Hacker News Reader

> some of the things these people believe they've learned from the KA, and believe must be right because they (think) they've seen it on KA really worry me

What kind of things?

Are you suggesting that flesh-and-blood teachers or brick-and-mortar schools are less likely to spread misinformation or leave students with misconceptions? I can tell you a hundred false things I was taught by "real" school, and some of them are probably just things I think I was taught.

This. And I spent some time in some of those education courses they (sort of) recommend to Khan in the article, and they were either a complete waste of my time or worse. They have more bad politics than good pedagogy.

Truly the greatest enemy the online education revolution faces is not the current education system, but the way that people secretly substitute the real system for this mysterious magical perfect system based on the assumption that the stated goals of the current system are actually its result, and compare online against the myth instead of the reality.

Goals aren't results. Compare real to real. The real competition isn't the mythical fantasyland where everybody learns everything perfectly and retains it forever as a result of the gentle teachings of the schoolmarm. The real competition is the system that produces the real people you really run into as you go about your day, doing real things. If online education in its currently very early state even manages to sometimes match the real world, at one-tenth the price or less, you can imagine what another ten or twenty years of refinement is going to produce for the online model.

And in that real comparison, online will definitely not always win today, and will always have weaknesses. Shop class seems unlikely to work well online. (But then, the real school systems shut down those classes 20 years ago....)

This is a spectacularly true comment, and is generalizable across disciplines. I've rewritten it slightly to generalize it....

Truly the greatest enemy the $REFORM_MOVEMENT faces is not the $EXISTING system, but the way that people secretly substitute the real system for this mysterious magical perfect system based on the assumption that the stated goals of the current system are actually its result, and compare online against the myth instead of the reality.

Are you suggesting that flesh-and-blood teachers or brick-and-mortar schools are less likely to spread misinformation or leave students with misconceptions?

Possibly, because when you leave school you can realize your misconceptions and learn from other people, as well as pointing out other people's misconceptions. But if everyone uses Khan Academy, everyone will end up with the same misconceptions.

Why wouldn't you be able to do that after taking some classes online?

I guess some people are suggesting that Khan Academy is the ultimate in education and that everybody should use only that and nothing else?

Except the self-fixing process you claim to be characteristic of physical institutional learning only happens when there is a significant number of people in the class that are A) In a position to think confidently and critically about the material B) willing to invest time and effort (often lots of both) in finding the correct conclusion and C) in contact with you about their insights. I have found the confluence of those factors to happen exceedingly rarely in physical classes and significantly less rarely in hybrid physical/online classes. This isn't surprising because lectures place severe limitations on two-way communication that online environments don't. With a traditional class structure (lecture/discussion section) I suspect at least 3/4 of questions go unasked and at least 3/4 of the received answers never get shared beyond the immediate group of individuals doing the asking (in comparison to an online forum, where the answers are googleable or at the very least spread to the entire class).

Also, online learning wins in the limiting case where courses have been iterated and feedback / FAQs taken into account. In a brick and mortar institution, "institutional memory" is effectively lost as professors retire or shift interests (if it ever existed in the first place) and their replacements introduce their own slew of idiosyncrasies, poor methodology, and misconceptions. In contrast, an online lecture never suffers this degradation. Sure, new lectures may replace old lectures (presumably at different sites), but both will be available for a time and during that time, students will pick up on inconsistencies. That's not true of brick-and-mortar lectures, where the only source by which a student can verify the material they are presented is the textbook or its alternatives. Combined with the tendency of courses to discourage reading the textbook (it's almost always a less point-efficient use of time to read textbook chapters than to do homework, practice problems, and go to office hours, which provide information better matched to the material that will be tested on), the status quo is a recipe for failure. My experiences confirm that this recipe for failure produces failure (in the pedagogical sense).

The third factor that favors online learning with regard to misconceptions are its twin killer features: the pause button and the rewind button. These reduce self-inflicted misconceptions tenfold.

So, sp322, I think the opposite of what you stated is true. I would welcome a conflicting opinion, because usually when I go on rants similar to the above three paragraphs all I get are nodding heads.

Yes, lets just perpetuate mistakes in perpetuity. And I highly doubt everyone would end up with the same misconceptions. However, the fact that Khan Academy is a) not rigorous, b) has no type of human interface with the teacher, c) has no type of input from professors and lead academic institutions, d) is purported as an educational savior by influential people when there is no such thing, e) uses outdated and confusing teaching techniques, f) has yet to put problems over exercises, and g) has no type of human interface between students it has a long LONG way to go.

Why must we always jump from A to B? I see this happen in all contentious subjects, but nowhere more than in education discussions.

The top-poster's point was about a very specific type of problem he's seen with some people watching some of Khan's videos. He does not even hint about the prevalence of the same problem in traditional schools.

Derek Muller of the YouTube science channel Veritasium did a TED audition wherein he discussed this: http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/Derek-Muller-The-key-to-ef...

He found that just showing a video of the laws of motion made people more confident of their answers on a physics quiz, but just as wrong. They would actually have false memories of the video confirming their prior knowledge. What worked was first debunking misconceptions and then replacing them with the truth, even though those videos were rated much more confusing.

We're not teaching blank slates, and if you teach as if you are, you end up with what you (and Derek) described.

Fascinating. There is also research showing (in gossip/news and politics) that by refuting a false statement, the act of repeating the statement actually reinforces it. People ignore the "... IS FALSE" part. I think that plays in here --- my simply consuming a statement, they slightly edit it to fit in with their prior information, or just to make it easier to remember, by dropping the complications.

You need to to drag someone through the mental struggle of unseating their beliefs.

My favorite technique is to find the source of the misconception, and highlight it. Instead of attempting to dispose of an entire complex thought, pick it a part, find the mistake ("you are confusing 'velocity' and 'force' -- they are different things."), and rebuild the correct explanation using the patched piece.

I agree. There is no doubt that Khan Academy is revolutionizing education, but it revolutionizes most and above all teaching, not learning. It enables students and teachers alike to get access to a wealth of instructional materials at any time, any place. It gives a second perspective on the material under study. It allows those that have forgotten a lot of the material to pick up again fast. It enables teachers to turn traditional lessons around: in stead of instruction in class and homework at home, one now start thinking about delivering instruction at home and do problems in the school environment.

At the same time Khan Academy's video lectures cannot take into account the prior knowledge of students but for what other videos have been downloaded at Khan's. It cannot take into account students' background, wishes, problems, disadvantages, and so on. There is no interaction, there is no conversation going on between teacher and pupil, pupil and pupil, and in the social environment of a class.

Furthermore, most videos and exercises seem to focus on repetition, rote learning, and giving correct answers. There is no room for exploring alternatives, errors, hypothetical situations, and what not.

Over-all, and most importantly, I wonder if Khan Academy does support/instigate/promote deep learning of the topics covered. And is that actually possible the way Khan Academy is set up?

Observe that Khan himself doesn't claim nor suggest so, but many who hail Khan as the savior of education seem to equate education with learning and, as a result, claim Khan's revolution in education as a revolution in learning. To me, these aren't the same and this pollutes the discussion between educators and fans.

To summarize: I think Khan's revolutionizing education but he isn't revolutionizing learning

I think that the crux of the argument seems to be this idea that there is a "magic bullet" to fix the education system. As a former teacher I can tell you that if there is a magic bullet it's parent involvement in students lives. No textbook, online video, or even a fantastic teacher is an acceptable substitute for parent involvement as a foundation for a child's educational success.

With that said, I think that KA is an excellent addition to the pieces of the educational puzzle. I've used many of his videos to supplement teaching and textbooks, both good and bad.

I have similar second-hand experiences, but really I'm not sure it's different than any other self-study method in that regard. I know people who are doing spectacularly well in things they self-taught from textbooks and online materials (FAQs, tutorials, StackExchange answers, etc.), and other people who have quite serious misconceptions they've somehow picked up in that route.

Khan Academy is interesting to me not really because it's a revolution in learning, but because it's another modality that is better for some people. Some people learn well from written material, and those people have traditionally been the successful autodidacts, working their way through textbooks and tutorials. But perhaps different kinds of materials can cater to other people, with people working their way through a lecture series instead of a textbook. That'll probably have many of the same pros and cons.

You say that, but I think a lot of people are making up criticisms in order to justify ignoring it.

Where i was taught we still had the exact same decimal problem khan has...

The best way to deal with it is through continuous refinement until criticisms are few

  > The best way to deal with it though is
  > continuous refinement until criticisms
  > are few

And for that you need the criticisms.

I regularly find that the criticisms you see launched across the internet at various projects are a lot less worthy than the criticisms that they generate internally. I'm of the mind that if you believe that something is valuable or worthy you should criticize it because that is how it will improve. And as such I quite look forward to reading criticisms exciting new projects like say Wikipedia or Khan Academy.

I am, almost without exception, deeply disappointed by the knee-jerk reactionary defensiveness you generally find in these things. Conversely, you go visit Wikipedia itself and it has insightful comments about how its user base tilts the content away from the global south, women, the poor etc. and constructive ideas for how to measure and ameliorate such issues.

I think it's only natural for people to react to such uninformed, accusatory criticism in the way they do. It reminds me of John C Dvoraks anti-Mac columns from years ago, which he later admitted were professional trolling.

I've watched some of the math videos with my 11yo. There's definitely room for improvement, but I find that encouraging. It's nice not to be close to the ceiling of how good online education can be.