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I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Aca

I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum. They have some significant advantages compared to (just) a classroom: (1) They set a quality floor – sometimes a teacher can be really incomprehensible, or mean, or whatever, but Khan's videos are consistently okay. (2) They are available from anywhere, without need for special social/technical infrastructure, like enrollment in school or access to a university library. (3) They are self paced, which means they can better accommodate the various interest level, motivation, and speed of different students. (A typical classroom also has some advantages: it gives social setting, a consistent schedule/structure, and human feedback.) I'm also disappointed though, because it seems like, given production resources, there would be potential to make widely available materials that were much better than average lectures. With significant production effort (a team of subject experts and content creators doing a lot of dedicated work on each topic) I think it would be possible to make something truly great, but Khan's videos fall so far short of my imagination. For any particular topic, there are typically other freely available resources which I think are better. I've also been disappointed because many people have hyped the site as being extraordinarily amazing, but when I have looked at it, what is there doesn't match the hype.

nonethewiser 1mo ago
>I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum. Its better than average quality classroom teacher in my experience. And the point is this didn’t exist online at the time. His resources were strictly more. I imagine its still hard to find a single free resource that matches its breadth and quality.
blackoil 1mo ago
> materials that were much better Do you have few examples?
- jacobolus 1mo ago
  Personally I like books, but there are also many, many lecture videos on YouTube, some of them excellent (though I think they could still be better with bigger production teams and higher budgets). For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. If you have a specific topic in mind, I urge you to search around. (Making a long list of my own book/website/video recommendations about various topics here seems a bit off topic and out of scope.)
  - thaumasiotes 1mo ago
    > For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. There are? I know an OCW course includes "lecture notes" pdfs. Does it have the lectures too? For example, the course "distributed systems" is available on OCW as 6.824, from spring 2006: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-824-distributed-computer-systems-engineering-spring-2006/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-824-distributed-computer-syste... MIT has renumbered the course, but it's still around: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ . Don't be fooled by the URL; it's now 6.5840. And a series of lectures is available too: https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos . They're from spring 2020. They link to the course website for spring 2020, which is great. But it doesn't link to them, and OCW doesn't know about any of this, as far as I can tell. The 6.824 lecture series is pretty hard to discover, too, because it's uploaded by an account dedicated solely to that one course, which isn't related to any other MIT lecture videos.
    - jacobolus 1mo ago
      Some OCW courses have lecture videos, while others do not.
      - thaumasiotes 1mo ago

nonethewiser 1mo ago

>I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum. Its better than average quality classroom teacher in my experience. And the point is this didn’t exist online at the time. His resources were strictly more. I imagine its still hard to find a single free resource that matches its breadth and quality.

blackoil 1mo ago

> materials that were much better Do you have few examples?

jacobolus 1mo ago
Personally I like books, but there are also many, many lecture videos on YouTube, some of them excellent (though I think they could still be better with bigger production teams and higher budgets). For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. If you have a specific topic in mind, I urge you to search around. (Making a long list of my own book/website/video recommendations about various topics here seems a bit off topic and out of scope.)
- thaumasiotes 1mo ago
  > For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. There are? I know an OCW course includes "lecture notes" pdfs. Does it have the lectures too? For example, the course "distributed systems" is available on OCW as 6.824, from spring 2006: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-824-distributed-computer-systems-engineering-spring-2006/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-824-distributed-computer-syste... MIT has renumbered the course, but it's still around: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ . Don't be fooled by the URL; it's now 6.5840. And a series of lectures is available too: https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos . They're from spring 2020. They link to the course website for spring 2020, which is great. But it doesn't link to them, and OCW doesn't know about any of this, as far as I can tell. The 6.824 lecture series is pretty hard to discover, too, because it's uploaded by an account dedicated solely to that one course, which isn't related to any other MIT lecture videos.
  - jacobolus 1mo ago
    Some OCW courses have lecture videos, while others do not.
    - thaumasiotes 1mo ago