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Let Them Eat Khan Academy
theodp writes "Connie Ballmer announced that Seattle's Lakeside School and nine other private schools have formed the Global Online Academy to enhance learning opportunities for students at the elite institutions, some of which charge upwards of $35,000 in tuition and count the likes of Bill Gates, President Obama, Steve Case, Mitt Romney, and Sean Lennon as alums. 'Independent schools have traditionally struggled with how to provide their education models and resources to a wider student population in order to serve a public purpose,' Ballmer explained. 'While the initial classes will be for students at member schools only there is potential to share them with a broader community and help narrow the disparity of educational opportunity.' In the meantime, there's always Khan Academy."
...I would start with the issue of eliminating the employment of multiple choice questions in the sciences and mathematics.
This move in my opinion, would encourage students to deliberately show the working (read steps) as they solve these questions.
What we have these days is a situation in which students are encouraged by the knowledge that they can guess their way through an exam and it has not helped.
My approach would reward 'small marks' for each step shown to be relevant in solving a number. This approach is better. What do you think?
IME as a private school graduate, they don't give you a better education anyway. What you get:
(i) How to talk the talk, i.e. say what people want to hear - most of life's tests aren't about properly understanding stuff, just about giving the impression that you do;
(ii) The right friends - they will help you out whenever you need it;
(iii) A sense of self-importance which gives you just enough tenacity and lack of empathy to overcome any adversary^H^H^Hity.
Curriculum? Read good books and talk to smart, keen people.
Is this posted for information only or is there a point?
One of my college physics professors had a novel solution for using scan-trons for easy grading while avoiding the multiple choice dilemma. Instead of selecting from a series of 4 or 5 choices to choose from, he gave us scan-tron sheets with the columns of numbers from 0-9 like the ones you see when you fill out your social security numbers. You work out your physics problem and then input the number on 3 or 4 columns.
It's a great way to make exams easy to grade while avoiding multiple choice. We always had our physics exam grades back the next class for that class.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Color me cynical, but somehow I get the feeling that institutions whose clientele are exclusively the super-rich do not have a real stake in trying to minimize the disparity between their clients and the less fortunate. They may put up something "for everyone" for its PR value, but I wouldn't be surprised if at the same time they're emphasizing to their paying customers how much better is the education their kids are getting.
This is in contrast with private universities, which are also terribly expensive, but which have a tradition of valuing education for its social benefits. Even these universities may one day get to the point where they feel economically threatened by the free material they post (for example MIT's OpenCourseWare) --- for example, if a new demographic of students starts to appear which demand to pay less but only to be tested and certified for their degrees, because the free educational material available is good enough for them.
Incidentally, here's the professor:
http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~croft/FARADAY.HTML
Awesome dude. For the last 14 years, he's given the annual Faraday Christmas Children's Lecture where he messes around with physics experiments like jetting around on rollerblades and a 50 pound fire extinguisher and having a cinder block broken on his chest while laying on a bed of nails.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
That isn't always fair. Some private schools are, indeed, purely about meeting the right sort of people, playing some sports, and learning how to not look awkward in a suit. Others provide a genuinely excellent education. Some do both(whether to the same people, or by means of having a meritocratic battle arena and an old boys club on the same campus, catering to different populations.)
Threatened is right.
The entire point of education is to administer the knowledge with a series of proofs that the students learned it (let's ignore gaming the system for now.)
Knowledge huh? That should be cheap. The inbound material consists of books and podcasts! And a college degree is a very finite series of classes, so it can't really be that hard for $State_School to post a curriculum for all the courses that don't require crazy equipment. Then all the student needs is Q&A sessions, and the administered tests. Price tag per semester: $500.
So then the Elites have to step it up to show where that other $200,000 is going.
Yet we're well into the Music and Movie content debates, how has Edu remained this far below the radar?
The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So what you're saying is that a private school education teaches you how to be full of shit, ride the coat tails of others, and develop a huge ego?
No wonder the education system needs a massive wild fire.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
That may work in some simpler degrees, but many degrees require hands on work and experience as well. This can't be handled through books and podcasts. Do you really want your Doctors, your Engineers and your Nuclear Scientists learning from books on tape before they go out and start operating on you, building your bridges and running your nuclear reactors?
AJ Henderson
It isn't actually clear that schools have all that great an incentive to be terribly protective of their "curriculum". Some colleges have explicitly endorsed(and funded) things like OpenCourseWare, and even for the ones that don't, it isn't as though you'd have a hard time scraping a complete syllabus and reading list off the prof's website(or, if the school uses some horrid authenticated 'portal' like that damnable "blackboard" crap, virtually anybody taking the course would give you a copy of the syllabus and reading list for a 6-pack...)
At the highschool level, things like "AP" and "IB" are pretty heavily codified, and the tests that actually verify your knowledge of them are administered independently of the school, so you don't run into the "You say that 'my mommy and daddy academy' was taught according to Roxbury Latin's curriculum. How cute... Now go away." problem. Public schools, similarly, have voluminous state standards and approved textbooks that are trivially available for public inspection.
What schools actually sell isn't really curriculum; but (depending on level and institution) a mixture of prestige/networking, a reputation that allows them to (credibly) assert that a graduate with a decent GPA has actually learned their curriculum, practicum courses using facilities unavailable to smaller institutions or individuals(particularly in things like chemistry and physics), and access to really good people in the relevant fields.
Access to a good curriculum can, certainly, make autodidactic behavior easier(given that the set of books/resources one could possibly devote time to is larger than could be tackled in a lifetime, it sure does help to have somebody else suggest the ones worth starting on, a problem for which some intelligence is required; but no level of brilliance will substitute for years of experience...) and one's experience with a merely OK teacher following a good curriculum will be much better than the same teacher following a bad one. However, it is really impressive to watch and experience what a Good teacher can do, with or without a curriculum. There are plenty of stuffed suits out there, and plenty of research-focused intellectuals barely cleared for human interaction; but there are also Good Teachers who can bring more insight into a series of extemporaneous talks and reading suggestions than could 90% of their lesser peers, given full access to a curriculum. Good schools try to have some of those on hand.
I applaud efforts to use technology's ability to organize and cheaply disseminate information that would historically have mouldered away somewhere to provide broader access to information, and advice on how to use it, to people who don't have a good source thereof. Hopefully it will even outcompete some pathologically counterproductive teaching environments. I'm somewhat skeptical, however, of such projects abilities to either rival having access to really good teaching, or to handle the task of introducing students to new things. Given how cheap technology makes it, a system that is purely helpful to autodidacts is still entirely worth it; but some of the pieces where the motivated autodidacts of the world stand around congratulating each other on how brilliant their newfound educational model is seem to miss the fact that much of the educational world's "trench work" consists of trying to inspire disinterested students to become interested learners(and, if that fails, at least shove enough basic knowledge into them that they don't become another recruit for the useless festering underclass...)
"The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network."
The "Old Boys" network has a key advantage. Their parents actually care and can fully provide for the welfare of their children. The problem with Public Education is the fact that there is this crazy idea that "All kids should be saved and are worthy to go to college" The problem is School isn't always fun and most children do not have the ability to self motivate themselves to do well in school. There are a lot of parents who think education is a wast and use the schools as a baby sitting service. Other parents do not have the resources to help their children. Private school aren't any better then public schools however the parents tend to pressure the children to perform better. If you take all the kids out of a snotty upper crust public school and put them in the poorest inner city school, and all the kids of the inner city school into the upper crust public school I doubt you will see any meaningful change in the child's education.
I would argue the schools will need to be more selective. If by high school they should be strongly pressured (not forced) to go to vocational training if they don't have what it takes, so they are trained for the workforce in 4 years. The A and B students will then continue onto High school, where the distractive elements of kids who really don't want to be there, is reduced thus can focus more on education and college.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I am a current high school math teacher.
The solution you propose doesn't help so much with the problem of multiple choice tests. The goal is to understand what the student knows. If a student makes a sign error at the beginning of the test, but does all of the steps correctly, this student knows a lot about the problem. Without actually looking at the work, I don't know how to tell this.
Another example is systematic error. Suppose the student doesn't understand rounding rules, or switches x and y. Again, looking at the work and I can tell much more about what the student knows.
Combining several threads at once, it still works to slice a good year off the "general ed requirements" for those professions, and the lecture courses thereafter. Meanwhile, it gets into the "degree subsidization" of those professions by the English majors. That would force a collision with the other stories that we are giving away our engineering knowledge for free to the Chinese and reducing the US jobs for those degrees.
My original post meant that for the simpler degrees, if we convince the employers that X degree is good enough to hire, it tackles the "you don't have the piece of paper" problem. ... Which lastly collides with the Babysitting Service crew.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
like all /. readers, I scanned the article, picked up only the keywords 'Ballmer ' and 'Khan' and hence I feel compelled to make a comment about someone throwing a chair while yelling 'KHAAAaaaan!'
Thanks for your attention.
Yeah, agreed for that. Certainly a lot of courses that are taught as lectures really do not need to be. Personally, I'm not an academic and would prefer something more along the line of apprenticeship for professional fields. I've never liked the whole lecture mentality in favor of hands on and dynamic education. I don't learn well from blanket presentation of material and learn much better from actually doing and I think this is true of many people. So yeah, I agree that general education stuff that doesn't really have a hands on application can be easily taught for effectively free and think that anything beyond that should be more hands on and dynamic. The costs would then be associated with the skill level of the people you are learning from (and therefore the value of the skill you are learning if you have the ability to match the level of skill.)
AJ Henderson
Yeah, but some students work better that way. If you get down to it, a teacher lecturing isn't much different than a textbook either, except shlee can take questions. And taking questions isn't that great unless you're wondering about the answer too, otherwise it's just breaking your train of thought.
So, I'd rather have a video that's professionally made (not by professional, but just anticipating what students will ask) and being able to rewind it instead of sitting in a lecturing frantically taking notes getting a ton down because the professor hinted that any bit of trivia is up for exam.
Now, I can understand Khan Academy is a one way exchange, and teachers can offer a two way exchange (conversation) but in my educational experience that's so rare inside the 5-12th grade classroom and then in the first several undergraduate years (outside class may be different) that people may as well be harping about unicorns.
Showing steps has its drawbacks too. It biases things towards specific mechanics chosen for either pedagogical purposes or ease of marking rather than practicality or insight. I'll illustrate this with an anecdote.
Many years ago when I was at MIT, there was a guy in the dorm who always finished his problems sets in a fraction of the time of the rest of us, although he sometimes got marked down for not "showing his work". It turned out he could perform many astonishing feats of algebra in his head. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused, so I questioned him about this. He said he never learned the "proper" ways of doing things because they were so tedious. It was so much easier just to see the answer. Yet while he was intelligent enough, apart from math he didn't seem like a superhuman genius. He'd simply worked out algorithms for doing things that didn't require a lot of working memory, either in his head or (like the rest of us) using paper as supplementary memory. He'd turned a kind of corner in algebra, like the one when you're learning a foreign language and start to think in it instead of translating word by word and puzzling over book grammar. I lost track with this guy after college, and I've often wished that I'd thought to write down the "tricks" he had for simplifying algebra so I could make them available to the world.
The point of this story isn't that the educational system should be built around the needs of rare individuals like this. It's that it's important for teachers to know their students as individuals. A teacher should be intimately familiar with each student's strengths and weaknesses, and use that knowledge to guide students to mastery of the subject, rather than verifying that the student goes through the same standardized set of motions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network."
The "Old Boys" network has a key advantage. Their parents actually care and can fully provide for the welfare of their children. The problem with Public Education is the fact that there is this crazy idea that "All kids should be saved and are worthy to go to college" The problem is School isn't always fun and most children do not have the ability to self motivate themselves to do well in school. There are a lot of parents who think education is a wast and use the schools as a baby sitting service. Other parents do not have the resources to help their children. Private school aren't any better then public schools however the parents tend to pressure the children to perform better. If you take all the kids out of a snotty upper crust public school and put them in the poorest inner city school, and all the kids of the inner city school into the upper crust public school I doubt you will see any meaningful change in the child's education.
I would argue the schools will need to be more selective. If by high school they should be strongly pressured (not forced) to go to vocational training if they don't have what it takes, so they are trained for the workforce in 4 years. The A and B students will then continue onto High school, where the distractive elements of kids who really don't want to be there, is reduced thus can focus more on education and college.
I agree with this. Other developed countries, notably Germany and Japan have similar models. The German model of education seems IMO the best for preparing kids either professionally and vocationally in a manner that is meaningful for both students and society. That is what we need.
What we currently have in the US is a system with a 12-year long baby-sitting system that, upon exit, gives a kid the choice of flipping burgers or go to a 4-year college. It completely ignores vocational training. Vocational training is the foundation to a solid, self-reliant and enterpreneurial blue collar working class. We do not have that at all.
The reaction to Khan and his incredible resources is universal: People applaud and cheerfully encourage him to "keep going"
Now imagine if the reaction to Linus Torvalds had been the same in 1993. "Neato, Linus! More please! You're really awesome to have done all this yourself!"
Luckily for the world, that was not the reaction to the release of the Linux source code back then. People were like "Yeah, this is a great start, now let me add something to this so that we can build this into a fully functioning system." To be fair, Linus openly encouraged this and provided a framework for volunteer contributions. Khan doesn't do that, but does nothing to discourage it.
Yeah, his lessons are the work of one man, but already, they contain like 5% of a full curriculum of education. With 19 other Khans working in their spare time, we could finish the job and release "curriculum 1.0". Then, hopefully, many other Khans would work on augmenting and improving it. But it's almost shocking to me that something this important and easy is not being done. There might even be money in it for a company that releases free/openly licensed teaching material and then administers for-pay achievement tests or certification tests. If this were done right, it would be the obviously right path for gifted students, homeschoolers, and people who lack access to good traditional schools. They could go through the material at their own pace and take certification tests as quickly as they work through the material. Wise governments would even offer them a refund for the cost of tests they passed. It's much cheaper than the same government paying to "school" them.
As a homeschooling parent, I can say that Khan Academy is the best math related resource I have found. At 7, my son is doing math that generally isn't taught until the 5th or 6th grade.
The way they lay it out is really nice. When we started using it, I went over the chart with my son, and showed him how far he needed to go to be able to function as an adult. How far he needed to go to have completed the minimum high school math, how far Dad got in math, and how far he needs to go to pretty much 'complete' math. This has really helped him see Math as having completion points instead of being an endless treadmill. Me and my wife are also going though all of the exercises ourselves, so he can see our chart filling along side of his. This has been a real motivator for him.
In the real world, it almost never matters whether you're right or not, as long as you can bullshit convincingly.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.