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Interviews: Ask Lead Developer Ben Kamens About Khan Academy
Ben Kamens spent over 5 years at Fog Creek, eventually working his way up to VP of engineering. However, after watching one of Salman Khan's talks he started to volunteer his time at Khan Academy, and is now the lead developer. In-between providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere, he's graciously agreed to answer some of your questions. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Joel Spolsky has famously stated that he prefers software engineers who come from highly accredited universities, preferably Ivy-league. His thought is that one has to distinguish oneself in order to be granted admission to such places. Do you think that Joel's opinion, and those of other elitist employers, will change with the introduction of free, quality online education?
I've heard that KhanAcademy has a platform for schools. Students can learn using Khan Academy and teachers can monitor their progress and help students where they need it most. When I last heard about this the platform was a pilot program being launched at select schools. Are there plans to make this platform generally available? or even open source?
It seems to me that the problem with online education is being able to prove what you have learned. I can learn Calculus online at Khan Academy or at my local community college. I'll probably learn Calculus better at Khan Academy and for less money. But, I cannot use that knowledge to get a degree nor would I have any other way of proving my knowledge to other schools or potential employers. Do you have a solution to this problem?
I find the idea of having ebooks for free and then K-12 kids getting an ereader for saving the school district money. Expanding this, I feel edutainment was never done right and could be explored again. Finally if some professors do their lecture once, they wouldn't have to do it again stored in video format.
I think the notion of going from paid books to free content is noble, and I'd be willing to work for well below a standard software engineer salary. How can I get in contact with you to possibly get employment?
God spoke to me
>> When will we start seeing responses?
Let me get back to you on that.
Not one single "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" joke?!
Not one?!
You are a disappoint Slashdotters!
Where are all the "traditional" Computer Science courses? I'm not asking about the "interactive manual" type courses like how to do loops in Python - there are a ton of materials about that all over the web. I'm asking about theoretical computer science, such as Turing completeness, Chomsky hierarchy, abstract data types, compiler design, that kind of stuff which is the backbone of a university computer science education.
The reason I'm asking is not to diminish the value of hands-on courses, but because many (including myself) were not able to get a "traditional" CS degree, coming into programming jobs from other disciplines (or no degree at all) and are largely self taught. Self teaching is great when it comes to practical stuff early on, but once you move on to more senior roles you start feeling the gaps of not understanding the theory behind your tools, design, and implementation, as much as you should.
As Khan Academy, at least in my exposure to it, is about listening to someone talk watching writing on a board, do you think that this is teaching good pedagogy? Do you think it reinforces the idea that visual learners are the smartest people, the people who deserve to be educated? Is there any plans to expand the current format ot include other learning styles. For instance, I am not one of those that thinks manipulative have to be used in math, but I do think a math classroom with no manipulative is not as reaching to as broed a learner base as it could be. Or having an interactive element where a formative assessment might be conducted during the video?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'm a middle school teacher experimenting with using KA with my classes. I think it is an amazing tool, especially for differentiation -- helping teachers to help their students who are behind have successes in math and, ideally, work towards getting caught back up to their peers. I think it can allow math teachers to do more interesting and fun (non-drill) types of work in the classroom, such as focusing more on students learning by doing open-ended, authentic, rich projects with each other.
The key word there is that I *think* it must be helpful to the type of classroom described above. I want to know it is, and as part of our practice in Ontario, Canada, it is encouraged that teachers engage in personal inquiry projects to get more data on whether what we think is working actually is. It is difficult to get the data I need out of KA. We're having to do a lot of manual grabbing of student usage times and populating spreadsheets with that. Any plans to extend the external API to allow more sophisticated queries? Or, perhaps plans to provide a tool allowing more extensive data dumps which researchers can use?
And if you don't have plans at the moment, does this post influence that? ;-) With a more thorough access to student data, I expect there will be researchers who will be more interested in investigating KA in their research and fleshing out the actual benefits (and also any issues that might be addressed).
My students and I thank you!
(mr.walker at walker-clan dot com)
I've heard a criticism of the Khan Academy pedagogic approach is that it is explanation based (effectively the old model: the teacher talks, the student listens, the student carries out an exercise, listens again) - while schools are moving towards exploration based learning (where students are encourage to try and approach problems from different angles supported by teacher-as-facilitator).
To what extent does Khan Academy replicate a very old fashioned rote-learning form of education (albeit delivered and presented via a new media with minor improvements like pause and rewind), and in what aspects does it offer significant new pedagogical advances in learning?
One of the big things about Khan and other massive online course systems is videos. Yes, videos. E.g. I once saw this 5 minute video explaining why dividing anything by zero was not defined. Rather than, plus infinity. I summarized it as:
OK, so the question is: why videos? You are cutting off most of the world's population who do not have access to decent Internet and thus can't download and watch all these videos. If you provided text (even if just a transcript along with some screenshots where necessary) you would be able to reach a much bigger audience, including those who could benefit most.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
For example the UK, where there's growing interesting in enquiry based learning - this links to a report by Ofsted, the government's "Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills".Enquiry learning (called inquiry learning in the USA) also has its champions in North America (e.g. Roy Pea). A quick look around suggests that this approach also has been tried with success in Scandinavia( "Context of teaching and learning school science in Finland: Reflections on PISA 2006 results" by Lavonen and Laaksonen).