPad app. 2. The transcript is way too granular. It makes it hard to read and it makes the transcript really long in some cases. Breaking it out by paragraph (instead of every 3-5 seconds) would make it more readable. I don't even think the timestamp needs to be shown. 3. It'd be nice to see the directed acyclic graph of lesson dependencies like they have on the site. It's hard to know where to start when you have 2,800 videos. Great job putting out the app though! It's great to see some good educational tools for the iPad that don't suck.
- kamens 15y ago
  Thanks for feedback, and agreed on title. There are many 3rd party apps out there that have taken "Khan Academy" and we didn't want to go through the legal hassle or harm any developers using our API, so we added that on. We may eventually have 3rd party apps rename to something slightly less 100% official.
tsunamifury 15y ago
The breadth and depth of Khans work is nothing short of astonishing. His ability to put a large amount of information out there for anyone to use is an overwhelming kindness. That being said, Khans work lacks polish. You could suggest that his informal presentation style is a plus, or that focusing on producing as much content as possible is more important, but I disagree. His narration has an erratic cadence and he is often repetitive in a way that corrects or modifies the previous statement rather than building upon it. His voice is not "radio-friendly", but thats my personal opinion. The transcripts are poorly laid out and are nearly impossible to scan visually, there only use is for search purposes. The information architecture is clear and to the point, but it's not oriented to the true beginner. Someone who doesn't already know what the labels mean wont know why they should or shouldn't learn these items. I hope khan academy invests in polishing some of the great work he has put together so far, I think it would be worth the investment.
- UK-AL 15y ago
  There's tons of other resources out their that sound like a professional voice over. However they have no personality and don't sound like a individual talking to you one to one. They sound like they are are polished for a mass audience with no personal attachment what so ever to the user. They sound like a robot repeating facts from a book. This is opposite to khan. Khan takes the 'brotherly'(Despite never knowing you) approach to teaching, and sometimes makes mistakes and lacks a little bit of polish. I think this is actually the key thing that makes khan academy work compared to other suppliers.
  - sopooneo 15y ago
    Folks, it's not an either or.
- chrishenn 15y ago
  Recently I started using Khan Academy a lot more. At first I too felt like a lot of the videos needed more polish, as well as some other aspects of the site. But eventually I accepted that it really didn't matter whether I was watching one of the newer HD videos or the older pixelated ones. It wouldn't help me learn. I think the informal style is a plus. Making the videos more professional would risk them being the same thing as a textbook. In my math class, we occasionally do "flip teaching" using brightstorm [1]. Its basically a more formal version of Khan Academy, and I think the videos are super boring to watch compared to something like Sal's video on the squeeze theorem [2]. [1] http://www.brightstorm.com/ http://www.brightstorm.com/ [2] http://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus/v/squeeze-theorem http://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus/v/squeeze-theorem
avjinder 15y ago
The appstore mentions that it was launched on 17th February. Why is this being posted today?
kamens 15y ago
Interesting tidbit: it's taken us months to get approved for the App Store b/c we were a bit stubborn in our refusal to offer an audio-only version of Sal's videos to people w/ crappy cell connections. Since his stuff is so low-bitrate, we thought we could get all videos down to the lowest of Apple's HTTP Live Streaming requirements -- even having the crappiest of crappy video is 1000x better than audio only when trying to learn algebra. We were able to make a <64kbps version for most of the videos, but couldn't do it for everything. Some were just over the mark. We hoped for a little app store leniency given the content. Eventually we had to give up on some problematic videos and offer audio-only versions for crappy streaming connections. Gotta ship.
- gauravk92 15y ago
  Sal? Or Khan Rep? I'm just about to dive into the app but I want to know up front whether you guys have taken the online practice system and remade it for the iPad . Apple showed off stupid iBooks interactivity, like sliding to help yourself learn the stages of mitosis..., they don't get it. But if someone is leading the way, it's khan academy.
  - spicyj 15y ago
    (GP is Ben Kamens, lead developer at KA.) As of now, the app only does videos; exercises will come in a later release.
    - gauravk92 15y ago
      Thanks, checked the profile right after replying, how stupid!
    - ashleyw 15y ago
      I seriously can't wait for the exercise side of things, do you have any idea when such an update will appear?
      - spicyj 15y ago
jannes 15y ago
This app seems to be a blend of native UIKit development and jQuery Mobile. The navigation on the left-hand side is native and really fluid, but on the right-hand side (where the videos and subtitles are) is a UIWebView with jQuery-Mobile-powered pages. That's why the scrolling performance of the subtitles is so shitty (compared to native scrolling) and why the "share" and "download" buttons don't really look native. But an average user wouldn't notice these things, so I guess they're not important. I just don't understand why the developers didn't do everything natively. What are the advantages of using - in my mind - inferior technology like jQuery Mobile in an app that's completely custom-built anyway? It can't be that much more work to do the whole interface with UIKit. Other than that I think it's a really good app (and great content, too). So, congratulations to the developers and Sal!
- clintjhill 15y ago
  I agree with the point of your question, but I do know that in some cases it's a matter of codebase count. Which is to ask would it be better to have 1 codebase that serves as your website and native views? Or is it better to have X number of codebases for your views based on the number of platforms you'd like to be on? Especially when in all cases the views should be the same regardless of platform/native. Sometimes native is forgone to provide more centralization of views. It's not always good to custom build for every platform when you want consistency in your UX across all platforms. It all depends. EDIT: Grammar.
  - jannes 15y ago
    I see where you are coming from. And I agree that it's a trade-off. But I think my point is, that from a usability point of view you simply have no other choice than having X codebases, one for each platform you want to be on, if you are not willing to compromise on usability. I don't know of anyone who tried themselves at the magical "write once, run anywhere" and delivered a consistently great user experience. Of course, it would be hyperbolic to say that the Khan Academy app has some huge usability flaws. It hasn't. But I'm mostly thinking about another example here: Facebook. They're a billion dollar web company and even they managed to majorly fuck their mobile apps up in terms of responsibility and general snappiness. They tried "write once, run anywhere" and failed. There was an article about Facebook's mobile technology on ReadWriteWeb some time ago: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobile-was-design.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobi... (I hope this information isn't outdated already) HN discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397872 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397872 I think empirical evidence shows that this is the wrong approach if you want to deliver a good user experience.
senthilnayagam 15y ago
Good to see a native app, I think they are hosting them, my kid used to get distracted by ads on YouTube videos
- spicyj 15y ago
  That's right, we're hosting them on S3.
Macsenour 15y ago
tidbit: in my high school I was given a math book and told to read the book at night, and do the homework in the classroom the next day. There were students at every level sitting at long tables. The two teachers roamed the aisles in case we had questions. They verified our work and pulled a few of us aside if we all seemed to be stuck at the same place. Sounds amazingly like the 60 Minutes story I just heard. Funny thing is, my high school did this in 1978, and the school was Berkeley High EAST Campus. Further, it was considered a punishment to be forced to go there. Result: I did the 9 month Geometry course, developed at Berkeley High, in 3 months and passed the required exam. I'd say, this works and I'm living proof.
beatle 15y ago
great. this and the iTunes University App = Golden
joelthelion 15y ago
This is great and all, but the people who can benefit the most from Khan academy typically don't own and iPad.
- sireat 15y ago
  Naive question here, is there a real need for a native app for iPad in the first place? Would the iPad's browser not be able to handle all the content on Khan's Academy?
eli 15y ago
Does anyone know if the app was packaged with PhoneGap? If not, how was it done?
- spicyj 15y ago
  Not PhoneGap -- we used our own native wrapper for the navigation, etc; the "right side" of the app (video and subtitles) is all a web view.

182 points by spicyj 15y ago

My first post, and not directly to the point, apologies. But if you haven't checked it out, please do check out Khan Academy. One of my favorite videos is his ~1.5 hour informal session at MIT: http://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/v/salman-khan-talk-at-the-mit-club-of-northern-california http://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/v/salman-kha... I really hope he can actually take his ideas to fruition. Getting rid of the "blob" (industry term he uses sometimes). Getting students to understand 100% of a topic before moving onto topics that use the previous topic as a foundation. Paying fewer, good, teachers $100k+ (this may sound bad, please watch the video to understand what the entails) rather than many (maybe good) stretched-too-thin teachers the wages they get now. etc. Amazing watch and well worth an hour of your time. edit: clarity.

tedmiston 15y ago

(It's not available in the US App Store on my iPad for some reason (iOS 5.0.1).) Navigation by subtitles is interesting. I wish that existed on the website. Sites like MIT's Udacity have broken away from the barrier of losing the user's focus or being redundant by dividing videos into even smaller segments of just a few minutes with continual questions / exercises for instant feedback. I wonder if Sal is considering something similar. I've seen the Exercises feature, but it lacks exercises for most of the videos.

spicyj 15y ago
Sometimes the search index takes a while to update -- if you make sure to follow the direct link then I think it should work.
- tedmiston 15y ago
  I noticed you're a KA intern. Can you comment on any interesting problems addressed or aspects of the iPad implementation? It appears to be fully native as opposed to a wrapped web app. Is that correct?
  - spicyj 15y ago
    See kamens's post here for some comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691076 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691076 The "right side" (video, subtitles) of the app is a single web view, but the outer shell and navigation is done natively.
ig1 15y ago
It doesn't appear in the app store for me either (UK), but I can get it by following the link here.
kamens 15y ago
Note that we are currently a/b testing the effects of offering a "transcript" button under each video on the website itself which does just this. If you're lucky, you may already have the button. We'll almost certainly launch it to everyone soon even though the test hasn't told us much, just b/c we think it's a useful feature.
- bphogan 15y ago
  Just passing this along - transcripts of videos would potentially make this more useful for low vision, blind users, and the hearing impaired.

neebz 15y ago

apparently it is developed with jQuery and jQuery mobile. Would love to see how it fares on Android devices. Our experience with Sencha Touch (wrapped with PhoneGap) has been not so good on Android performance-wise.

nathos 15y ago
Sencha Touch 2.0 is supposed to have significantly better Android performance: http://www.sencha.com/blog/announcing-sencha-touch-2/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/announcing-sencha-touch-2/

benbjohnson 15y ago

First off, I'd like to say that Khan Academy is awesome. I've started using it with my 8-year old daughter to practice math and she loves it. That being said, I have a few criticisms of the iPad app: 1. The title of "Watch. Practice. Learn almost anything for free" is deceptive. I think the strongest point of the Khan Academy web site is the practice section but it's not available on the iPad app. 2. The transcript is way too granular. It makes it hard to read and it makes the transcript really long in some cases. Breaking it out by paragraph (instead of every 3-5 seconds) would make it more readable. I don't even think the timestamp needs to be shown. 3. It'd be nice to see the directed acyclic graph of lesson dependencies like they have on the site. It's hard to know where to start when you have 2,800 videos. Great job putting out the app though! It's great to see some good educational tools for the iPad that don't suck.

kamens 15y ago
Thanks for feedback, and agreed on title. There are many 3rd party apps out there that have taken "Khan Academy" and we didn't want to go through the legal hassle or harm any developers using our API, so we added that on. We may eventually have 3rd party apps rename to something slightly less 100% official.

tsunamifury 15y ago

The breadth and depth of Khans work is nothing short of astonishing. His ability to put a large amount of information out there for anyone to use is an overwhelming kindness. That being said, Khans work lacks polish. You could suggest that his informal presentation style is a plus, or that focusing on producing as much content as possible is more important, but I disagree. His narration has an erratic cadence and he is often repetitive in a way that corrects or modifies the previous statement rather than building upon it. His voice is not "radio-friendly", but thats my personal opinion. The transcripts are poorly laid out and are nearly impossible to scan visually, there only use is for search purposes. The information architecture is clear and to the point, but it's not oriented to the true beginner. Someone who doesn't already know what the labels mean wont know why they should or shouldn't learn these items. I hope khan academy invests in polishing some of the great work he has put together so far, I think it would be worth the investment.

UK-AL 15y ago
There's tons of other resources out their that sound like a professional voice over. However they have no personality and don't sound like a individual talking to you one to one. They sound like they are are polished for a mass audience with no personal attachment what so ever to the user. They sound like a robot repeating facts from a book. This is opposite to khan. Khan takes the 'brotherly'(Despite never knowing you) approach to teaching, and sometimes makes mistakes and lacks a little bit of polish. I think this is actually the key thing that makes khan academy work compared to other suppliers.
- sopooneo 15y ago
  Folks, it's not an either or.
chrishenn 15y ago
Recently I started using Khan Academy a lot more. At first I too felt like a lot of the videos needed more polish, as well as some other aspects of the site. But eventually I accepted that it really didn't matter whether I was watching one of the newer HD videos or the older pixelated ones. It wouldn't help me learn. I think the informal style is a plus. Making the videos more professional would risk them being the same thing as a textbook. In my math class, we occasionally do "flip teaching" using brightstorm [1]. Its basically a more formal version of Khan Academy, and I think the videos are super boring to watch compared to something like Sal's video on the squeeze theorem [2]. [1] http://www.brightstorm.com/ http://www.brightstorm.com/ [2] http://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus/v/squeeze-theorem http://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus/v/squeeze-theorem

avjinder 15y ago

The appstore mentions that it was launched on 17th February. Why is this being posted today?

kamens 15y ago

Interesting tidbit: it's taken us months to get approved for the App Store b/c we were a bit stubborn in our refusal to offer an audio-only version of Sal's videos to people w/ crappy cell connections. Since his stuff is so low-bitrate, we thought we could get all videos down to the lowest of Apple's HTTP Live Streaming requirements -- even having the crappiest of crappy video is 1000x better than audio only when trying to learn algebra. We were able to make a <64kbps version for most of the videos, but couldn't do it for everything. Some were just over the mark. We hoped for a little app store leniency given the content. Eventually we had to give up on some problematic videos and offer audio-only versions for crappy streaming connections. Gotta ship.

gauravk92 15y ago
Sal? Or Khan Rep? I'm just about to dive into the app but I want to know up front whether you guys have taken the online practice system and remade it for the iPad . Apple showed off stupid iBooks interactivity, like sliding to help yourself learn the stages of mitosis..., they don't get it. But if someone is leading the way, it's khan academy.
- spicyj 15y ago
  (GP is Ben Kamens, lead developer at KA.) As of now, the app only does videos; exercises will come in a later release.
  - gauravk92 15y ago
    Thanks, checked the profile right after replying, how stupid!
  - ashleyw 15y ago
    I seriously can't wait for the exercise side of things, do you have any idea when such an update will appear?
    - spicyj 15y ago

jannes 15y ago

This app seems to be a blend of native UIKit development and jQuery Mobile. The navigation on the left-hand side is native and really fluid, but on the right-hand side (where the videos and subtitles are) is a UIWebView with jQuery-Mobile-powered pages. That's why the scrolling performance of the subtitles is so shitty (compared to native scrolling) and why the "share" and "download" buttons don't really look native. But an average user wouldn't notice these things, so I guess they're not important. I just don't understand why the developers didn't do everything natively. What are the advantages of using - in my mind - inferior technology like jQuery Mobile in an app that's completely custom-built anyway? It can't be that much more work to do the whole interface with UIKit. Other than that I think it's a really good app (and great content, too). So, congratulations to the developers and Sal!

clintjhill 15y ago
I agree with the point of your question, but I do know that in some cases it's a matter of codebase count. Which is to ask would it be better to have 1 codebase that serves as your website and native views? Or is it better to have X number of codebases for your views based on the number of platforms you'd like to be on? Especially when in all cases the views should be the same regardless of platform/native. Sometimes native is forgone to provide more centralization of views. It's not always good to custom build for every platform when you want consistency in your UX across all platforms. It all depends. EDIT: Grammar.
- jannes 15y ago
  I see where you are coming from. And I agree that it's a trade-off. But I think my point is, that from a usability point of view you simply have no other choice than having X codebases, one for each platform you want to be on, if you are not willing to compromise on usability. I don't know of anyone who tried themselves at the magical "write once, run anywhere" and delivered a consistently great user experience. Of course, it would be hyperbolic to say that the Khan Academy app has some huge usability flaws. It hasn't. But I'm mostly thinking about another example here: Facebook. They're a billion dollar web company and even they managed to majorly fuck their mobile apps up in terms of responsibility and general snappiness. They tried "write once, run anywhere" and failed. There was an article about Facebook's mobile technology on ReadWriteWeb some time ago: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobile-was-design.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobi... (I hope this information isn't outdated already) HN discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397872 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397872 I think empirical evidence shows that this is the wrong approach if you want to deliver a good user experience.

senthilnayagam 15y ago

Good to see a native app, I think they are hosting them, my kid used to get distracted by ads on YouTube videos

spicyj 15y ago
That's right, we're hosting them on S3.

Macsenour 15y ago

tidbit: in my high school I was given a math book and told to read the book at night, and do the homework in the classroom the next day. There were students at every level sitting at long tables. The two teachers roamed the aisles in case we had questions. They verified our work and pulled a few of us aside if we all seemed to be stuck at the same place. Sounds amazingly like the 60 Minutes story I just heard. Funny thing is, my high school did this in 1978, and the school was Berkeley High EAST Campus. Further, it was considered a punishment to be forced to go there. Result: I did the 9 month Geometry course, developed at Berkeley High, in 3 months and passed the required exam. I'd say, this works and I'm living proof.

beatle 15y ago

great. this and the iTunes University App = Golden

joelthelion 15y ago

This is great and all, but the people who can benefit the most from Khan academy typically don't own and iPad.

sireat 15y ago
Naive question here, is there a real need for a native app for iPad in the first place? Would the iPad's browser not be able to handle all the content on Khan's Academy?

eli 15y ago

Does anyone know if the app was packaged with PhoneGap? If not, how was it done?

spicyj 15y ago
Not PhoneGap -- we used our own native wrapper for the navigation, etc; the "right side" of the app (video and subtitles) is all a web view.