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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy for John, and this is great news for the Khan Academy. But I have to admit my reaction was mixed about his initial plans to focus on the iPad. On one hand, this is tantamount to saying you want to ensure that rich kids have better access to educational materials. Relative to the rest of society, children of parents who can afford an iPad are probably the least needy re educational tools. On the other hand, they're probably the ones who will make the most use of the tools.

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You don't plan for today, you plan for five years down the line. Tablet computers are likely to become as ubiquitous as desktops or laptops, it's purely a matter of time.

Tablets are a much more useable form factor in classrooms, etc.

I agree that tablets are going to be ubiquitous in the future, but it may not be iPads that get into the most hands. I'd like to see John put his incredible javascript knowledge to work on a great cross platform web application rather than a native iOS app.

As I replied a few minutes ago - it absolutely will be a cross platform application using web technologies. It remains to be seen how it'll be bundled (likely using PhoneGap, I suspect) so at that point most of the major platforms are feasible.

That line of reasoning makes sense. He specifically mentioned iPad - not tablets in general. When I think of the educational needs of tomorrow, I think of school districts like Los Angeles, where the drop out rate is ~33%. It's really hard for me to imagine a scenario where tablets are wide spread among students in the lower income areas of that district.

Hopefully the iPad is just a kickoff point. One of my philosophies is that at least some part of your job should give you joy, and out of that great things can happen. Maybe iPad development is just something he wants to do for the joy of it.

NB: I know that John's not a one man army, and I'm not trying to lay this all on his shoulders. I'm just thinking out loud on HN.

"Hopefully the iPad is just a kickoff point."

That's precisely it. Being who I am, I'm going to be building everything with Open Web technologies and most likely built on top of jQuery Mobile. The iPad is just serving as a good initial platform to target and test on before expanding massively.

I wouldn't be surprised if much of the work that happens on the tablet version of the site gets back-ported to the main site itself (as things like tablets and mobile devices tend to encourage minimalist UIs and a larger emphasis on what the user is attempting to achieve).

I did work for the One Laptop Per Child project in the past, I'm a strong advocate for getting useful resources out to as many people as possible - regardless of their means.

John beat me to the punch here. We're thinking about a much more general mobile strategy. My personal mission is to try to design an experience for content, student interaction, and exercises that is usable on smaller screens because, although the tablet market is booming (thanks in great part to the growth of the iPad) the smartphone market is much bigger and growing more quickly. They are also likely to become commoditized more quickly (if you want to argue that they aren't there already). In any case, replace the word "iPad" in his post with "mobile" and I think you are closer to what John, I, and the rest of the team are talking about.

Congrats on your new position! I love Kahn Academy.

Do you think there's any chance that Sal will open up contributions to other teachers? I believe that Kahn Academy could evolve into a MUCH better tool if Sal focused on establishing the curriculum (and which videos and exercises need to be developed), and allowed other people to submit videos from across the internet.

While it's cool that Sal is the sole instructor, he's not the world's best instructor, and I'm sure the overall product could be improved through contributions of others. And you could go from 2100 videos to 10,000 videos a LOT faster if you allowed others to contribute.

Just my 2 cents worth.

"Tablets are a much more useable form factor in classrooms, etc."

why?

I'd imagine: Easy to store, easy to interface with, can be passed around, relatively cheap, easier software installation than some OS, don't take much desk space.

Anyone else other ideas?

I don't understand this point of view. I question the assumption that iPads are primarily devices of the wealthy. We're talking about $500 for a lifetime of learning, not thousands of dollars. And the portability and durability of iPads makes them easily rentable and transferable.

We must leave the obsession with the iPad aside for a moment. The whole idea is to deliver educational content through a hand held device. The thing here is there are many parameters attached to it. First is the device, then the content delivery itself has a cost(Internet subscription et al) then the maintenance of devices etc. So the cost of the device is not the only thing. There are many incremental costs.

Most of this is definitely out of the reach of the people who actually need it. $500 is a lot of money for people in my country. Most may be earning only 1/5th of that in the whole month. Average salary of a teacher in India a around $150 a month. Which is around $5 a day average.

How do you expect mass technology adaption with these sort of expenses?

So what do you suggest? The person I responded to was specifically concerned about the iPad, I presume vs other devices that might also be able to deliver the Khan Academy content. Are we now to criticize anything not affordable to $150/month wage earners?

First is the device, then the content delivery itself has a cost(Internet subscription et al)

Yeah, the connectivity is the biggy. Especially with video. Even in "first world" countries there are many places with poor/expensive connectivity that's frequently not suited for regular video use. In Africa, it's basically the norm. Imagine - a teacher costing less than the bandwidth to download some videos.. ;-)

Why when I was a kid, rich kids got Apple IIc's and us poor kids got a Commodore 64 and 1540 drive for around $300.

Anyway, $499, which isn't that much, is today's price. iPads will drop in price and you'll get them used. At some point along will come great Android tablets for $299 (and probably iPads). Gotta start somewhere. Tablets are the next big thing. Soon they'll be a billion of them.

$499 is a lot in a developing country.. I'm not against this approach, I'm just adding a different perspective.

You're assuming that it was his plan and his decision to focus on the iPad. Kahn will be his employer, so I imagine they have a hand in deciding what is important enough for him to work on. It doesn't seem likely that he just up and decided that he'd build them an iPad app and made the decision without needing any approval.

Roughly right. I told them that I really wanted to build a cross platform, mobile, version of their application (amongst other things, naturally). They mentioned that they were already looking to build an iPad application - that seems like a fine place to start development and testing.

It's going to be a challenge to figure out the right UI idioms for the project, less so getting it working on a bunch of platforms giving the technology stack (open web technologies). Right now that's my biggest concern. Once we figure out how the interactions should work then the table/mobile world is our oyster.

The iPad is the only established tablet, and surely anything they do on their can go onto the Playbook, Android tablets, etc. when the platforms and Khan are ready. I'm sure we'll be seeing tablets in the Netbook price range soon. As far as digital devices go, it's hard to get much cheaper than that.

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