Khan Academy
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2011–2012
20:27 · 5.1M views · Mar 10, 2011
Salman Khan's TED 2011 talk on Khan Academy. He shows that it goes beyond video lectures to self-paced practice and analytics for teachers, and argues for filling gaps in understanding.
HN recommends it to show Khan Academy's real model of mastery learning and teacher tools, often as a rebuttal to critics.
4 comments from Hacker News
Feynman would probably say establish a rock solid base, fill in the gaps in your understanding, and explore all of the components surrounding your areas of interest (e.g. read the sources cited in the footnotes :-). "It's not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview, Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle that he could find...In other words, he wanted to connect a new idea to what he already understood and thereby extend his understanding" ( [LINK] ). Feynman wanted to understand problem from all angles and understand why something was true, not just that it merely was true. His approach resulted in a tight mental framework that enabled him to connect new ideas and build upon insights from the outside in -- breadth before depth (see [LINK] ). Watch this TED talk by Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan academy, to see how filling in gaps of understanding can significantly accelerate your rate of progress ( this video ).
I think the best rebuttal to this article would be Sal's TED talk: this video In particular, he doesn't present the Khan Academy as a full replacement for primary education, but as an enhancement. In the second half of the video, he illustrates the teacher as maximizing the amount of useful interaction between themselves and the students. Instead of spending class time lecturing and producing examples (things that technology can handle easily, and in some cases better than a human can), teachers use their class time to interact with students individually, helping them better understand the content and meaning behind it. This time becomes even more useful because the application gives statistics on how students are performing, and what directions they're moving in; it arms teachers with better data and more time to use it.
This is exactly what Sal, the founder of Khan Academy, believes. What strengthens this argument is that, if you miss a few logical steps you end up even more baffled when you encounter concepts that are build upon the concepts on which you neglected to learn, mostly because you were either embarrassed to ask in class or because you thought that you got it right in the first place. This, adding the fact that it's "socially acceptable" to claim that a person might not be smart enough and give up entirely, is what makes children fail in the end and deemed to be "stupid". Edit: If you're further interested in Salman Khan's point of view you can check his TED talk here this video
The OP seems to forget that the goal of the Khan Academy is not just to produce videos. Of course there's no feedback with a one-way video lesson. If you watch his (excellent) TED talk [1], you'll see that his organization isn't just about video lectures, but rather an all-encompassing suite of tools that allows students to learn at their own pace, repeat lessons that they didn't understand at first, and provides teachers with analytics to target their attention towards those students who need help. [1] this video