I do find it appalling that their approach is making a parody video instead of presenting a better solution. Instead of wasting their time—and mine— making fun of Khan, it would have been immensely more useful presenting a video of how their approach is better.

This is something I love about the development community (even though I'm not a developer myself). If someone thinks he has a better solution to your problem he sends a pull request and boom: the better solutions are often obvious.

A mild critique written up in a small corner of the internet is likely never to be seen by most.

Any publicity is good publicity, and I think these individuals definitely want to help.

These teachers that criticize Khan, you know what their 'pull request' is? They actually teach in real classrooms. They experiment constantly, looking for better ways to teach, and then they share their ideas with other teachers through a variety of different mediums. Those are their pull requests. You don't see them because you're not a part of the community.

Actually, you've hit upon the root problem. Truly effective education doesn't scale. Why? Because truly effective education is personal and personalized. A teacher is very effective when teaching small classes, because they can give students individual attention. That teacher is not going to be as effective when teaching 100, or 1000, or a million students. There's no way to provide individual attention there.

It can be hard for us to understand, because readers of HN are likely to be autodidacts to some extent who don't need that kind of attention. We need to understand that this isn't the norm. The research has been very consistent on this topic for decades now.

That doesn't mean that mass education a la khan and some of the other solutions that are out there are bad. The frustration educators are feeling about these rise from several different areas:

1) We know that these are not the most effective means of teaching. Most students do experience long-term learning in these environments.

2) Mass education is very dehumanizing. This isn't just websites that experience this, but teachers in actual classrooms who have to teach larger and larger class sizes every year. It's a dehumanizing experience.

Basically, to me it seems like we don't care about 2 any more, and the sacrifice of effectiveness is one we're willing to make in order to get quantity. I don't like that, and many teachers out there completely reject that idea.

So if you can find a way to scale personal (in the social sense), and personalized education, you're going to be positioned very well. Khan academy isn't it, and I'm not even sold that doing it on large scales is even possible.

Maybe scaling personalized education is not that complicated.Basically you just create wide arrays of explanations to something , and automatically try to offer each student the explanations he will benefit most from. Yes it demands work on content creation , and it demand a way(automated, crowdsourced, by teacher) to offer each student recommendations on content. But the gains could be immense: offering great education globally.

After you solved this problem, offering social support becomes somewhat easier.Instead of the teacher focusing on lecturing to full classes, creating lesson plans, he can focus on working with each student individually and offering social support. That's the whole idea of reverse classroom:children listen to lectures at home, and do homework at school with help of the teacher.

But that's just one way of a scalable solution, but there are many startups working on finding the solution and building interesting things. I wouldn't bet against all of them.

>> Most students do experience long-term learning in these environments.

That's interesting, because that doesn't match the many positive reviews from students. That also doesn't match the fact that khan offers exercises to some students and see results improve.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/study-cl...

(And I would argue huge college lecture halls, and courses such as the Standford AI class also illustrate that small class size isn't what it's made out to be.)

-frequent teacher feedback

-the use of data to guide instruction

-high-dosage tutoring

-increased instructional time

-high expectations

How many of those are not even doable by Khan?

By the way, when I say 'class size matters' I'm not saying that 'large class sizes aren't effective.' I'm saying 'smaller class sizes are more effective than large class sizes.' We all know learning can happen in pretty much any environment. The question is how to maximize that value. The fact that you can learn in the stanford AI class is very far away from answering the question 'is that the most effective way to learn.'

The last time Khan posted a call to hire on HN, I reached out to them about a position as a curriculum developer. They're more interested in expanding their back-end currently, not improving their instruction.

I think the reason is simple. Khan came from india, where teacher quality is awful in many places. he want to offer good enough education to those who have awful education.

I'm from Finland, which tops in PISA rankings and what I've read about the reasons behind our good PISA performance, one is that teachers profession is still valued here, we have quality applicants and thus good teachers compared to many other countries.

Based on that experience, I'd say that Sal Khan is definitely above an average as a teacher. Anecdotally I'd say he is a very good teacher, but that's debatable.

>Salman Khan, uses positive and negative signs inconsistently and mixes up transitive and associative properties.

Oh, the irony: Khan actually confused the commutative and transitive properties. The parody video gets it right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC0MV843_Ng#t=3m14s

This stuff is hard. To be fair, I don't think Khan is doing any worst than a first-year teacher in his first class of the day.

Youtube provides annotations – I wonder why KA doesn't insert crowdsourced corrections the instant a mistake is made? It seems like a good middle ground between his "write-only" philosophy (which has made him incredibly prolific) and the legitimate criticisms that quality has suffered as a result. This video was corrected, but I'm sure there's countless other small mistakes that could benefit from a change in process, not just a PR band-aid.

I've seen quite a few of his videos that have had serious problems in them, 20-second long stretches of silence when he's erasing or fixing mistakes, and places where he talks himself (and the listener) into a circle. I just don't see why Khan doesn't take the time to fix obvious mistakes/issues in his videos -- or have someone else do it! Sure, it means more video development time but it's for the purpose of producing superior lessons and not spreading misinformation.

Traditional educators revisit topics/lessons and learn from their previous attempts and from student feedback. This allows future lessons on the same topic to be more refined and better serve the student. Who honestly believes they get something right the first time, or doesn't try to improve something when they, or someone else, identifies an obvious problem?

Khan has an excellent framework in place, but he needs to revisit his content. Or let someone else do it -- do these videos have less value if someone other than Khan comes in to fix things up? I'm sure there would be plenty of volunteers. Obviously the guys in this video had some good insight that could have helped Khan's video.

I know that's his philosophy. But as someone who's a rules-based learner, it makes it really hard to learn anything when I start focusing on a mistake and wondering how does this fit with the general rule, etc.

And beyond that I find it much harder to unlearn something wrong than to learn the right thing to begin with.

It might be a good philosophy and practical for classroom teaching, but he needs to use the advantages electronic media offers and do some editing. At least to remove anything that's really going to throw a student off and possibly even discourage them.

Leave the mistake in and then correct it.

I think leaving the mistake and correcting later is very confusing and possibly discouraging to students. What is your response to that?

In the same video, note your mistake and correct it.

I don't see why you would want to leave the mistakes in there. Someone might not grasp the correction!

I just remember getting incredibly frustrated after basically learning the wrong thing in the first video and then having it corrected in the second.

Maybe youtube isn't the best medium for his videos and he should instead find an option that allows and easily facilitates future edits.

My grade 10 and 11 maths teacher couldn't factorise polynomials consistently. She'd often get stuck while halfway through a problem while working on the blackboard. Euclidian geometry was a challenge, and she failed to communicate theorem proving techniques. My Grade 12 (final year) maths teacher was promoted out after 3 months, and replaced by someone who didn't appear in class regularly.

I went for additional after-school maths tution, and I did very well during the exams in the topics that were covered there, but unfortunately we couldn't redo the whole syllabus. So my Higher Grade C for maths, although better than the majority of students in my school (and the country I guess, which has very low, and still-dropping educational standards) was disappointing.

We also had serious problems with our science teacher - retired, and replaced with someone who also never really used to pitch up. My parents bought me physics videos from the Learning Channel, a video-based system, and I managed to get an A. Unfortunately their budget didn't stretch far enough to buy the maths videos as well.

I have watched Khan's videos and I always wish that that sort of service was around back when I was in school. Yes, I, and most of my friends may have been deprived of some conceptual understanding, but at least we would have gotten some teaching. Something is better than nothing, at least for those of us who don't live in US College towns.

* Khan makes mistakes and just leaves them in.

* Khan doesn't tell you how you could use these things in real life

* He's just using a procedural rule-based approach.

Um, did none of your school teachers ever make those mistakes!?!? Because mine did, all the time. And I had nowhere else to turn. The beauty of Khan, and all the other educational videos on youtube, is that you can get a second (or third or fourth or tenth) opinion on the matter by asking your school teacher or by doing some more google searching. This is amazingly better than it used to be.

The great thing about Khan is he's obviously having fun teaching you. He's laughing and having a good time, he makes little mistakes and he has to scribble things out or correct himself later, and it's OK. He draws in pretty colors. What does that convey to a kid? Math can be fun! There are people that like it! You can like it too! It's OK if you mess up, even the pros do! The first time my kids watched a Khan video they were simultaneously cracking up and getting excited about their new-found knowledge. They begged for more. It was awesome. I wish more teachers taught like Khan.

Well, that's how they teach it in public school, here are the steps, no explanation of why it works, just accept that it works and memorize the steps. So if you want to attack teaching the procedure instead of the concept, look at just about every math teacher in K-12 first.

Wow, fantastic work guys! Your condescending commentary on the methods and content of the Khan videos is sooo helpful to a bunch of people who have benefited because of them. I know that my own kids, who augment their math from school with the Khan videos, really appreciate your mocking sentiment toward totally free content that has raised their knowledge, acumen and confidence toward math.

//-- end:sarcasm --//

Seriously, you want to "raise the level of the discussion" with this type of piss-poor commentary? The only thing you're accomplishing at the moment is simply re-inforcing the stereotype that traditional education teachers are threatened by this content.

Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise -- nobody will care.

This is the problem when hacker news tries commenting on Education. Readers here tend to be wildly ignorant about what's actually going on Education. How do you know that these teachers aren't doing things? Do you mean, they should be making a website? What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

You see this video and you don't know about the years of criticism that has been laid against Khan. You don't see the suggestions that have been offered (and ignored). You don't see these things because you're not a member of that community. Just like these teachers probably have no idea about what's going on in the Rails community, you really don't know what's going on in theirs.

> What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

I don't care about criticism of KA, I care about results for my kids. And I see positive results, so I have my own evidence that's contradictory, I guess. Given my "wild ignorance" of the education community, that's apparently the only measure I can use anyway, right?

I'm a classroom teacher, in mathematics and computer science. I can say, with certainty, that no teacher at my school is threatened by Khan Academy. That's a straw man. We became teachers because we want students to learn, and any resource that helps them do so is wonderful.

If we do criticize Khan Academy, it's because we're less than thrilled with the implementation and instruction, not the site's very existence.

I've spoken with more than a few teachers who are abjectly opposed to KA content. While my own observation is that of a concerned parent (small sample size applies), I would suggest that there are some teachers who exhibit the behavior of having their approaches to teaching second-guessed (hence: threatened.) By a similar measure about "straw men", I would double-check any assumptions about teachers and their desires for students to simply learn. I've personally dealt with those in the teaching profession who resist the idea that there's more than one way to learn something.

As for KA criticism, I've yet to hear suggestions that would yield better results. I get that implementation/instruction goes against the grain of traditional teaching methods. But hey, maybe that's the point? I'm in no position to assess that, but I am in position to evaluate results.

My kids are proof positive that using KA works for them. I'm an engineer and excelled at math, and they understand concepts better with KA material than without, so I have some perspective as to whether their learning is what I consider well-grounded.

The implementation and instruction at Khan really doesn't go against traditional teaching methods. They are traditional teaching methods, transposed online. Learn via a one-size-fits-all lecture, practice via rote. It's a traditional method, mind you, because it's worked fro hundreds of years.

I'm not surprised it works for a number of students, and I'm glad it works. It's better than most alternatives out there, paid or free, which is damning with faint praise.

I'll be the first to admit: I can't match it, or beat it, because it's a herculean effort to do so. One of my best one-day lessons has probably taken me 15 hours of work outside the classroom to write, over the course of 5 years, and has seen a half-dozen revisions. I'm still not in love with it. If I complain, it's not because I want KA to go away, it's because I want it to improve.

[1]During my tenure there, we won the Broad Prize for Urban Education, and were specifically noted in the award for raising our 4th and 8th grade mathematics scores more dramatically than any other city in the country.

Note that saying it like this is non-intuitive, but the point is that it's actually a geometric interpretation, so you draw a picture. This also helps students with the idea that there's actually some connection between algebra and geometry --- even though this is really fundamental, it's often omitted from mathematics education.

* make a deposit in your bank account every day, and see your balance in a few days (positive times positive);

* make a deposit in your bank account every day, and see your balance a few days ago (positive times negative);

* make a withdrawal from your bank account every day, and see your balance in a few days (negative times positive);

* make a withdrawal from your bank account every day, and see your balance a few days ago (negative times negative).

From there, you can show that -(-1) = 1. If the students have any command of factoring, you can use that to handwavingly show, for example, that -2 ✕ -3 = -1 ✕ 2 ✕ -1 ✕ 3 = -(-6)) = 6.

[1]She actually has them walk forwards, and hold signs - it's more involved, and covers all four cases for multiplying negatives and positives, but we'll gloss over that for the moment.

edit: oh yeah, can't use * for multiplication.

The worse part is that you describe this as a fight. It's not a fight, and I know that those teachers who are most outspoken against khan don't want it to be a fight. They want a collaboration, but it's not happening. It's really too bad that any criticism of khan is viewed as coming from the 'what's wrong with education' side of things. Pedagogically speaking, Khan academy is stuck with stuff known bad decades ago. Khan academy is like using rocket ships to transport telegrams. Yeah, the technology is cool, but the teaching practices need to be there too. That's what's currently missing from Khan academy, and there has been very little apparent effort on their part to actually fix that.