The whole site feels really cheap. I closed it at first because I thought I typed the URL in incorrectly and had landed on a parked domain.
The best thing about Khan Academy is its personality, which makes the learning very accessible. It's a no bullshit content delivery system, but this feels like it's straight out of Generic Corporate Designer™.
Non-free content? A scrolling marquee and pulsating Join Now buttons? And calling your well established and much-loved competition 'buzz-heavy'.. yeah right. This isn't going anywhere.
I went to the site and it was virtually empty. A split second later I realized I had AdBlock Plus on. I disabled it and what I've seen looked like a spam site. I think the comparison with Khan Academy is extremely unjustified here.
My question has always been - will Khan Academy lose relevance outside Sal Khan? He can't be an expert in everything. In order to scale, I'd expect that he'd have to be able to pick people who are great teachers and also domain experts.
And he's not an expert in 90% of the things he teaches. He's just quite good at understanding things quickly and explaining it to others, like Feynman was. Being called Khan Academy is apropro, it's mostly about his teaching and he is irreplaceable. Fortunately, video lives forever and most of the subjects are not transient.
Feynman only taught physics. Sal Khan teaches maths, astrophysics, economics, history, etc etc...
The potential for misinformation from someone who is teaching a subject that they are not an expert in, and have just "understood it quickly" is quite worrying. he has been criticised on this before, see http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=2029
Economics is a lot like maths, and there is crossover so it's no surprise that he is good at both. But History is a different kind of subject.
If he is really irreplaceable, then there are severe limits on it. I hope and expect that even if Sal Khan is a trailblazer, others can do follow his example.
I've learned about a lot more than physics from Feynman. I also see little evidence that classes are taught by experts in their subject matter except at the university level, and even then only rarely.
But let's post a link to Khan's comments/rebuttals to the claims of the NAS article you cited.
I am happy to see innovation happening in how people get 'an education'. As usual, some of the most interesting stuff is being done by people outside the established providers (cf. The Innovator's Dilemma).
It's interesting - Khan Academy has such massive following, but from a technology standpoint I've seen much cooler stuff... www.smart.fm comes to mind.
This article seems to be an ad for this guy's product, which is non-accredited college degrees from an online school. There's a lot of organizations doing online degrees, this is not very unique.
Competing in what? They don't offer the same courses!
Alison has stuff like "personal development", "touch typing" and even adobe products and a bit of Mathematics and Science, while Khan Academy is mostly Math and Economics in detail.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadThe best thing about Khan Academy is its personality, which makes the learning very accessible. It's a no bullshit content delivery system, but this feels like it's straight out of Generic Corporate Designer™.
Also, if you want a clickable url: http://alison.com
My question has always been - will Khan Academy lose relevance after Sal Khan ? Or is there a recipe that allows the creation of more Khan Academys.
The potential for misinformation from someone who is teaching a subject that they are not an expert in, and have just "understood it quickly" is quite worrying. he has been criticised on this before, see http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=2029
Economics is a lot like maths, and there is crossover so it's no surprise that he is good at both. But History is a different kind of subject.
If he is really irreplaceable, then there are severe limits on it. I hope and expect that even if Sal Khan is a trailblazer, others can do follow his example.
But let's post a link to Khan's comments/rebuttals to the claims of the NAS article you cited.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2633796
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634324
Get non-domain expert, smart teachers to study and try to teach a subject ?
Using flash to restrict consumption and bugging users with registration offers is not a better way to learn.
For an example of someone actually learning something, here's a post by someone who just finished the MIT 6.00 Intro to Comp Sci class on Curious Reef: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...
The comparisons to Khan are bizarre.
Alison has stuff like "personal development", "touch typing" and even adobe products and a bit of Mathematics and Science, while Khan Academy is mostly Math and Economics in detail.