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Comment by Marcan | Hacker News Reader

Why would you say that? Can you elaborate? As far as I'm concerned, it is a great free online resource which makes learning accessible to everyone. Sal Khan is also an excellent teacher.

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There’s like 500 way better online resources for any given KA topic. Take any KA video and compare it with the same topic from Numberphile, VSauce, or even just a random person who knows how to teach.

> Numberphile, VSauce

I just looked at the video listing for these creators and there's nothing but pop-science.

I don't understand how it's at all comperable to KA?

A. You didn’t look very hard. B. Okay, try PBS space time, Dr PhysicsA, 3Blue1Brown, Strand’s MIT series, Red&Blue. There are so many wonderful resources online to learn from that just need to be meta-organized, KA is the bottom of every heap except for the meta-organization. (And, BTW, many of the others have internal meta-organization.)

You’re comparing short entertainment videos vs something meant to break down subjects and teach them bit by bit.

Nobody is using Vsauce to help them study a college course. The videos simply don’t exist, and I say this as someone who’s watched the channels you mentioned.

Apparently you haven’t. DrPhysicsA is literally ALL of physics. Strang is ALL of linear algebra. For any topic there’s someone who’s done it better then KA. I agree that it requires meta-organization, and that’s a valuable contribution, but KA should stick to that par, bcs their teachers are uniformly soporific.

> DrPhysicsA is literally ALL of physics.

There’s more to physics than what one person or organization can teach.

And Ps. I say this as a teacher, a cognitive scientist, a computer scientist, an education researcher, and most importantly a parent whose kid’s teachers have (thankfully rarely) forced his kids through the KA video tunnel of drone, which I’ve had to subsequently un/re-teach nearly every single time. (BTW, KA “lectures” are quite often, IMHO as a teacher, simply wrong in approach. It’s like they took a standard textbook and made a video out of every paragraph. What a nightmare. Even a book would be better - at least you could flip back and forth.)

Have you watched all of the above? Kahn is learning-grade, while the others are high-quality pop-sci/math.

I feel like you're comparing apples and oranges.

I love Numberphile, but they work best as an exposure to new concepts. I'm not watching Numberphile to help me with my statistics homework, I'm watching to be introduced to the concept itself in a relatively entertaining way. It's closer to recreational math than a learning aid.

On the other end, I find KA videos to be a bit dry, but are useful when I need help with a specific concept in statistics or calculus or something.

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