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How Education Is Changing Thanks To Khan Academy
An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on how freely-available lectures from Khan Academy are affecting both teaching methods and learning methods in classrooms across the country. From the article: 'Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She's now on her way to "flipping" the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan's videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids' own time and homework is done at school. ... It's when they're doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck. "I'm able to give specific, pinpointed help when needed, she says. The result is that Thordarson's students move at their own pace. Those who are struggling get surgically targeted guidance, while advanced kids ... rocket far ahead; once they're answering questions without making mistakes, Khan's site automatically recommends new topics to move on to.'"
Isn't this just doing what Salman Khan suggested in his TED talk? He proposed that teachers should use class time for supervising and assisting in problem solving, and that students should watch lessons at home.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This is a great idea when it comes to the way kids learn and where they struggle.
I'm wondering, though, what happens when a student doesn't have a computer or internet access.
I'm glad to see that this is finally happening. A "good" lecture on a subject needs to only be done once. It seem like a waste repeating the same thing year after year. Where students (speaking for myself) need help is in the actual implementation of the lecture subject. Now that the students are doing 'homework' in class, that resource is available. And if Kahn's methods don't work for you, then maybe there need to be 3-4 different teaching styles. One that is heavy on theory light on examples, heavy on examples and light on theory and some that mix it up a bit.
In college we would get together in study groups or the teacher or TA had office hours (hopefully). For elementary, middle and high school students this really isn't an option. They're usually in class all day and then go home. So if they get hung up on something simple they're essentially stalled. Resulting in frustration, loss of interest and possibly a bad grade. Thankfully my teachers would often assign at least one 'type' of problem where the answer was in the back of the book. If I didn't get it I could figure out how to get the right answer and then apply that to other problems.
This worked all the way up through this year when I took a graduate level linear algebra class. The teacher made Ben Stein look animated. The course material was very dry and it was way too theoretical (for myself). If a homework answer wasn't in the back of the book. I'd find a similar problem that did have the answer, work through it to get the solution and feel a bit more confident on the homework problems. I can't name the number of "Eureka!" moments I had while doing homework.
I'd much rather watch a video on how to do something (welding, car repair, etc) and have someone watch over my shoulder while I do it and be there for questions than have them lecture to me and then go "alright, now you get to do it blind". I'm glad to see that teachers are getting an opportunity to 'teach' rather than 'lecture'.
we still need to get rid of tech the test maybe also get rid of the some of the tests as well or make them more hands on.
In college and some cert tests it's so bad that you can cram for the test and pass but have no idea about how to use, setup, run the stuff covered in the course and at the same time you can have some know knows the course, stuff in a cert really well but sucks at testing and fails the test.
Wikipedia tells me that "twelfth grade (12) [is] for 16–19-year-olds". When I was 16 and in college I was using the college library every day. I think that an effective education must involve independent learning, which will often involve a library. Younger students can't be expected to be learning independently, but once a student is 15 or 16, they should be in the library most days anyway.
Why did it take 100+ years for people to think "Hey, read up on something at home, and we'll talk about it and work through problems in class tomorrow"? Actually, that sounds a lot like many smaller university classes I had. Wondering why this is suddenly capturing everyone's imagination. It's pretty obvious, but then again, many ideas are obvious yet don't catch on.
creation science book
Apparently some countries use terms cognate to "college" to mean secondary education, or what U.S. residents call "high school". Where I went to high school, after the final bell, students had five minutes to board the school bus. If a student chooses to stay late to spend time in the library, how is such a student expected to get home?
Why did it take 100+ years for people to think "Hey, read up on something at home, and we'll talk about it and work through problems in class tomorrow"?
Because it took 100+ years for home study to become stimulating enough to hold a child's interest, with audiovisual presentation of lecture material and automated drill and practice.
you are laboring under the assumption that the alternative to "teaching to the test" is "teaching well" and have failed to consider the far more likely possibility of "not even teaching to the test..."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
on the late bus?
If my school district made such a "late bus" available while I was in school, I was never notified of it. Perhaps it's just the car culture prevalent in my country: parents are expected to own and use cars, and by the time the "late bus" would leave, the parent is expected to be off work.
You write like someone who would fail a Turing test.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Seriously, in the science arena the idea of the labs is to learn what was taught in a large lecture hall. That is when most learning occurs. So it has always made sense to have a lecturer separate from those who help with the class. Ideally, Khan should be revising his lectures based on feedback from the teachers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who exactly is "that kid" that you're talking about? The minority youth whose only ambition in life is to become a "thug"? The one who goes out of his way to avoid getting any sort of an education? The one who speaks his native language like he's a fucking moron? The one who wears his pants at his ankles? The one who intentionally seeks out violence, and abuses drugs and alcohol?
No, nothing can be done for him. He's a failure. Some kids just are. Don't blame greater society, the schools or the educators for such youth doing everything in their power to fail at every aspect of life.
Yes, the answer is to marginalize such youth. There is no hope for them, and they are not worth our time to try to save. There are many more deserving youth who should get such attention instead. You know, the ones who come from impoverish backgrounds, but who actually want to learn.
Not sure if you're trying to be satirical.
Anyway, such things can be improved. Go into an inner-city school and watch a good talk on gender abuse. Boys who otherwise think it's normal to abuse their girlfriends often have a major breakthrough when they make the connection to child abuse--and pretty much everyone in that environment is familiar with child abuse. Lives can improve. People can improve.
Of course it's easier to marginalize, and to avoid that segment of society altogether, for the individual. But for society as a whole, we are far better off if we don't.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
How can Wired write an entire article, and slashdot write a summary, all about a website, and nobody includes the link to Kahn Academy!?? Geesh
Operator, give me the number for 911!
There is even evidence that watching Khan videos leads to a false sense of learning. See Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos" It basically shows that while students think they're learning a lot by watching videos, their actual learning is minimal.
A great into to all this is Wieman's Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" As he puts it, to increase learning, we need to use
At best, Khan Academy only does the third of these.
I had a math teacher who would assign you problems before she had explained how to do 'em in class.
That way, you'd read the book, try to do the problems, and then the next day, be pepared to ask questions on the stuff you were having difficulties with when she actually taught the lessons. She'd then give you another night to fix whatever you needed to on the homework before turning it in.
I found it so much better than just listening to a teacher droning on for an hour or more, then having to go and read the book to figure out what they should've been explaining.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"They kids don't have to view them at home, they simple CAN if they want a refresher. They can do the same at the school itself after hours, or the public library."
In my country:
- not all kids have access to a computer and broadband at home
- school libraries are mostly not open after school closes at 4pm, lack of funding
- public libraries are not always within reach of school children
Those that can afford, get better. Lower income kids would fall behind.
"Yes, the answer is to marginalize such youth. There is no hope for them, and they are not worth our time to try to save. "
Writing off people is a dangerous and expensive game to play. Not spending an extra $10K, $20K on educating kids from marginalised/ messed up families now now means somebody who ten years down the line might well decide the only way to get on in society because they aren't literate and have no qualifications is to turn to crime, mug you/ steal your car/shoot somebody you know/ or similar, mess up several people's lives, then have to be kept in prison for 30 years on your tax payers money at probably a lot more than $10K a year.
You get to decide....
Good luck in a lot of places finding a public library that's open when you'd need it to be. Public libraries are closing or cutting hours and services at an alarming rate.
One of the problems with educational reformers is that things that work on a small scale - only put in the best teachers, get parents involved, etc. can't always be replicated on a large scale. And they need to realize that. You can't have 100% excellent teachers. What's the current number - not even a third of the US population gets a 4-year college degree? Exactly how can we pay to have millions of brilliant teachers? Especially when teachers are under attack, there's pressure to drive pay down, etc. And a huge part of public school problems are actually societal problems. We've got drugs, crime, malnutrition, poverty, uninvolved/absent parents, lead poisoning, lousy school facilities and so forth. And the public schools can't cherry pick.
And at a time when standardized tests are being used to evaluate teachers and schools, the kids have no stake in the tests. And there's a ton of pressure (some of it based on the raft of IEPs given to students for all sorts of reasons - some legit, some ridiculous) to grade kids based on effort and not outcome. You want to make adjustments for kids with issues? Provide both absolute and adjusted grades.
And the cost to support students with learning or behavioral problems is high. It's not unheard of now to have a classroom with three or four kids with individual aides, plus there's an assistant teacher to deal with kids who have less-stringent IEPs, plus the lead teacher. Unless, of course, you teach art, music, industrial arts, etc. Then, the aides get that as a break period. So you've got 25 kids in the room - a bunch of whom get aides in other classes and some for behavioral reasons - with no help. And you received no training in how to deal with those students as part of your education.
"How this goes down with blacks, hispanics, ... is the real test."
No. It works for those it works for. For those it may not work for, try something different.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
In Old English, the past tense of "cuman" was either "com" (with long o) or "cam" (with long a), neither of which would have produced "came". You can consult any book on Old English to find the conjugation of such a common verb. My one Middle English book only gives "com" and "come" as the past tense of that verb, although with no textual citations. So I went and found an online Middle English dictionary and looked up "comen" (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&type=headword&q1=comen&rgxp=constrained) and found this: "ME p. sg. cam, com & p. pl. ca:men, ke:me(n are analogical formations, modeled largely on the type of stal, ste:len." (a: and e: are my edits to indicate long a and e, respectively). Note that it lists "com" as the normal past tense. I don't know what the frequency of "cam" vs. "co:m", but my guess is that the former must have eventually become frequent enough to take over for most dialects.
Now on to your second point. It's true that just because one sees the morpheme "come" does not mean the verb necessarily conjugates (not declines) like the base verb "come". However, in the case of "become", we know that it does in fact conjugate the same as the base. In fact, pretty much all verbs that are formed by adding a prefix like be- and for- are conjugated the same as the base verb. You only get a different conjugation when the stem in question is laundered through another part of speech. In the case of "welcome", there is a noun "welcome" and that is the basis for the verb "to welcome", which is thus conjugated like a weak verb (as all verbs derived from nouns are conjugated). The derivation seems to go back to Old English, where the verb was "wilcumian" (http://www.bosworthtoller.com/035723) and thus a weak verb derived from a noun.
Final point: it's entirely possible that it was just a typographic or spelling error. Not knowing whether the writer of the sentence in question is from an area where they speak a dialect that has "come" as the past tense of "come", I cannot say for sure which is the actual case. Either way, it's really just not that big a deal.
Very few things really are, we're just prone to hyperbole regarding the minor hiccups we encounter.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
E.D. Hirsch, author of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them and registered democrat, has a short piece here that you should read, it's very interesting as are his books:
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20030228_traditionaledMA97.pdf
Gramsci was not the only observer to predict the inegalitarian consequences of the educational methods variously described as âoenaturalistic,â âoeproject-oriented,â âoecritical-thinking,â and âoedemocratic.â I focus on Gramsci as a revered theorist of the Left in order to make a strategic point. Ideological polarizations on educational issues tend to be facile and premature. Not only is there a practical separation between educational conservatism and political conservatism, but there is an inverse relation between educational liberalism and social liberalism. Educational liberalism is a sure means for preserving the social status quo, whereas the best practices of educational conservatism are the only means whereby children from disadvantaged homes can secure the knowledge and skills that will enable them to improve their condition.
Hirsch dedicted the book I mentioned to Gramsci, who was a Marxist himself.
Interesting that Hirsch would single out the years 1942-1966:
Among other results, hostility to traditional schooling methods and subjects has fostered inequality. The record is clear. In the period from 1942 to 1966â"before progressive theories had spread throughout our schoolsâ"public education had begun to close the economic gap between races and social classes. But after 1966, as SAT scores went into steep decline, the black-white wage gap abruptly stopped shrinking.
I, too thought the Khan Academy's teaching methods must involve encouraging horrible chitinous creatures with far too many legs crawl in the students' ears and wrap themselves around the kids' brainstems.
I'm glad that that apparently is not the case.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Teaching is not telling and repeating is not learning.
Half a century of physics education research is continuing to show that people need to learn the conceptual why just as they need to learn how to use the mathematical model. If they don't understand the concept, the math will be nothing more than a magic black box that spits out numbers for them. Engineers need to understand the concepts.
Science is not just a tool, it is one of humanity's primary methods of viewing and interpreting the universe, along with art and religion (and philosophy, and some other categories). If you do to art teaching what you propose we do to science teaching, people would learn to paint by numbers to reproduce versions of the great works, but would have no opportunity to learn line, or shadow, or structure, or perspective.
You would learn nothing significant about art that way, just as people learn nothing significant about science by learning to plug and chug equations.