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Personally, I see it as a great opportunity. Today you need a great teacher that can sit down and figure out why a student has problems understanding a specific

Personally, I see it as a great opportunity. Today you need a great teacher that can sit down and figure out why a student has problems understanding a specific concept etc, and explain in many different ways. I don't see how computers can't do that. Online education will actually level the playing field and make the best material and pedagogy available to everyone. Today, if you get a lousy mathematics teacher, you're set back years potentially. I know, I had one for 3 years in high-school. Compared to my peers, it really set me back. Had to work very hard to catch up, but fortunately I was motivated enough to do it. While Khan Academy might be good today, what I think would help even further is to find the absolute best teachers out there and "capture" the way they teach. Capture all the questions students have and incorporate them into the videos. For example, if there's a video talking about the number PI, the student should be able to pause in the middle of the video and see commonly asked questions and answers about this portion of the video. This also has the great benefit of students being able to go through the material at their own pace. Today teachers have to either leave half the class behind, or spend too much time on the weaker students.

zwieback 13y ago
I think this is heading in the right direction but teaching methods of the best teachers have been studied for years and I don't think the algorithm is simple. I have no doubt that computers can be better than the worst teachers but I think we're far a way from beating the best ones. I'm surprised at the negative comments here, I'm guessing there are a lot of education software entrepreneurs who somehow interpreted the article as a swipe at their industry. I thought it was a good counterpoint to the hype around online courses although it was also clearly a plug for another product. My kids are already growing up with a mix of online and warm-blood teachers. They talk a lot about how they like or dislike this or that teacher and they try very hard to succeed in the classes of the teachers they respect. They use Khan Academy and stuff like that but it's just this thing on the web they can draw on, they have zero emotional connection to it.
- purplelobster 13y ago
  Let me clarify that I think computers would help the most with explaining concepts in an engaging, pedagogical and interactive way. Having a personal tutor that helps you with your homework and example problems is much further into the future. But my biggest problem in school was not that I didn't get help to solve problems and do homework, it's that the teachers often didn't explain high-level concepts in a way that made it click for me. It's the one-to-many teaching that is especially bad today if you get a teacher that either can't explain well, or just doesn't understand the subject deeply enough to explain it well. Edit: As an example, listen to Feynman talk about anything and everything, and compare that with your average or below average college lecturer. The difference in your understanding is immense. A good teacher helps you build a mental model of the world and gets you excited about it. A bad teacher just regurgitates what the course material says with no real engagement. I wish I could have had Feynman-level lectures on everything from the start, it would have saved me years.
  - PebblesRox 13y ago
    My aunt has a story about this: one time she listened to a Feynman talk on tape. Afterwards she was explaining it to her son and she started to draw out some diagrams that Feynman had been drawing on the board during the lecture. Her son said "Wait, weren't you just listening to this? How do you know what the diagrams looked like?" She realized that his explanations were so clear that she had been able to picture everything without even consciously thinking about it.

zwieback 13y ago

I think this is heading in the right direction but teaching methods of the best teachers have been studied for years and I don't think the algorithm is simple. I have no doubt that computers can be better than the worst teachers but I think we're far a way from beating the best ones. I'm surprised at the negative comments here, I'm guessing there are a lot of education software entrepreneurs who somehow interpreted the article as a swipe at their industry. I thought it was a good counterpoint to the hype around online courses although it was also clearly a plug for another product. My kids are already growing up with a mix of online and warm-blood teachers. They talk a lot about how they like or dislike this or that teacher and they try very hard to succeed in the classes of the teachers they respect. They use Khan Academy and stuff like that but it's just this thing on the web they can draw on, they have zero emotional connection to it.

purplelobster 13y ago
Let me clarify that I think computers would help the most with explaining concepts in an engaging, pedagogical and interactive way. Having a personal tutor that helps you with your homework and example problems is much further into the future. But my biggest problem in school was not that I didn't get help to solve problems and do homework, it's that the teachers often didn't explain high-level concepts in a way that made it click for me. It's the one-to-many teaching that is especially bad today if you get a teacher that either can't explain well, or just doesn't understand the subject deeply enough to explain it well. Edit: As an example, listen to Feynman talk about anything and everything, and compare that with your average or below average college lecturer. The difference in your understanding is immense. A good teacher helps you build a mental model of the world and gets you excited about it. A bad teacher just regurgitates what the course material says with no real engagement. I wish I could have had Feynman-level lectures on everything from the start, it would have saved me years.
- PebblesRox 13y ago
  My aunt has a story about this: one time she listened to a Feynman talk on tape. Afterwards she was explaining it to her son and she started to draw out some diagrams that Feynman had been drawing on the board during the lecture. Her son said "Wait, weren't you just listening to this? How do you know what the diagrams looked like?" She realized that his explanations were so clear that she had been able to picture everything without even consciously thinking about it.