Khan Academy Will Be Ready For Its Close-Up In Idaho

theodp writes "Education officials with Northwest Nazarene University and the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation say they are arranging to have Khan Academy classes tested in about two dozen public schools next fall in Idaho, where state law now requires high school students to take online courses for two of their 47 graduation credits. 'This is the first time Khan Academy is partnering to tackle the math education of an entire state,' said Khan Academy's Maureen Suhendra. Alas, the Idaho Press-Tribune reports (alas, behind a paywall) that next fall would be too late for film director and producer Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth), who will be in Idaho in January filming The Great Teacher Project, a documentary which will highlight positives of education, like the Khan Academy pilot in Idaho. Not to worry. For the film, a few teachers will implement Khan Academy in day-to-day teaching starting in January, before the entire pilot program launches in fall 2013."

Comments

Re:Required online courses?

[uncqual]

Khan Academy classes do little, if anything, to teach the student to learn and seek out information in less structured environments. A link to outside information is rare (vs. links to videos and exercises within Khan Academy that are related to the current video or exercise). Searching within Khan Academy for information on a simple concept can be problematic as well - esp. if you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Although I like Khan Academy and think it could have a role in the classroom, it needs a lot of improvement. If such improvement doesn't happen at a faster pace than it is, Khan Academy is likely to fade into the sunset taking donor's money with them.

The folksy nature of the videos is tiring and the sloppy execution just wastes students' time and confuses them. If a "live" classroom teacher makes an error, as all humans do, it impacts about 30 students for a few minutes and the teacher can correct the error and get immediate feedback from the students about if they are still confused by the original error and clear up the confusion. Worst case, a bit of material gets deferred to the next class for those 30 students due to the delay caused by the error. When a video in Khan Academy makes an error, and then corrects it 30 seconds later, it leaves many viewers (perhaps hundreds of thousands) confused and there's no ability for Sal et al to sense that the students are confused and address that issue. If any significant error is made in a video, the video should be remade or edited as needed - failing to do so smacks of laziness and arrogance and demeans the value of the viewer's time while failing to set an expectation to students of what is expected of a public presentation.

Production quality is low as well. The simple thing of making the text as Sal scribbles easier to read, even something as simple as abandoning the black background and using slightly wider lines, would help.

It's obvious that the video lessons are not planned well. While the conversational tone and the "handwriting" helps keep attention, it's just painful to watch Sal stumble around deciding (and narrating his on the fly decisions) to "let's make that a different color" while he undoes and rewrites what he just did. I know Sal is very proud of the fact that he doesn't prepare for the videos -- but it comes off as arrogant (perhaps because it is arrogant).

And, of course, we all know about the sloppiness. Is (2 - -3) "subtracting a minus 3 from 2" or "subtracting a negative 3 from 2? Some such things float by in live classroom situations without causing problems, but why not get it right (or at least consistent across all Khan videos) when all you have to do is reshoot or edit a video?

The "coach" role is a joke for use by a teacher who is managing a classroom and responsible for monitoring student progress. If a school is going to invest significant instructional time/money using Khan Academy as a teaching tool, these problems MUST be addressed. The tools are clumsy to use and fail to provide good visibility into student progress in a meaningful way. For example, there's no way to direct students, during class times, to work first/only on exercises or videos that were assigned and this creates problems with focus and allows simple errors, such as when a student picks the wrong video and works on it for ten minutes, to go undetected (I've seen that often). For another example, "Teachers" should be able to set goals for their class and individual students and those goals should be "lockable".

Sal is enjoying his 15 minutes of popular media fame too much and isn't working hard enough to actually improve education.