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Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

asfgioanio 3y ago
I don't see any reason to listen to Sal Khan. As far as I can tell, he became a major figure in education, with ample resources and real power, because he is good at explaining things. Why would I assume he knows anything about how education works in general because people liked his approach to one very small part of it? At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I'd listen to him before I would listen to you.
  - durub 3y ago
    Indeed, and I see plenty of reasons to listen to him. Khan Academy helped me immensely in college for free and Sal Khan has been at it for what, 17 years now? I'm pretty sure he has a better than average grasp on what it means to learn and how to improve the process. And even more importantly, he's trying to! If not him, then who should we listen to? I don't have a clue why GP reduces Sal to "good at explaining things" when Khan Academy is so much bigger than just him for a long time now. And I, for one, am very grateful that he exists. People in first world countries can't imagine the impact that free access to great education resources has in the rest of the world, like in my case. > At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here. The gym analogy falls short to me. The mistake here is assuming that someone that worked in education for almost two decades, and has achieved extraordinary results in the mean time, doesn't have any clue about education in general.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Likewise. Sal Khan has been instrumental in de democratization of education.
- vz8 3y ago
  A couple studies indicating benefits from Khan Academy, just from a cursory search: 16% lift in overall test scores: https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/sproject_attachments/w241_final_report_does_khan_work.pdf https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/sprojec... 11% lift in math test scores: https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4757&context=theses https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... And Khan Academy's impact page: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/impact https://www.khanacademy.org/about/impact has links to additional studies.
- elric 3y ago
  Many parts of Khan Academy are great precisely because Sal is good at explaning things. In an engaging fashion, in clear language, with frequent exercises. It's benefited many people over the years (including myself). Building a succesful learning platform which has impacted many students, certainly qualifies someone to have an opinion on education in my book. Would you be happier if he were some elected Minister Of Education -- who, from what I've seen, are generally about as qualified as a box of donuts? Literally no one at a gym assumes that muscular people are experts at medicine. But it is reasonable to assume that they know a thing or two about building muscle ...
- logicchains 3y ago
  >with ample resources and real power, because he is good at explaining things Isn't explaining things well the heart of good education?
- A_non_e-moose 3y ago
  > At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here. Who would be better at building strawmen? An average HN commenter, a farmer, or an etymologist?
akasakahakada 3y ago
Current education system is broken. You can't learn anything. Learning need feedback loop, but this do not exist. In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently. Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent, or at the end of the book. Why at the end, not next to that problem? Or next page? Why wasting my time to flip pages back and forth? If the content of exercise is important, why not include that into the text? If instructor is needed, why not making every concepts into Q&A as they had already been explained in office hour or email somewhere else? Why zero effort being put into knowledge accumulation? Human failed at education. ChatGPT obviously is a more knowledgeable entity, personally I prefer that more than human instructor.
- elric 3y ago
  I'm sorry to read you've had such an awful educational experience. Where was this? It does not resonate with my experience at all. I had my fair share of awful teachers, but the handful of excellent teachers really made a difference. The course material was generally pretty decent as well. My formal education ended some 20 years ago, and I'm sure things have changed, and from what I hear from younger friends and relatives, it doesn't seem to be for the better ...
  - akasakahakada 3y ago
    I think I read more textbook then average person to a extend that can call myself textbook reviewer. People usually stuck with only one book that is being assigned to them at class, But as a self-learner, I read all, literally all, linear algebra, discrete math, stuff like that, all just terribly written.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but I've taught a lot of students at the university level. Some of them have exactly this attitude. You're simply wrong. And on the long term path to failure. The exercises are invaluable. You don't get the answers because then you look at them. The whole point of the exercises is for you to do them, and then for you to figure out if you are right or wrong! The content of the exercises isn't in the book because you need to actually do things to learn. You cannot learn math, physics, and many other topics passively. You're ignoring the main lessons and features of the system. And no. There are countless amazing books. The fact that you can't see that is because you don't understand how to learn.
logicchains 3y ago
One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for a fraction of the cost of human tuition, potentially bringing about a huge leap in educational attainment. No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.
- TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  Decent? These current LLMs have more knowledge than every teacher on the planet combined. I’m very hopeful to see what finetuned models come out on top of the base gpt4 or lama
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    But is it just knowledge or is it the human connection that makes a difference? Students have access to all the information they need on Calculus through Google and other resources, for instance, but actually sitting down with a living, breathing human being and having them help you through your troubles...to me, that cannot be replaced with an AI. If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter...
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > But is it just knowledge or is it the human connection that makes a difference? Sense of connection, perhaps. But AI is getting better at faking that. Even ELIZA gave some people the feeling, though I'm not sure how. > If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter... We kinda are though? XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/903/
  - pjmorris 3y ago
    That's a little like saying Wikipedia has more knowledge than every teacher on the planet combined. It's being able to bring the relevant knowledge to bear on the student's understandings that matters, and that depends not only on the prompts the student provides the teacher/tutor/LLM, but on the teacher/tutor/LLM's understanding of the domain, the student's point on the learning curve, the student's level of frustration and receptivity, how people learn, and probably a dozen things that aren't coded into how LLMs respond.
routerl 3y ago
So, Khan Academy is experimenting with providing every student with (what they call) a "personal tutor". Examples given are: in coding and math, identifying potential mistakes in partial solutions, and suggesting how the student might get unstuck; in literature, an AI impersonates characters in a novel so the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?"); in writing, the AI writes with the student, rather than for students. The flip side is teachers saving time on lesson planning, grading, etc, all the work that's adjacent to actually teaching. A lot of this is a feature preview for Khan Academy, and a big part of it is just the ReACT pattern[1] (have people settled on this name?). To me, even all of the above is just an efficiency increase, which means workloads will increase to fill the available time, and we might see student to teacher ratios in the order of tens of thousands to one. How much of a future teacher's career will be about maintaining their AI systems? How much of learning will be like that too? [1] https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern
- seanhunter 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s ever safe to procnosticate on the basis that something is “Just an efficiency increase”. Plenty of tech that is just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society.
  - akasakahakada 3y ago
    And efficiency is everything. People defending bad education system using "gov has no money" "country has no teacher" excuses while the higher education is pumping out unemployed graduates every year. They can act more actively to make teacher as an job option to people. They just don't like problem being solved. Now GPT4 personal tutor exist, make them no excuse to not provide better education to people.
  - cultofmetatron 3y ago
    >just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society. truer words haven't been spoken. one big one off the top of my mind was the us governments decision to allow civillians to access gps at the same resolution as the arms. with that, all sorts of applications that require realtime location tracking. uber, lyft, rappi, gojeck off the top of my head.
akasakahakada 3y ago
I think teachers should probably use ChatGPT for a couple days before starting this conversation. It is the common ground. Not knowing what ChatGPT is able to do hinder valuable debate.
TimPC 3y ago
The AI I want in education generates a test and then based on my responses to questions figures out the exact content I need from a huge library. Imagine asking a student 15 math questions with adaptive difficulty in a dynamic test to figure out the next content they need to learn from complete videos of JK-Uni mathematics? Instead of teaching to an age, we give students exactly the content they need right now.
dtnewman 3y ago
Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some effort. Now, any student can have chatGPT generate a book report for Lord of the Flies in less than 5 minutes. The common theme I hear from teachers is that the education model will need to flip, where students do more writing in class and more learning outside of class. It sounds simple, but it's actually a massive change to implement and things are gonna be very tricky over the next few years until the dust settles more. [1] https://www.revisionhistory.com https://www.revisionhistory.com, which I originally thought would be most useful for cheating, but interestingly, many teachers are more interested in using it to help students work through revisions. I've gotten feedback from teachers that they plan to have students use ChatGPT to start their assignments and then task them with updating, modifying and annotating them, so I'm trying to figure out which features to build to support that.
- tru1ock 3y ago
  I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum. The current system is all about making it easier for the system to do its thing instead of the user(learner) getting something valuable out of it.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum. That will also favor a specific subset of learners.
    - tru1ock 3y ago
      Perhaps, but learners that are good in the current system will do well regardless imo. They are good at self directed, isolated learning which I think is the minority.
L_226 3y ago
I really see the potential here (if it is not already happening) for fine-tuned LLMs to start generating bespoke defence and economic policies. Think about the amount of data you could feed a system about orthodox management strategies, current supply chains, demographics etc. Probably at least 50% of current global governments / bureaucracy could be wholesale replaced by a single decent LLM, and the economic and social outcomes would be far better.
Augustineesther 3y ago
[flagged]
shartstorm92 3y ago
This is gross posturing and indicates future rent seeking behaviour. Imagine getting in front of people and telling them that some corporation trained the font of wisdom, and that you'd be happy to charge fuckin' admission! What absolute dogshit. All that future rent seeking for a glorified DAN prompt. This is the digital equivalent to making everyone do bullshit jobs because we never figured out how to deal with increased worker productivity from manufacturing.

I don't see any reason to listen to Sal Khan. As far as I can tell, he became a major figure in education, with ample resources and real power, because he is good at explaining things. Why would I assume he knows anything about how education works in general because people liked his approach to one very small part of it? At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here.

jacquesm 3y ago
I'd listen to him before I would listen to you.
- durub 3y ago
  Indeed, and I see plenty of reasons to listen to him. Khan Academy helped me immensely in college for free and Sal Khan has been at it for what, 17 years now? I'm pretty sure he has a better than average grasp on what it means to learn and how to improve the process. And even more importantly, he's trying to! If not him, then who should we listen to? I don't have a clue why GP reduces Sal to "good at explaining things" when Khan Academy is so much bigger than just him for a long time now. And I, for one, am very grateful that he exists. People in first world countries can't imagine the impact that free access to great education resources has in the rest of the world, like in my case. > At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here. The gym analogy falls short to me. The mistake here is assuming that someone that worked in education for almost two decades, and has achieved extraordinary results in the mean time, doesn't have any clue about education in general.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Likewise. Sal Khan has been instrumental in de democratization of education.
vz8 3y ago
A couple studies indicating benefits from Khan Academy, just from a cursory search: 16% lift in overall test scores: https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/sproject_attachments/w241_final_report_does_khan_work.pdf https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/sprojec... 11% lift in math test scores: https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4757&context=theses https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... And Khan Academy's impact page: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/impact https://www.khanacademy.org/about/impact has links to additional studies.
elric 3y ago
Many parts of Khan Academy are great precisely because Sal is good at explaning things. In an engaging fashion, in clear language, with frequent exercises. It's benefited many people over the years (including myself). Building a succesful learning platform which has impacted many students, certainly qualifies someone to have an opinion on education in my book. Would you be happier if he were some elected Minister Of Education -- who, from what I've seen, are generally about as qualified as a box of donuts? Literally no one at a gym assumes that muscular people are experts at medicine. But it is reasonable to assume that they know a thing or two about building muscle ...
logicchains 3y ago
>with ample resources and real power, because he is good at explaining things Isn't explaining things well the heart of good education?
A_non_e-moose 3y ago
> At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here. Who would be better at building strawmen? An average HN commenter, a farmer, or an etymologist?

akasakahakada 3y ago

Current education system is broken. You can't learn anything. Learning need feedback loop, but this do not exist. In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently. Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent, or at the end of the book. Why at the end, not next to that problem? Or next page? Why wasting my time to flip pages back and forth? If the content of exercise is important, why not include that into the text? If instructor is needed, why not making every concepts into Q&A as they had already been explained in office hour or email somewhere else? Why zero effort being put into knowledge accumulation? Human failed at education. ChatGPT obviously is a more knowledgeable entity, personally I prefer that more than human instructor.

elric 3y ago
I'm sorry to read you've had such an awful educational experience. Where was this? It does not resonate with my experience at all. I had my fair share of awful teachers, but the handful of excellent teachers really made a difference. The course material was generally pretty decent as well. My formal education ended some 20 years ago, and I'm sure things have changed, and from what I hear from younger friends and relatives, it doesn't seem to be for the better ...
- akasakahakada 3y ago
  I think I read more textbook then average person to a extend that can call myself textbook reviewer. People usually stuck with only one book that is being assigned to them at class, But as a self-learner, I read all, literally all, linear algebra, discrete math, stuff like that, all just terribly written.
light_hue_1 3y ago
I'm sorry, but I've taught a lot of students at the university level. Some of them have exactly this attitude. You're simply wrong. And on the long term path to failure. The exercises are invaluable. You don't get the answers because then you look at them. The whole point of the exercises is for you to do them, and then for you to figure out if you are right or wrong! The content of the exercises isn't in the book because you need to actually do things to learn. You cannot learn math, physics, and many other topics passively. You're ignoring the main lessons and features of the system. And no. There are countless amazing books. The fact that you can't see that is because you don't understand how to learn.

logicchains 3y ago

One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for a fraction of the cost of human tuition, potentially bringing about a huge leap in educational attainment. No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago
Decent? These current LLMs have more knowledge than every teacher on the planet combined. I’m very hopeful to see what finetuned models come out on top of the base gpt4 or lama
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  But is it just knowledge or is it the human connection that makes a difference? Students have access to all the information they need on Calculus through Google and other resources, for instance, but actually sitting down with a living, breathing human being and having them help you through your troubles...to me, that cannot be replaced with an AI. If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter...
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > But is it just knowledge or is it the human connection that makes a difference? Sense of connection, perhaps. But AI is getting better at faking that. Even ELIZA gave some people the feeling, though I'm not sure how. > If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter... We kinda are though? XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/903/
- pjmorris 3y ago
  That's a little like saying Wikipedia has more knowledge than every teacher on the planet combined. It's being able to bring the relevant knowledge to bear on the student's understandings that matters, and that depends not only on the prompts the student provides the teacher/tutor/LLM, but on the teacher/tutor/LLM's understanding of the domain, the student's point on the learning curve, the student's level of frustration and receptivity, how people learn, and probably a dozen things that aren't coded into how LLMs respond.

routerl 3y ago

So, Khan Academy is experimenting with providing every student with (what they call) a "personal tutor". Examples given are: in coding and math, identifying potential mistakes in partial solutions, and suggesting how the student might get unstuck; in literature, an AI impersonates characters in a novel so the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?"); in writing, the AI writes with the student, rather than for students. The flip side is teachers saving time on lesson planning, grading, etc, all the work that's adjacent to actually teaching. A lot of this is a feature preview for Khan Academy, and a big part of it is just the ReACT pattern[1] (have people settled on this name?). To me, even all of the above is just an efficiency increase, which means workloads will increase to fill the available time, and we might see student to teacher ratios in the order of tens of thousands to one. How much of a future teacher's career will be about maintaining their AI systems? How much of learning will be like that too? [1] https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern

seanhunter 3y ago
I don’t think it’s ever safe to procnosticate on the basis that something is “Just an efficiency increase”. Plenty of tech that is just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society.
- akasakahakada 3y ago
  And efficiency is everything. People defending bad education system using "gov has no money" "country has no teacher" excuses while the higher education is pumping out unemployed graduates every year. They can act more actively to make teacher as an job option to people. They just don't like problem being solved. Now GPT4 personal tutor exist, make them no excuse to not provide better education to people.
- cultofmetatron 3y ago
  >just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society. truer words haven't been spoken. one big one off the top of my mind was the us governments decision to allow civillians to access gps at the same resolution as the arms. with that, all sorts of applications that require realtime location tracking. uber, lyft, rappi, gojeck off the top of my head.

akasakahakada 3y ago

I think teachers should probably use ChatGPT for a couple days before starting this conversation. It is the common ground. Not knowing what ChatGPT is able to do hinder valuable debate.

TimPC 3y ago

The AI I want in education generates a test and then based on my responses to questions figures out the exact content I need from a huge library. Imagine asking a student 15 math questions with adaptive difficulty in a dynamic test to figure out the next content they need to learn from complete videos of JK-Uni mathematics? Instead of teaching to an age, we give students exactly the content they need right now.

dtnewman 3y ago

Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some effort. Now, any student can have chatGPT generate a book report for Lord of the Flies in less than 5 minutes. The common theme I hear from teachers is that the education model will need to flip, where students do more writing in class and more learning outside of class. It sounds simple, but it's actually a massive change to implement and things are gonna be very tricky over the next few years until the dust settles more. [1] https://www.revisionhistory.com https://www.revisionhistory.com, which I originally thought would be most useful for cheating, but interestingly, many teachers are more interested in using it to help students work through revisions. I've gotten feedback from teachers that they plan to have students use ChatGPT to start their assignments and then task them with updating, modifying and annotating them, so I'm trying to figure out which features to build to support that.

tru1ock 3y ago
I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum. The current system is all about making it easier for the system to do its thing instead of the user(learner) getting something valuable out of it.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum. That will also favor a specific subset of learners.
  - tru1ock 3y ago
    Perhaps, but learners that are good in the current system will do well regardless imo. They are good at self directed, isolated learning which I think is the minority.

L_226 3y ago

I really see the potential here (if it is not already happening) for fine-tuned LLMs to start generating bespoke defence and economic policies. Think about the amount of data you could feed a system about orthodox management strategies, current supply chains, demographics etc. Probably at least 50% of current global governments / bureaucracy could be wholesale replaced by a single decent LLM, and the economic and social outcomes would be far better.

Augustineesther 3y ago

[flagged]

shartstorm92 3y ago

This is gross posturing and indicates future rent seeking behaviour. Imagine getting in front of people and telling them that some corporation trained the font of wisdom, and that you'd be happy to charge fuckin' admission! What absolute dogshit. All that future rent seeking for a glorified DAN prompt. This is the digital equivalent to making everyone do bullshit jobs because we never figured out how to deal with increased worker productivity from manufacturing.