I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.
I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. I still remember watching Sal Khan's videos on calculus after struggling to get any grip on it from my frustratingly uninterested teacher who was forced into the position after our actual teacher retired. After I saw them I came back with a fire in me because for the first time he exposed me to the beauty of calculus.
This guy is completely wrong about Khan not inspiring students to care. Sometimes all students need is to see what caring looks like to ignite it in themselves. You can feel how much he cares just by watching him because the video is the product of all that caring, and he does it for millions of people.
But thank you to this blog author for being brave enough to call out Khan's failures, I am sure it'll help education much more than Khan did.
I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum.
They have some significant advantages compared to (just) a classroom: (1) They set a quality floor – sometimes a teacher can be really incomprehensible, or mean, or whatever, but Khan's videos are consistently okay. (2) They are available from anywhere, without need for special social/technical infrastructure, like enrollment in school or access to a university library. (3) They are self paced, which means they can better accommodate the various interest level, motivation, and speed of different students. (A typical classroom also has some advantages: it gives social setting, a consistent schedule/structure, and human feedback.)
I'm also disappointed though, because it seems like, given production resources, there would be potential to make widely available materials that were much better than average lectures. With significant production effort (a team of subject experts and content creators doing a lot of dedicated work on each topic) I think it would be possible to make something truly great, but Khan's videos fall so far short of my imagination. For any particular topic, there are typically other freely available resources which I think are better.
I've also been disappointed because many people have hyped the site as being extraordinarily amazing, but when I have looked at it, what is there doesn't match the hype.
>I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum.
Its better than average quality classroom teacher in my experience.
And the point is this didn’t exist online at the time. His resources were strictly more. I imagine its still hard to find a single free resource that matches its breadth and quality.
Personally I like books, but there are also many, many lecture videos on YouTube, some of them excellent (though I think they could still be better with bigger production teams and higher budgets). For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. If you have a specific topic in mind, I urge you to search around. (Making a long list of my own book/website/video recommendations about various topics here seems a bit off topic and out of scope.)
MIT has renumbered the course, but it's still around: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ . Don't be fooled by the URL; it's now 6.5840.
And a series of lectures is available too: https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos . They're from spring 2020. They link to the course website for spring 2020, which is great. But it doesn't link to them, and OCW doesn't know about any of this, as far as I can tell. The 6.824 lecture series is pretty hard to discover, too, because it's uploaded by an account dedicated solely to that one course, which isn't related to any other MIT lecture videos.
Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:
"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."
Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:
- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).
- No room for outside innovation.
- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.
Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.
I don't want to tangle myself in a "technically correct" kind of discussion however I'd like to point out that Bloom's taxonomy - a widely used model in pedagogical context - has a level for creative work.
It is the highest level of learning, but still a level of learning.
> There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems.
Only if your goal is to teach people how to solve that particular problem. But it’s not the best way to teach mathematics.
For my money, the best way is problem based. I heard of one math teacher who had a video playing as the students walked in. The video was a weirdly shaped bucket being slowly filled by a hose. Students came in, saw him sitting up the back, got fidgety then someone asked “how long will this take??”. At that, he shot up and said “good question”! And they spent the rest of the class trying to estimate how long it would take for the bucket to be filled. Complete with diversions into flow rate, volume, and so on. He made the students ask the question. Then got the students to try and answer it themselves, helping them work through their own ideas on the board.
While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).
In my case, it's not so much that I find it childish, it's that I find it incredibly distracting which means I can't focus as easily on the content. Instead of "oh, now I understand how that equation works" I catch myself thinking "why is he repeating the same word over and over - that's so annoying!". Then my brain starts obsessing over "when is he going to do it again?", even though I don't want it to. It's a bit like trying to deliberately ignore something. It becomes all you can think about.
Oh ok, got you. While it entirely differs on how different people receive ideas, for me, I just try to keep the end goal in mind (what are we ultimately moving towards) and just think of those repeated words as just small steps rather than just annoying repeating word.
OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
There’s a great lecture on giving lectures by an MIT prof. He says you can give no more than 3 ideas per hour, and you must repeat yourself at least 3 times for each idea. And while, part of his thesis is because people might miss something due to their attention, and needs of the group vs individual I think his experience is still highly relevant. I know that I don’t learn as much unless there’s room for almost boredom. I find there is a feeling similar to boredom that I have to experience to really internalize something. It’s almost like I can feel the neurons rewiring (though I suspect it might just be an emotion that encourages the energy expenditure necessary for learning). If I skim, or do doubletime, then that feeling usually never comes, and there’s a good chance my future recall will be poor…
When I’m understimulated by a teacher, my mind wanders. I’ll start thinking about something else entirely. When my mind comes back, I’ll have missed a couple minutes of content. I can overcome this with willpower, but doing so is exhausting.
Playing videos at 1.5-2x fixes the problem entirely. My attention is held without any effort.
If a concept is new or difficult enough, I just slow the video back down or pause it whenever I need to think things through.
I'd argue (as the article does), that you don't 'really' learn from watching stuff, fast or slow, but from actually working with and doing. This is completely obvious in the physical domain. You could take a ten year course on the basketball free throw and watch a billion hours of video on it, but then when you get on the court and actually do it - you're going to shoot pretty much like somebody who's never shot before.
And I think the same is true in academic domains. If you're trying to think about something consciously, you're going to do a poor job of it. And the only way to get the unconscious competence is through a bunch of 'doing'. Chess is a great example of this because it's purely mental yet again you're never going to gain any degree of significant competence without playing a lot. Interestingly this even applies after mastery. A master who has played e.g. 1. e4 their entire life and then swaps to 1. d4 isn't going to be playing at the same level as he plays 1. e4 even if watches thousands of hours of videos on it beforehand. That connection you make by doing and interacting with things is just critical.
It is a spectrum. If you give your mind some space, it will start churning through the key ideas, fill in gaps, turn things upside down, ask questions. That starts during the explanations and their pauses. And ideally you have some empty time right after to think about it, maybe do an exercise, maybe try to explain it to somebody. Work it, like a good dough.
2x listening suffocates this process. Like too little sugar or too low temperature or too little rest for your yeast dough. It might "feel" good but you are missing out so much...
I don't think you can make blanket statements. Consider:
1. Teacher 1 speaks at 100 words per minute.
2. Teacher 2 speaks at 50 words per minute, for the exact same content as Teacher 1.
You're not really losing anything by playing Teacher 1 at normal speed vs Teacher 2 at 2x speed. For every learner, there will be an optimal teaching speed for a given topic. This may mean listening to some audio at normal speed, some at higher speeds, and some even at slower speeds. I always customise my playback speed to the specific content I'm trying to learn.
Those two teachers will rarely say the same words. Chances are, teacher 2 chooses their words more carefully, and gives you then space to absorb that higher information density. In the end, both may communicate the same amount of information.
It's not about the rate of speaking but rather about what is actually being spoken. I am currently going through the Neetcode DSA course and it's just obnoxious. His video on Union Find, a 15 LoC algorithm, is 20 minutes.
I think there was a study omparing watching an educational video in 1x speed and watching it two times back to back in 2x speed equating the time spent on the material, which found the second group faired better.
Though it's not the question I asked. Would the second group fair somewhere close to the first if it only had listened once?
(I don't buy the argument that this would not be fair since they would use the extea time to watch more stuff ... because that's rarely what people do with their extra time. Especially not watching the same thing again.)
I remember reading a study a while back about learning from videos at 1.5x to 2x speed. The key observation that actually made the learning more efficacious was to watch the video at 2x speed two times back to back. Apparently, this method was also better than watching the video one time at normal speed. I suppose it's because one get twice the exposure for the same amount of time.
I haven't looked for the study, but I can if you are truly curious.
Ironically, spaced repetition is the key to successful learning.
Obviously one can overdo it. And there is variance in what people require. But not giving things time, instead giving in to the dopamine-craving, that's killing your learning abilities.
Repeating a sentence twice in a row during an explanation, is not spaced repetition at all. Spaced repetition means testing recall at increasing intervals, usually starting 1 day apart.
"Paris is the capital of France. Paris is the capital of France" -> not spaced repetition.
"Paris is the capital of France. [one day later]. What is the capital of France? [three days later] What is the capital of France?" -> spaced repetition.
And in fact, it's this plus practice where the real value lies in learning and memorising. The only purpose of an explanation from a teacher is to help you understand the concept. Generally once you understand it once, you don't need to understand it again - unless you forget, and that's where the practice / spaced repetition comes in. That's why I prefer the teaching part to be as efficient as possible, so I can focus my limited time on the parts that will make me internalise it.
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him after a Robitussin bender.
I wish YouTube let you increase the speed of videos past 2x. I play almost everything at 2x now, and I have no problem comprehending videos at that speed. I’d like to try 2.5x or 3x but the ui doesn’t have that option.
There's a bunch of different chrome extensions that do this, and you can do it yourself from the Chrome console with `$0.playbackRate = 3` or whatever.
It might be annoying if you already know the content. Frame it for the least common denominator (pun intended) - the person who has the time and needs the repetition to pick up a concept.
Not sure that I'm adding anything to this, or that what I'm saying is even relevant, but Sal does (or did) have a deviated septum, and as someone who suffers from the same / similar root cause of breathing issues, I'm pretty sure speaking is (or was) taxing for him, probably contributing at least mildly to such a style.
I've not tried it myself, but I consistently hear good things about Math Academy. It uses a knowledge graph so that it knows whether you've satisfied prerequisites for a topic, and it adapts itself to your level. I've never taken the plunge because it's very expensive at $49 a month, but it seems to be the one that serious maths learners use.
I did the trial of Brilliant the other day. You can get 7 days free, then another 7 days added if you cancel the first trial before the end. After that you can continue to get 2 free lessons per day with ads. I think it's about $20 a month for unlimited lessons. The maths problems are more visual (which makes them quite intuitive) and it has a nicer, more polished UI than Khan Academy. It's easier to stay in the mood for doing more lessons. The main downsides compared to Khan are that the explanations are quite minimal (short descriptions, no videos), and it doesn't reach as advanced a level as Khan. I'm looking at it as more a way to do a refresher on the maths I already learned at school rather than a serious learning tool. If it were $5 a month I'd probably consider subbing for a couple of months and trying to blitz through all the material before switching back to Khan to fill in the gaps.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
I have benefited a good deal from Khan Academy, and was quite disappointing to go back and see that they seem even more focused on showing videos than they did 10 years ago.
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
From what I know of the Khan approach, it's akin to "flipping the classroom" [0], which has gained pretty wide acceptance. It was pioneered by Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur.
(I use the flipped classroom approach extensively. But the legal profession being the eager embracers of novelty that we are </sarcasm>, I refer to the approach as "enhanced Socratic method," given that Socratic method was something we all endured in law school.)
For math and engineering courses, the basic flipped-classroom approach was used at West Point for over 150 years: In the so-called Thayer method, students study textbooks in advance, then in class, they work on problems on chalkboards. The instructor moves from chalkboard to chalkboard, coaching the students in real time. [1]
(I do much the same thing in my contract-drafting classes: In small groups, students do drafting exercises using online whiteboards. I lurk on my laptop, quietly coaching in person as needed.)
Is the article about something else than how math on Khan Academy was thaught?
I remember minimal videos (3-13 min, usually 5-8), and then exercises drilling the techniques until you understand it and don't make mistakes. If you got a perfect score (no mistakes whatsoever), you went a little faster.
That's learning by doing, or am I wrong?
Or are there no exercises for things other than math?
Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.
"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"
It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.
I agree with you. It's just an attention bite as nobody would care about this article if it wasn't focused on something as big and popular as Khan Academy. It's clear that the author has never used it as a place to learn something.
Direct Instruction - and the largest educational study ever untaken Project Follow Through - would like a work. Project based learning?
Recall practice IS learning. Projects, exploration, and discovery-based "learning" sounds great in theory but in practice, without actual testing, really doesn't live up to the hype.
I should clarify -- since from both posts, my comment was ambiguous and misinterpreted:
I was explaining the article, not my views, since the top-level comment did not read it.
Regarding your comment, it is as wrong as the article. BOTH are important. Recall practice is great for e.g. developing surface understanding, declarative knowledge, and well-done, procedural knowledge.
That type of knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, for high-level performance in most fields, at least beyond a spelling bee or vocab exam. To understand gaps, see:
- Complex problem-solving, which includes extensive conditional, conceptual, metacognitive, etc. knowledge. (e.g. see how top participants prep for math olympiads)
- Attitudes towards school / learning (one of the top predictors of future success by 3rd grade, together with reading)
- Transfer learning
- Cross-cutting / not explicitly represented knowledge / literature on expert blindspot
- Etc.
"Projects, exploration, and discovery-based 'learning'" work great in practice, when properly structured, which usually means explicit, well-defined learning objectives.
Bad: "Make a nice poster on selling a car"
Good: "Independently explore an organ system of the human body. Make a nice poster synthesizing what you learned and present it to the classroom in three weeks."
Particularly in early mathematics and language acquisition (but also in most learning domains) you need both rote learning and exploratory learning. Fundamental concepts + exercises to build muscle memory are foundational to enabling students to participate fruitfully in meaningful projects, complex problem-solving, exploration and argumentation.
If you're flailing around without having memorized basic trigonometric identities, you're going to struggle severely to apply them to classical mechanics. If you can't do basic matrix multiplication, you're not going to build a graphics engine.
The article tries to damn Khan with an example about probing how neural myelination works. If you understand the foundations of electricity (by learning about capacitance and impedance) and have done some grueling foundational learning in organic chemistry, ready answers might spring to your mind. You need the former to make asking the latter fruitful or meaningful.
Khan deliberately uses the term "scaffolding" - which since we're throwing around dead education theorists harks from Vygotsky - which is precisely what a teacher provides by pantomiming elementary concepts for a child. Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence.
I really don't understand this article. Two things can be true at once.
I was explaining the article, not making a statement about how learning works. My comment was poorly phrased.
I agree with everything you said, except Vygotsky. :)
Vygotsky is worth reading, since:
- He is evidence-based. He isn't just a theorist. He cites studies. This contrasts with educational philosophers which dominated literature of the time.
- He is universally misquoted in US education literature, usually to say banally obvious things.
- He is brilliant.
- In the concept of ZPD, US education literature usually says the literal opposite of what Vygotsky said.
Do you really thing the concept of scaffolding didn't exist before 1900?
Curiously, Vygotsky precisely has a passage about (positive) experience with throwing special-needs students into the deep end of the pool on tasks they can't succeed with, and contradicts the (incorrect) intuition behind the teaching process implied by:
"Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence."
To be specific, a child does need to ultimately internalize these, but one of the best ways to do so is through a certain type of struggle, rather than breaking down into little pieces, in the ways consistently attributed to him.
I've read the article (except skimming \ fast forwarding 3rd and 2nd paragraph from the end) and it wasn't there. No detailed info explaining why author's criticizing Khan Academy for not doing something it in my experience did.
Maybe you haven't read it?
This articles core argument appears to be that a live instruction is better than a video because there can be feedback at the moment of confusion while a video can't. But that depends on student's impulse being triggered and I'm not sure if its any better or in some cases can be worse if the teachers content is not as thorough as Khan's or anyone else's video - as these benefit from a worldwide audiences feedback on correcting any confusing or unclear parts.
In the classrooms I see through my kids, the teacher is doing roughly what a Khan video does: walking through a worked procedure at the front of the room. If a video fails to provoke the "wait, why does that work?" moment, then a teacher following the same flow likely fails in exactly the same way as the author claims and missing the opportunity for hands'on learning. A video actually allows the learner to go back and review content if anything was unclear, and presumably any interactive AI agent can help with the feedback part even though the teacher in the video isn't.
I also wish the piece had stayed with Khanmigo, where nobody has a good theory yet on where the ai tutoring loop actually breaks and why people fail to engage it and that putting it in their face may not work, why exactly personalization at that scale hasn't produced the gains it promised.
Also irked by the title built on a pun on Khan's name, sets up an awkward framing that kind of lets me know it may not be unbiased.
> there can be feedback at the moment of confusion while a video can't
LLMs are great at this. I’m sure they’re misused constantly. But if you ask the right questions, LLMs are excellent learning aides. Especially for symbolic reasoning like mathematics and programming.
Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning", or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did.
My belief is that Khan Academy is tremendously useful when started at a young age and done consistently. I have been doing it for over 7 years and it was a huge portion of my childhood. Long term, consistent use of KA from a young age builds deep procedural fluency and (this is very IMPORTANT:) self-directed discipline that transform how a student handles complex concepts. Even though some critics correctly note and argue that automated drill and practice cannot replace creative, project based discovery and learning, daily mastery based practice eliminates foundational learning gaps (you get a solid understanding), lowers the anxiety around making mistakes (because you get used to repetitive practice), and automates core mechanics (it becomes a basic skill) until they become second nature. I believe that persistent procedural learning is very far from mechanizing education at the expense of real learning. Rather, it frees up valuable cognitive bandwidth and gives the precise structural confidence and fluency required to excel in open ended, high level problem solving that so many critics preach. This is my opinion as someone who did Khan Academy for 7 years (where I learned the procedural step by step learning and practice) and went to school at the same time (where I did the open ended problems and projects). I believe that Khan Academy will help millions of students learn and grow (and the computer programming community is great too!).
To be clear: I'm not against Khan Academy. I think overald it's great! It's helped tons of children by virtue of making solid learning material available for free on the internet, while also giving children a chance to learn at their own pace and dive into topics they're curious about. I used it on occasion myself as an adult
Also, 3B1B got his start at Khan Academy so that definitely counts for something.
But if we're in the context of classrooms, and discussions of how one might change the roles of teachers using computers, then I'm getting wary. Especially when a lot of money is involved from investors who do not care to study history because it might not fit their desired narrative.
As someone who has earned over 3 million points on Khan Academy over a 3-4 year span about ten years ago, I am very appreciative of my experience. What I appreciated most is when Sal would derive formulas such as the quotient rule in Calculus from the power rule by using negative exponents. Deriving formulas rather than memorizing them opened up a new perspective for me.
This article appears to focus on the chat bot which I have not used and was not part of my experience. At the time, I had a subscription to Wolfram Alpha that was helpful if I got stuck on an intermediary step.
The high level of goal of the post which is directed at asking good questions raises a point that seems valid to me.
Education is a very difficult problem. People like to learn and people want to learn. Mostly improve themselves over their friends and society, and they want to do it quickly and easily. This proven by the countless influencer videos and influencer culture present in youtube on topics such as finance, health and many others.
However, true education is really hard. It requires hard work, sticking with something beyond when it gets boring and difficult. Being stubborn to get it right. These qualities are not very common and instilling this is extremely difficult from outside.
What author is asking is, he wants Khan Academy to be a true education platform , while dismissing it was video platform. He is wrong in both counts.
Khan Academy is a gateway for a student to draw the map or scaffold as the initial phase. The start of the education happens when the student works on the exercises, and tries it again and again to get it right. They are driven by the mastery based education which they try to ask the student to do.
A good general article on education, but weirdly wrong when it comes taking a dig at khan academy platform. And w.r.t to AI use in Education, students who know how to use AI are using it exceeding well for their true education.
K.A. has always helped me immensely. Often I will add a video as a 2nd "I do" before our "we do." If there is extra time after small groups we typically answer the math unit questions as a class. Students are thrilled to come up in front of the class to defend thier reasoning before finally seeing if thier choice was correct.
What is with these personal attacks? I don’t understand the insistence that every educational tool must offer some perfect, complete learning experience.
I grew up in India watching the early Sal Khan videos because I preferred them. They complemented school and helped me understand things I’d ignored in class or simply hadn’t been taught well.
You can critique the limits of videos without dismissing teachers who have genuinely helped millions of people learn.
This seems to be wrestling with the wrong opponent.
> And this is what I think the edtech world keeps getting wrong. The assumption is that if you can deliver the right content, in the right way, at the right time, learning will follow. It won’t.
I think it depends on the goals of the student and what you're trying to learn. Some things are procedural and can be learned by being told, some things require a more hands-on approach to really "get."
If I want to learn how to drive a tractor, I just read the Farmer's Guide to Tractor Drivin' or find a YouTube video (I learned how to drive an excavator and fell trees like this—watch and listen and then go do what they said; hot damn, I learned how to do it).
If I want to learn how to produce a modern masterpiece (or novel invention) in some field or art, I won't find the "how to" in a book or video [1]. That's very much a personal journey that can't be replicated or recalled as a series of steps you tell someone to follow.
The Sal Khan way is prescription-driven and has its place in the world and I don't think it should be dismissed. But that way won't give you the "10,000 hours" level of understanding or experience (and arguably, shouldn't be expected to—even in the shape of an intermediary chatbot).
I have been using Khan Academy for over 7 years growing up. It has helped tremendously and taught me to be a critical thinker. There are exercises, quizzes, and unit tests to test a student's understanding and if they get something wrong, KA marks what videos or articles they should go back to and review. I agree with one of the commenters here, this article is uncharitable.
The AI voice of this article irked me. Pangram says 44% of it is AI, for the chunk I was reading.
For generic trope-y content like this, the voice can't be left this AI-ish. It has to be about something really interesting for this AI tone to be bearable.
I watch Khan Academy videos because they explain topics like mathematics in an easy-to-understand way. But it's just one tool in a student's arsenal. Khan Academy is by no means the one-stop-shop for education and should not stop learners from inquiring, constructing, expressing, and communicating as part of their learning journey. I hoped that the author would at least make that distinction a bit more in their article because it seemed a little unnecessarily critical. I _think_ the article makes the assumption that most students are just passively watching videos and _are_ using Khan Academy as the one-stop-shop and that the site (and Khan) are missing out on an opportunity to provide a better experience that is more in line with John Dewey's principles of learning.
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses have labs, problem sets, and required essays. All else is memorization (not that memorization is inherently bad, part of learning assembly language programming is memorizing the available instructions, while learning French includes memorizing vocabulary).
Educational technology that is focused on delivering “content” is unlikely to be of much value. Technology that induces the learner to experiment, to discover, to discern patterns, and to ask further questions, is going to be much more valuable.
The article starts by talking about how interactive learning with Khanmingo failed, and then goes into depth about how watching videos isn’t enough. That’s disappointing. Khanmingo should be superior to passively watching a video because you can interactively dig deeper just like the author says is necessary.
The concept of Khanmigo was great. The implementation was basically useless.
It was a great attempt, but the article explains the problem:
"early OpenAI access"
This was literally the world's very first attempt at an agentic tutor, with (initially pre-release) GPT-4. That is worlds away from what's being built with fable or sol-grade models in 2026, or what will be available in 2028.
Off-topic and may be found rude - I find multiple instances of "Kahn" in the comments. Is it really that difficult to put in the effort to learn the correct spelling of "Khan" specially when it is everywhere in TFA, the post title, and other comments?
I think it's because these "h"es are silent in (most?) dialects of English, so both spellings would result in the same pronunciation. English doesn't really have a 'kh" /x/ sound, or an unaspirated k, or an "ahn", or a "dh" sound. So Kahn and Khan both get read as /kan/, Gandhi and Ghandi both get read as /gandi/. If anything the "h" just seems to hint that the vowel isn't pronounced /æ/. So folks remember that there is a silent h but not where it is.
Of course many Indian languages have aspirated and unaspirated "d" sounds, for example, and this is also reflected in the English dialet. But most of us English speakers can't hear the difference very well even if we concentrate.
It feels weird and unfair to focus solely on Kahn here when he’s competing with some random teacher or professor’s droning, confusing, non-interactive lecture that’s less engaging and just as lacking in interactivity or application.
I also don’t think he ever purports to be “all you need” to learn.
It reminds me of the people who criticize Duolingo because you can’t actually reach perfect fluency through their app--like wasn’t it always obvious that it was never meant to be the only education you need; wasn’t it always obvious that you need to actually _speak_ a language to learn it? And yet it’s still a great app that has helped millions of people learn languages.
I agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Khan here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.
I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.
Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.
Traditional methods are failing because of austerity and capitalism. Pedagogy is a science which has expert studying these things. And most teachers are well aware of the science and know what works. Stuff like instant feedback has been known to work better since behavioralism in the 1950s. Problem is that whenever these solutions are applied they are used to cut corners and make education cheaper, resulting in a net loss. This is a problem of austerity.
Note that I was explicitly not blaming this on Khan, I was merely stating that he is the face if this movement and as such will get a lot of the blame, regardless of how much he deserves it.
My personal feelings about him is that he is actually an excellent teacher, and has independently discovered what pedagogical scientists have known for decades. He however allowed his discoveries to be packaged as a neat capitalist solution, and then has watched as his “discoveries” were used to excuse austerity (and made a bunch of money doing so). At best he is naive, and at worst he is an active participant. Either way he deserves at least some of the blame (though personally, I would rather blame the system, and point to him as being a part of it)
I think the core thesis - that videos aren't the full package - makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why Khanmigo couldn't in theory fill in some of the other pieces.
I'm reminded o A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age - and how LLMs haven't been able to achieve anything similar. With the correct supervising AI agents that have their own goals - I don't see why you couldn't have an LLM try to motivate you, or gamify education tailored to your interests and targeted at the areas you are struggling with. Somehow weaving in their own education videos seems way too difficult though - it feels like it should be an entirely different thing
Maybe Khanmigo just kinda sucks? Having a ton of funding doesn't mean its the best possible solution. I've never used it, so it's hard for me to judge.
Here's a presentation that, kind of claims the opposite. More specifically, it claims figuring it out on your own is not as good as having a teacher tell you, and then having you use the info, and it claims to be backed up by research
I'm not a fan when schadenfreude indulges in someone failing to make the world a better place.
I think there is a simple reason why AI tutors are not terribly successful.
AI is just not good enough yet, they are only just now capable of performing tasks, getting them to do those tasks involves a degree of careful guidance and the ability to handle frustration calmly and rationally.
Those things require a high motivation to have the task done.
They are not the properties you want in a tutor, a few students have the drive to learn in conditions that are not ideal. They are a small minority.
What you need is a AI that has a deep enough understanding of the ideas behind the metals it teaches and is engaging witty and charismatic enough to get that information across to a student.
When it has those abilities there will be a lot of parents that won't want it to have access to their kids.
Not sure what actually killed it but Khanmigo seemed to have removed the state of being stuck. Wrestling with a problem you cannot immediately solve is where the learning happens at least for me in programming and math.
Seeking help after a while is obviously fine but when the help is one keystroke away and always available, you take it before the useful part of being stuck has happened. Not ideal for learning tbh
A comment I had made on Dan Meyer's article, also relevant here (Also, as others are pointing out here, there is a crucial difference between the videos and their chatbot; you can inspire with videos because your human interests are on display):
This resonates so much with me. I am the co-founder of a microschool and also a neuroscientist. And these two have intersected so much in fascinating ways. Four years in, the big lesson for us is that for learning to make sense it should have the following progression: meaning, motivation, mechanics, measurement.
Conventional schooling, and everything designed to help with conventional schooling like Khanmigo give in to this systemic gravitational pull of measurement (we must know what they are learning). And from that ensues your standardized curriculum, measuring the visible and easy, because that's easier than something like "mathematical thinking", and the focus on mechanics (multiplication tables, fractions, chemical names, whatever). And in doing this we leach out all meaning and focus on the drills.
Chatbots, the way they are set up now, are doomed to fail because the entry point is mechanics. "How do I solve this particular quadratic equation?" It's a meaningless question to a child because it simply does not connect to their world. We cannot start with that and work Socratically towards meaning. We must instead offer or build a world where meaning and sense-making are possible. (Wrote about this here https://blog.comini.in/p/why-khanmigo-will-fail )
Personally interesting for me is how meaning-making and sense-making are essentially the core of conscious experience. We, bundles of experiences, cohere and conspire and collaborate to create a meaningful experience from the sensory data that assaults us. Data that would be meaningless without a perspective.
So in education we are doing the same thing that the mind does so effortlessly by existing and being in the world and grappling with it. But we shoot ourselves in the foot by taking a reductive lens and split it into elements.
That's worked well for us only until we encountered complex adaptive systems that need us to also focus on the whole. But the system has been built to focus on the narrow and hope that these come together at some point. And so we end up with this meaning crisis we are all navigating, in school and outside.
I'm curious if maybe the mistake was in assuming we needed AI for the teaching part of the process.
Maybe we should focus only on having AI for the correcting/internalizing part instead? A purely deterministic grader and problem creator creates an endless stream of problems and solutions. The LLM's job is just to help you get to the point that you can assign a random problem from this problem set and the student will be able to answer it without assistance. Hopefully the teachers lecture at the beginning of class helped with understanding as well (I suspect that it would), and also provides a more broad "theory of mind" about what we are doing than the myopic LLM's "Let's get you solving this problem" does. Also, humans are social creatures, and being taught by another human being (even if it were less efficient) is likely beneficial to most people.
tldr; Normal human teacher, deterministic grading to gauge progress, and LLM assistants to help the student get to the point that they can pass the deterministic grading.
Think less science and more a conversation; establishing syntactic and semantic ground rules for the speakers grasp of a behavior relative to problem.
It's not necessarily about teaching something concrete. It's about teaching a social style in an abstract way. It's discussing a painting or piece of music, in math the symbols used to represent possible number/geometry generators.
I never just watch the videos. I rewrite what is written out. To recreate the song and dance so to speak.
Pragmatically speaking life is just performance art. Only a few specific realms of science move the needle for humanity; biological health maintenance (across all contexts; housing, food, not just medical) and our research in energy infrastructure.
Everything else is just one's relative outcome. Result of their sensory experience. Feels like this should be obvious at this point.
The studies that show brain activity goes down as we use AI. Yeah. So? Is it great to stimulate ourselves so much with ultimately arbitrary content our biology immediately tries to forget due to entropy? Heart attacks are up in <60 crowd relative to last generation. Constant interaction with flame wars and tabs v spaces (functional languages and Nix or gtfo!) computer config wars level inanity is not good Bob.
I can't speak for anything that came later, but in the early videos the majority of the benefit was that the presentation was exceptionally clear, and focused on developing one little piece of a subject at a time, it gently paste format that you could easily pause and rewind over and over.
It was never about replacing exercises, it was there to help you do the exercises from your actual coursework, and to serve as a refresher reference for things you might have already studied but forgot some details about.
Also the videos usually consisted of a while of time spent physically writing out and talking through examples.
I looked at Khanmigo fairly early on. I tried it out and thought: this is ChatGPT with a system prompt. And not a good system prompt either. In addition to what felt like rote math it had some had some experiences, like you could "talk" to Plato or some other figure. Each of these was also pretty awful; simplistic prompts that spent all their time on guardrails and none on the experience itself. (What it the student thinks they are ACTUALLY talking to Plato?! Avoiding this seemed very important to the makers.)
In the more core experience they were super focused on not giving kids answers. I suppose built on a fear of subverting the teachers or classroom environment. But again it became a fixation that took all attention away from teaching itself.
But I figure you put something out in the world and see what happens. Yet I came back to it a year later and it was exactly the same. Nothing had changed. It baffled me then, and still baffles me... I had done enough to know the whole experience was easy to manipulate and yet I couldn't see any evidence of effort. It felt very much like "we tried nothing and it didn't work". Maybe I was missing something, I don't know.
I think there's a few different problems here:
1. I think the author is correct to highlight that underlying motivation, which is so important to teaching. We can focus on a high-minded Constructivist ideal of intrinsic motivation, but motivating students is also what grades are for, and classrooms, and learning with peers, having someone pay attention to your work, and so on. I do think that the AI chatbot is not capable of providing that. But the AI can still ENGAGE with that motivation. I have a feeling Khanmigo never did. I suspect some of their privacy controls also kept it from ever creating a good model of the learner.
2. The entire experience was very focused on answers, on solving problems. And yet it focused on that so reluctantly. The obsession with not giving away the answers had the unfortunate result in not engaging with anything but answers. It felt like it was always teasing at something it would withhold. But questions are cheap, especially rote questions, they shouldn't be treated as precious.
3. This may be unfair, but I infer the makers of Khanmigo did not build it with love and craft, which is unfortunate. I don't know enough to say why. Though there's a weird confidence to the product and to all of Khan Academy that I feel does not bring the necessary humility.
4. The chat experience was asymmetric in the wrong direction. In each turn the AI can and will spew out paragraphs of text, and the student types a couple words. Chatbots DO NOT have to work like this, they operate wonderfully with large chunks of user input. But you have to have the modality to receive it, the openness of experience to elicit that response, and the respect to make use of that response. Speech can be good, but it's a real challenge in a classroom environment (though if you are investing in Khanmigo, you can also invest in the other hardware to make it possible).
5. In some fairness, individual tutors don't represent any pedagogy at all. It's usually just someone making it up as they go. Motivation is a huge aspect, studying with someone sitting next to you, watching you study, will do wonders for keeping you focused! But also a tutor will have a natural theory of mind, hopefully the ability to see a student get the wrong answer and get inside the student's head to model their understanding and find a path to a correct understanding. That's a very challenging task, not beyond GPT-4 entirely but still quite challenging, especially if you are optimizing cost or time to response.
6. A good experience will do a TON of prework. I don't know if Khanmigo does that, if they've reshaped and expanded each educational module into a thorough playbook for the AI. That's where you have a chance to model things like wrong answers (there are actually SEVERAL books enumerating wrong answers in math), and use that to plan out responses.
If Khanmigo is not successful, I think that's on Khanmigo. Still teaching is very challenging. And maybe all of Khan Academy fails in this way: it does not seem to acknowledge the challenge of what they're trying to attempt. They seem far too confident in what they do, and not nearly creative enough.
Sal could not get to his cousin's house every afternoon to do math with her, so he recorded the sessions. She said she preferred the recordings, because she could rewind them and because he wasn't sitting there watching her not get it. He put them on the internet. Then he spent about fifteen years building an exercise engine, a "mastery" model, and a teacher dashboard around them, and told everyone who would listen that the point was to move the lecture out of the classroom so the classroom could be used for something better.
And the essay's premise is: this man wants your child to watch a video.
Overall, I do agree with the thesis but:
> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?
> Watch a video.
I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.
The attacks on Khan here personally irked me.
I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. I still remember watching Sal Khan's videos on calculus after struggling to get any grip on it from my frustratingly uninterested teacher who was forced into the position after our actual teacher retired. After I saw them I came back with a fire in me because for the first time he exposed me to the beauty of calculus.
This guy is completely wrong about Khan not inspiring students to care. Sometimes all students need is to see what caring looks like to ignite it in themselves. You can feel how much he cares just by watching him because the video is the product of all that caring, and he does it for millions of people.
But thank you to this blog author for being brave enough to call out Khan's failures, I am sure it'll help education much more than Khan did.
> "Sometimes all students need is to see what caring looks like to ignite it in themselves."
Excellent point, well expressed.
(Also, IMHO the sarcasm in your final sentence detracts from your comment.)
> The attacks on Khan here personally irked me.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum.
They have some significant advantages compared to (just) a classroom: (1) They set a quality floor – sometimes a teacher can be really incomprehensible, or mean, or whatever, but Khan's videos are consistently okay. (2) They are available from anywhere, without need for special social/technical infrastructure, like enrollment in school or access to a university library. (3) They are self paced, which means they can better accommodate the various interest level, motivation, and speed of different students. (A typical classroom also has some advantages: it gives social setting, a consistent schedule/structure, and human feedback.)
I'm also disappointed though, because it seems like, given production resources, there would be potential to make widely available materials that were much better than average lectures. With significant production effort (a team of subject experts and content creators doing a lot of dedicated work on each topic) I think it would be possible to make something truly great, but Khan's videos fall so far short of my imagination. For any particular topic, there are typically other freely available resources which I think are better.
I've also been disappointed because many people have hyped the site as being extraordinarily amazing, but when I have looked at it, what is there doesn't match the hype.
>I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum.
Its better than average quality classroom teacher in my experience.
And the point is this didn’t exist online at the time. His resources were strictly more. I imagine its still hard to find a single free resource that matches its breadth and quality.
> materials that were much better
Do you have few examples?
Personally I like books, but there are also many, many lecture videos on YouTube, some of them excellent (though I think they could still be better with bigger production teams and higher budgets). For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. If you have a specific topic in mind, I urge you to search around. (Making a long list of my own book/website/video recommendations about various topics here seems a bit off topic and out of scope.)
> For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW.
There are? I know an OCW course includes "lecture notes" pdfs. Does it have the lectures too?
For example, the course "distributed systems" is available on OCW as 6.824, from spring 2006: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-824-distributed-computer-syste...
MIT has renumbered the course, but it's still around: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ . Don't be fooled by the URL; it's now 6.5840.
And a series of lectures is available too: https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos . They're from spring 2020. They link to the course website for spring 2020, which is great. But it doesn't link to them, and OCW doesn't know about any of this, as far as I can tell. The 6.824 lecture series is pretty hard to discover, too, because it's uploaded by an account dedicated solely to that one course, which isn't related to any other MIT lecture videos.
Some OCW courses have lecture videos, while others do not.
Is 6.824 one that does, or one that doesn't?
Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
Khan Academy is a treasure, and is how I re-learned math in my 20s after not taking it seriously in school. Then moved on to MitX for science [re]fam.
I am having my kids learn math with Kahn academy if we don't have anything better by that point.
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:
"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."
Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:
- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).
- No room for outside innovation.
- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.
Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.
I don't want to tangle myself in a "technically correct" kind of discussion however I'd like to point out that Bloom's taxonomy - a widely used model in pedagogical context - has a level for creative work.
It is the highest level of learning, but still a level of learning.
> There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems.
Only if your goal is to teach people how to solve that particular problem. But it’s not the best way to teach mathematics.
For my money, the best way is problem based. I heard of one math teacher who had a video playing as the students walked in. The video was a weirdly shaped bucket being slowly filled by a hose. Students came in, saw him sitting up the back, got fidgety then someone asked “how long will this take??”. At that, he shot up and said “good question”! And they spent the rest of the class trying to estimate how long it would take for the bucket to be filled. Complete with diversions into flow rate, volume, and so on. He made the students ask the question. Then got the students to try and answer it themselves, helping them work through their own ideas on the board.
That’s beautiful teaching.
> that's not what school is for
Most people would disagree with you about the purpose of school.
Article cites Dewey, who wrote a lot of text about what school is for. Friere is also worth reading there. You'll see a diversity of perspectives.
Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos.
"Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."
Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.
While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).
In my case, it's not so much that I find it childish, it's that I find it incredibly distracting which means I can't focus as easily on the content. Instead of "oh, now I understand how that equation works" I catch myself thinking "why is he repeating the same word over and over - that's so annoying!". Then my brain starts obsessing over "when is he going to do it again?", even though I don't want it to. It's a bit like trying to deliberately ignore something. It becomes all you can think about.
Oh ok, got you. While it entirely differs on how different people receive ideas, for me, I just try to keep the end goal in mind (what are we ultimately moving towards) and just think of those repeated words as just small steps rather than just annoying repeating word.
YMMV but I found the style very helpful
OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
I'd love to see studies about this.
There’s a great lecture on giving lectures by an MIT prof. He says you can give no more than 3 ideas per hour, and you must repeat yourself at least 3 times for each idea. And while, part of his thesis is because people might miss something due to their attention, and needs of the group vs individual I think his experience is still highly relevant. I know that I don’t learn as much unless there’s room for almost boredom. I find there is a feeling similar to boredom that I have to experience to really internalize something. It’s almost like I can feel the neurons rewiring (though I suspect it might just be an emotion that encourages the energy expenditure necessary for learning). If I skim, or do doubletime, then that feeling usually never comes, and there’s a good chance my future recall will be poor…
https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=Gfiq1tonSf5KLePy
When I’m understimulated by a teacher, my mind wanders. I’ll start thinking about something else entirely. When my mind comes back, I’ll have missed a couple minutes of content. I can overcome this with willpower, but doing so is exhausting.
Playing videos at 1.5-2x fixes the problem entirely. My attention is held without any effort.
If a concept is new or difficult enough, I just slow the video back down or pause it whenever I need to think things through.
> When I’m understimulated by a teacher, my mind wanders.
A good solution to this is to train focus. By giving in to the dopanine craving you are depriving your mind of the space it needs to process.
I'd argue (as the article does), that you don't 'really' learn from watching stuff, fast or slow, but from actually working with and doing. This is completely obvious in the physical domain. You could take a ten year course on the basketball free throw and watch a billion hours of video on it, but then when you get on the court and actually do it - you're going to shoot pretty much like somebody who's never shot before.
And I think the same is true in academic domains. If you're trying to think about something consciously, you're going to do a poor job of it. And the only way to get the unconscious competence is through a bunch of 'doing'. Chess is a great example of this because it's purely mental yet again you're never going to gain any degree of significant competence without playing a lot. Interestingly this even applies after mastery. A master who has played e.g. 1. e4 their entire life and then swaps to 1. d4 isn't going to be playing at the same level as he plays 1. e4 even if watches thousands of hours of videos on it beforehand. That connection you make by doing and interacting with things is just critical.
Indeed, well put.
It is a spectrum. If you give your mind some space, it will start churning through the key ideas, fill in gaps, turn things upside down, ask questions. That starts during the explanations and their pauses. And ideally you have some empty time right after to think about it, maybe do an exercise, maybe try to explain it to somebody. Work it, like a good dough.
2x listening suffocates this process. Like too little sugar or too low temperature or too little rest for your yeast dough. It might "feel" good but you are missing out so much...
I don't think you can make blanket statements. Consider:
1. Teacher 1 speaks at 100 words per minute.
2. Teacher 2 speaks at 50 words per minute, for the exact same content as Teacher 1.
You're not really losing anything by playing Teacher 1 at normal speed vs Teacher 2 at 2x speed. For every learner, there will be an optimal teaching speed for a given topic. This may mean listening to some audio at normal speed, some at higher speeds, and some even at slower speeds. I always customise my playback speed to the specific content I'm trying to learn.
Those two teachers will rarely say the same words. Chances are, teacher 2 chooses their words more carefully, and gives you then space to absorb that higher information density. In the end, both may communicate the same amount of information.
It's not about the rate of speaking but rather about what is actually being spoken. I am currently going through the Neetcode DSA course and it's just obnoxious. His video on Union Find, a 15 LoC algorithm, is 20 minutes.
I think there was a study omparing watching an educational video in 1x speed and watching it two times back to back in 2x speed equating the time spent on the material, which found the second group faired better.
Interesting, I'd like to read that study.
Though it's not the question I asked. Would the second group fair somewhere close to the first if it only had listened once?
(I don't buy the argument that this would not be fair since they would use the extea time to watch more stuff ... because that's rarely what people do with their extra time. Especially not watching the same thing again.)
I remember reading a study a while back about learning from videos at 1.5x to 2x speed. The key observation that actually made the learning more efficacious was to watch the video at 2x speed two times back to back. Apparently, this method was also better than watching the video one time at normal speed. I suppose it's because one get twice the exposure for the same amount of time.
I haven't looked for the study, but I can if you are truly curious.
There's a difference between pacing (good), and repetitive speech (bad). Between pacing and repetitive speech.
Ironically, spaced repetition is the key to successful learning.
Obviously one can overdo it. And there is variance in what people require. But not giving things time, instead giving in to the dopamine-craving, that's killing your learning abilities.
Repeating a sentence twice in a row during an explanation, is not spaced repetition at all. Spaced repetition means testing recall at increasing intervals, usually starting 1 day apart.
"Paris is the capital of France. Paris is the capital of France" -> not spaced repetition.
"Paris is the capital of France. [one day later]. What is the capital of France? [three days later] What is the capital of France?" -> spaced repetition.
And in fact, it's this plus practice where the real value lies in learning and memorising. The only purpose of an explanation from a teacher is to help you understand the concept. Generally once you understand it once, you don't need to understand it again - unless you forget, and that's where the practice / spaced repetition comes in. That's why I prefer the teaching part to be as efficient as possible, so I can focus my limited time on the parts that will make me internalise it.
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him after a Robitussin bender.
I wish YouTube let you increase the speed of videos past 2x. I play almost everything at 2x now, and I have no problem comprehending videos at that speed. I’d like to try 2.5x or 3x but the ui doesn’t have that option.
There's a bunch of different chrome extensions that do this, and you can do it yourself from the Chrome console with `$0.playbackRate = 3` or whatever.
I think youtube premium lets you hit up to 4x
You can do it in YT premium.
Weird thing to put behind a paywall! I'll try some extensions.
It might be annoying if you already know the content. Frame it for the least common denominator (pun intended) - the person who has the time and needs the repetition to pick up a concept.
Not sure that I'm adding anything to this, or that what I'm saying is even relevant, but Sal does (or did) have a deviated septum, and as someone who suffers from the same / similar root cause of breathing issues, I'm pretty sure speaking is (or was) taxing for him, probably contributing at least mildly to such a style.
Personally I like it.
This is exactly what my kid said about why he doesn’t like Kahn academy.
What would you recommend over khan academy?
I've not tried it myself, but I consistently hear good things about Math Academy. It uses a knowledge graph so that it knows whether you've satisfied prerequisites for a topic, and it adapts itself to your level. I've never taken the plunge because it's very expensive at $49 a month, but it seems to be the one that serious maths learners use.
I did the trial of Brilliant the other day. You can get 7 days free, then another 7 days added if you cancel the first trial before the end. After that you can continue to get 2 free lessons per day with ads. I think it's about $20 a month for unlimited lessons. The maths problems are more visual (which makes them quite intuitive) and it has a nicer, more polished UI than Khan Academy. It's easier to stay in the mood for doing more lessons. The main downsides compared to Khan are that the explanations are quite minimal (short descriptions, no videos), and it doesn't reach as advanced a level as Khan. I'm looking at it as more a way to do a refresher on the maths I already learned at school rather than a serious learning tool. If it were $5 a month I'd probably consider subbing for a couple of months and trying to blitz through all the material before switching back to Khan to fill in the gaps.
Herbert Gross' lecture style, in MIT Calculus Revisited, would be nice:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B08AE665AB9002A
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1C22D4DED943EF7B
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD971E94905A70448
While I am a strong supporter of KA, I just use regular schooling to review and back up what I learned on Khan.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
I think it is okay.
I have benefited a good deal from Khan Academy, and was quite disappointing to go back and see that they seem even more focused on showing videos than they did 10 years ago.
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
The idea is for the students to watch the videos outside of class and this frees up time for the teachers to provide individual help.
From what I know of the Khan approach, it's akin to "flipping the classroom" [0], which has gained pretty wide acceptance. It was pioneered by Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur.
(I use the flipped classroom approach extensively. But the legal profession being the eager embracers of novelty that we are </sarcasm>, I refer to the approach as "enhanced Socratic method," given that Socratic method was something we all endured in law school.)
For math and engineering courses, the basic flipped-classroom approach was used at West Point for over 150 years: In the so-called Thayer method, students study textbooks in advance, then in class, they work on problems on chalkboards. The instructor moves from chalkboard to chalkboard, coaching the students in real time. [1]
(I do much the same thing in my contract-drafting classes: In small groups, students do drafting exercises using online whiteboards. I lurk on my laptop, quietly coaching in person as needed.)
[0] https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/flipped-classrooms
[1] https://flippedlearning.org/syndicated/avoiding-flipped-lear...
Is the article about something else than how math on Khan Academy was thaught?
I remember minimal videos (3-13 min, usually 5-8), and then exercises drilling the techniques until you understand it and don't make mistakes. If you got a perfect score (no mistakes whatsoever), you went a little faster.
That's learning by doing, or am I wrong? Or are there no exercises for things other than math?
Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.
"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"
It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.
I agree with you. It's just an attention bite as nobody would care about this article if it wasn't focused on something as big and popular as Khan Academy. It's clear that the author has never used it as a place to learn something.
You are wrong in understanding the article.
Khan: Videos + rote exercises
Learning: Projects, complex problem-solving, exploration, argumentation, etc.
Dewey is worth reading.
Direct Instruction - and the largest educational study ever untaken Project Follow Through - would like a work. Project based learning?
Recall practice IS learning. Projects, exploration, and discovery-based "learning" sounds great in theory but in practice, without actual testing, really doesn't live up to the hype.
Adam Boxer is worth reading.
I should clarify -- since from both posts, my comment was ambiguous and misinterpreted:
I was explaining the article, not my views, since the top-level comment did not read it.
Regarding your comment, it is as wrong as the article. BOTH are important. Recall practice is great for e.g. developing surface understanding, declarative knowledge, and well-done, procedural knowledge.
That type of knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, for high-level performance in most fields, at least beyond a spelling bee or vocab exam. To understand gaps, see:
- Complex problem-solving, which includes extensive conditional, conceptual, metacognitive, etc. knowledge. (e.g. see how top participants prep for math olympiads)
- Attitudes towards school / learning (one of the top predictors of future success by 3rd grade, together with reading)
- Transfer learning
- Cross-cutting / not explicitly represented knowledge / literature on expert blindspot
- Etc.
"Projects, exploration, and discovery-based 'learning'" work great in practice, when properly structured, which usually means explicit, well-defined learning objectives.
Bad: "Make a nice poster on selling a car"
Good: "Independently explore an organ system of the human body. Make a nice poster synthesizing what you learned and present it to the classroom in three weeks."
Particularly in early mathematics and language acquisition (but also in most learning domains) you need both rote learning and exploratory learning. Fundamental concepts + exercises to build muscle memory are foundational to enabling students to participate fruitfully in meaningful projects, complex problem-solving, exploration and argumentation.
If you're flailing around without having memorized basic trigonometric identities, you're going to struggle severely to apply them to classical mechanics. If you can't do basic matrix multiplication, you're not going to build a graphics engine.
The article tries to damn Khan with an example about probing how neural myelination works. If you understand the foundations of electricity (by learning about capacitance and impedance) and have done some grueling foundational learning in organic chemistry, ready answers might spring to your mind. You need the former to make asking the latter fruitful or meaningful.
Khan deliberately uses the term "scaffolding" - which since we're throwing around dead education theorists harks from Vygotsky - which is precisely what a teacher provides by pantomiming elementary concepts for a child. Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence.
I really don't understand this article. Two things can be true at once.
I was explaining the article, not making a statement about how learning works. My comment was poorly phrased.
I agree with everything you said, except Vygotsky. :)
Vygotsky is worth reading, since:
- He is evidence-based. He isn't just a theorist. He cites studies. This contrasts with educational philosophers which dominated literature of the time.
- He is universally misquoted in US education literature, usually to say banally obvious things.
- He is brilliant.
- In the concept of ZPD, US education literature usually says the literal opposite of what Vygotsky said.
Do you really thing the concept of scaffolding didn't exist before 1900?
Curiously, Vygotsky precisely has a passage about (positive) experience with throwing special-needs students into the deep end of the pool on tasks they can't succeed with, and contradicts the (incorrect) intuition behind the teaching process implied by:
"Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence."
To be specific, a child does need to ultimately internalize these, but one of the best ways to do so is through a certain type of struggle, rather than breaking down into little pieces, in the ways consistently attributed to him.
Sounds like you should read the article if you have questions about what the article is about?
I've read the article (except skimming \ fast forwarding 3rd and 2nd paragraph from the end) and it wasn't there. No detailed info explaining why author's criticizing Khan Academy for not doing something it in my experience did. Maybe you haven't read it?
This article is an example of a rather poor piece of writing. You can't blame people for skimming through it.
This articles core argument appears to be that a live instruction is better than a video because there can be feedback at the moment of confusion while a video can't. But that depends on student's impulse being triggered and I'm not sure if its any better or in some cases can be worse if the teachers content is not as thorough as Khan's or anyone else's video - as these benefit from a worldwide audiences feedback on correcting any confusing or unclear parts.
In the classrooms I see through my kids, the teacher is doing roughly what a Khan video does: walking through a worked procedure at the front of the room. If a video fails to provoke the "wait, why does that work?" moment, then a teacher following the same flow likely fails in exactly the same way as the author claims and missing the opportunity for hands'on learning. A video actually allows the learner to go back and review content if anything was unclear, and presumably any interactive AI agent can help with the feedback part even though the teacher in the video isn't.
I also wish the piece had stayed with Khanmigo, where nobody has a good theory yet on where the ai tutoring loop actually breaks and why people fail to engage it and that putting it in their face may not work, why exactly personalization at that scale hasn't produced the gains it promised.
Also irked by the title built on a pun on Khan's name, sets up an awkward framing that kind of lets me know it may not be unbiased.
> there can be feedback at the moment of confusion while a video can't
LLMs are great at this. I’m sure they’re misused constantly. But if you ask the right questions, LLMs are excellent learning aides. Especially for symbolic reasoning like mathematics and programming.
Khan Academy has a problem lately:
Go visit a page like https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra and count the number of:
It does not communicate that their primary goal is to educate, it feels more like the primary goal is fuelling the bureaucracy behind the charity.To be fair, if they redid the linear algebra curriculum and included exercises, they could spin that up into a solid paid program.
Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning", or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did.
[0] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5138/Teaching-MachinesThe-...
[1] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/
My belief is that Khan Academy is tremendously useful when started at a young age and done consistently. I have been doing it for over 7 years and it was a huge portion of my childhood. Long term, consistent use of KA from a young age builds deep procedural fluency and (this is very IMPORTANT:) self-directed discipline that transform how a student handles complex concepts. Even though some critics correctly note and argue that automated drill and practice cannot replace creative, project based discovery and learning, daily mastery based practice eliminates foundational learning gaps (you get a solid understanding), lowers the anxiety around making mistakes (because you get used to repetitive practice), and automates core mechanics (it becomes a basic skill) until they become second nature. I believe that persistent procedural learning is very far from mechanizing education at the expense of real learning. Rather, it frees up valuable cognitive bandwidth and gives the precise structural confidence and fluency required to excel in open ended, high level problem solving that so many critics preach. This is my opinion as someone who did Khan Academy for 7 years (where I learned the procedural step by step learning and practice) and went to school at the same time (where I did the open ended problems and projects). I believe that Khan Academy will help millions of students learn and grow (and the computer programming community is great too!).
To be clear: I'm not against Khan Academy. I think overald it's great! It's helped tons of children by virtue of making solid learning material available for free on the internet, while also giving children a chance to learn at their own pace and dive into topics they're curious about. I used it on occasion myself as an adult
Also, 3B1B got his start at Khan Academy so that definitely counts for something.
But if we're in the context of classrooms, and discussions of how one might change the roles of teachers using computers, then I'm getting wary. Especially when a lot of money is involved from investors who do not care to study history because it might not fit their desired narrative.
As someone who has earned over 3 million points on Khan Academy over a 3-4 year span about ten years ago, I am very appreciative of my experience. What I appreciated most is when Sal would derive formulas such as the quotient rule in Calculus from the power rule by using negative exponents. Deriving formulas rather than memorizing them opened up a new perspective for me.
This article appears to focus on the chat bot which I have not used and was not part of my experience. At the time, I had a subscription to Wolfram Alpha that was helpful if I got stuck on an intermediary step.
The high level of goal of the post which is directed at asking good questions raises a point that seems valid to me.
> What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn
As anyone who’s met Sal will attest, this characterization is incredibly off the mark.
The author extrapolated from the product as opposed to understanding the person and how the product came to be the way it is.
Education is a very difficult problem. People like to learn and people want to learn. Mostly improve themselves over their friends and society, and they want to do it quickly and easily. This proven by the countless influencer videos and influencer culture present in youtube on topics such as finance, health and many others.
However, true education is really hard. It requires hard work, sticking with something beyond when it gets boring and difficult. Being stubborn to get it right. These qualities are not very common and instilling this is extremely difficult from outside.
What author is asking is, he wants Khan Academy to be a true education platform , while dismissing it was video platform. He is wrong in both counts.
Khan Academy is a gateway for a student to draw the map or scaffold as the initial phase. The start of the education happens when the student works on the exercises, and tries it again and again to get it right. They are driven by the mastery based education which they try to ask the student to do.
A good general article on education, but weirdly wrong when it comes taking a dig at khan academy platform. And w.r.t to AI use in Education, students who know how to use AI are using it exceeding well for their true education.
K.A. has always helped me immensely. Often I will add a video as a 2nd "I do" before our "we do." If there is extra time after small groups we typically answer the math unit questions as a class. Students are thrilled to come up in front of the class to defend thier reasoning before finally seeing if thier choice was correct.
What is with these personal attacks? I don’t understand the insistence that every educational tool must offer some perfect, complete learning experience.
I grew up in India watching the early Sal Khan videos because I preferred them. They complemented school and helped me understand things I’d ignored in class or simply hadn’t been taught well.
You can critique the limits of videos without dismissing teachers who have genuinely helped millions of people learn.
This seems to be wrestling with the wrong opponent.
> And this is what I think the edtech world keeps getting wrong. The assumption is that if you can deliver the right content, in the right way, at the right time, learning will follow. It won’t.
I think it depends on the goals of the student and what you're trying to learn. Some things are procedural and can be learned by being told, some things require a more hands-on approach to really "get."
If I want to learn how to drive a tractor, I just read the Farmer's Guide to Tractor Drivin' or find a YouTube video (I learned how to drive an excavator and fell trees like this—watch and listen and then go do what they said; hot damn, I learned how to do it).
If I want to learn how to produce a modern masterpiece (or novel invention) in some field or art, I won't find the "how to" in a book or video [1]. That's very much a personal journey that can't be replicated or recalled as a series of steps you tell someone to follow.
The Sal Khan way is prescription-driven and has its place in the world and I don't think it should be dismissed. But that way won't give you the "10,000 hours" level of understanding or experience (and arguably, shouldn't be expected to—even in the shape of an intermediary chatbot).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvgVA_neH04
I have been using Khan Academy for over 7 years growing up. It has helped tremendously and taught me to be a critical thinker. There are exercises, quizzes, and unit tests to test a student's understanding and if they get something wrong, KA marks what videos or articles they should go back to and review. I agree with one of the commenters here, this article is uncharitable.
The AI voice of this article irked me. Pangram says 44% of it is AI, for the chunk I was reading.
For generic trope-y content like this, the voice can't be left this AI-ish. It has to be about something really interesting for this AI tone to be bearable.
I watch Khan Academy videos because they explain topics like mathematics in an easy-to-understand way. But it's just one tool in a student's arsenal. Khan Academy is by no means the one-stop-shop for education and should not stop learners from inquiring, constructing, expressing, and communicating as part of their learning journey. I hoped that the author would at least make that distinction a bit more in their article because it seemed a little unnecessarily critical. I _think_ the article makes the assumption that most students are just passively watching videos and _are_ using Khan Academy as the one-stop-shop and that the site (and Khan) are missing out on an opportunity to provide a better experience that is more in line with John Dewey's principles of learning.
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses have labs, problem sets, and required essays. All else is memorization (not that memorization is inherently bad, part of learning assembly language programming is memorizing the available instructions, while learning French includes memorizing vocabulary).
Educational technology that is focused on delivering “content” is unlikely to be of much value. Technology that induces the learner to experiment, to discover, to discern patterns, and to ask further questions, is going to be much more valuable.
The article starts by talking about how interactive learning with Khanmingo failed, and then goes into depth about how watching videos isn’t enough. That’s disappointing. Khanmingo should be superior to passively watching a video because you can interactively dig deeper just like the author says is necessary.
I am responding to the comment, not the article.
The concept of Khanmigo was great. The implementation was basically useless.
It was a great attempt, but the article explains the problem:
"early OpenAI access"
This was literally the world's very first attempt at an agentic tutor, with (initially pre-release) GPT-4. That is worlds away from what's being built with fable or sol-grade models in 2026, or what will be available in 2028.
Off-topic and may be found rude - I find multiple instances of "Kahn" in the comments. Is it really that difficult to put in the effort to learn the correct spelling of "Khan" specially when it is everywhere in TFA, the post title, and other comments?
A couple of days ago it was Ghandi instead of Gandhi. I understand it's not a big deal. But it's also not a big deal to get the spelling right.
I think it's because these "h"es are silent in (most?) dialects of English, so both spellings would result in the same pronunciation. English doesn't really have a 'kh" /x/ sound, or an unaspirated k, or an "ahn", or a "dh" sound. So Kahn and Khan both get read as /kan/, Gandhi and Ghandi both get read as /gandi/. If anything the "h" just seems to hint that the vowel isn't pronounced /æ/. So folks remember that there is a silent h but not where it is.
Of course many Indian languages have aspirated and unaspirated "d" sounds, for example, and this is also reflected in the English dialet. But most of us English speakers can't hear the difference very well even if we concentrate.
I’m preferring to the spelling; not pronunciation.
People remember spelling based on pronunciation.
There are only two comments with that spelling. It's not a big deal.
Considering that WoW came out in 2004 and people STILL sometimes call Rogues "rouges"... doubt it.
This is just the comment section of HN, does the spelling really matter as long as the reader gets it?
It feels weird and unfair to focus solely on Kahn here when he’s competing with some random teacher or professor’s droning, confusing, non-interactive lecture that’s less engaging and just as lacking in interactivity or application.
I also don’t think he ever purports to be “all you need” to learn.
It reminds me of the people who criticize Duolingo because you can’t actually reach perfect fluency through their app--like wasn’t it always obvious that it was never meant to be the only education you need; wasn’t it always obvious that you need to actually _speak_ a language to learn it? And yet it’s still a great app that has helped millions of people learn languages.
I agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Khan here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.
I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.
Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.
What entrepreneurs in the US have made huge money from EdTech exits? I can’t think of any. So this critique doesn’t seem fair to me.
(India is another story. If you are referring to ByJu, which was absolutely a predatory enterprise, I agree with you)
These platform exists because traditional methods are failing students in education. Some of them are scam but blaming it on Khan is BS.
Traditional methods are failing because of austerity and capitalism. Pedagogy is a science which has expert studying these things. And most teachers are well aware of the science and know what works. Stuff like instant feedback has been known to work better since behavioralism in the 1950s. Problem is that whenever these solutions are applied they are used to cut corners and make education cheaper, resulting in a net loss. This is a problem of austerity.
Note that I was explicitly not blaming this on Khan, I was merely stating that he is the face if this movement and as such will get a lot of the blame, regardless of how much he deserves it.
My personal feelings about him is that he is actually an excellent teacher, and has independently discovered what pedagogical scientists have known for decades. He however allowed his discoveries to be packaged as a neat capitalist solution, and then has watched as his “discoveries” were used to excuse austerity (and made a bunch of money doing so). At best he is naive, and at worst he is an active participant. Either way he deserves at least some of the blame (though personally, I would rather blame the system, and point to him as being a part of it)
I think the core thesis - that videos aren't the full package - makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why Khanmigo couldn't in theory fill in some of the other pieces.
I'm reminded o A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age - and how LLMs haven't been able to achieve anything similar. With the correct supervising AI agents that have their own goals - I don't see why you couldn't have an LLM try to motivate you, or gamify education tailored to your interests and targeted at the areas you are struggling with. Somehow weaving in their own education videos seems way too difficult though - it feels like it should be an entirely different thing
Maybe Khanmigo just kinda sucks? Having a ton of funding doesn't mean its the best possible solution. I've never used it, so it's hard for me to judge.
I think there is more to this.
Here's a presentation that, kind of claims the opposite. More specifically, it claims figuring it out on your own is not as good as having a teacher tell you, and then having you use the info, and it claims to be backed up by research
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ
I'm not a fan when schadenfreude indulges in someone failing to make the world a better place.
I think there is a simple reason why AI tutors are not terribly successful.
AI is just not good enough yet, they are only just now capable of performing tasks, getting them to do those tasks involves a degree of careful guidance and the ability to handle frustration calmly and rationally.
Those things require a high motivation to have the task done.
They are not the properties you want in a tutor, a few students have the drive to learn in conditions that are not ideal. They are a small minority.
What you need is a AI that has a deep enough understanding of the ideas behind the metals it teaches and is engaging witty and charismatic enough to get that information across to a student.
When it has those abilities there will be a lot of parents that won't want it to have access to their kids.
Not sure what actually killed it but Khanmigo seemed to have removed the state of being stuck. Wrestling with a problem you cannot immediately solve is where the learning happens at least for me in programming and math.
Seeking help after a while is obviously fine but when the help is one keystroke away and always available, you take it before the useful part of being stuck has happened. Not ideal for learning tbh
A comment I had made on Dan Meyer's article, also relevant here (Also, as others are pointing out here, there is a crucial difference between the videos and their chatbot; you can inspire with videos because your human interests are on display):
This resonates so much with me. I am the co-founder of a microschool and also a neuroscientist. And these two have intersected so much in fascinating ways. Four years in, the big lesson for us is that for learning to make sense it should have the following progression: meaning, motivation, mechanics, measurement.
Conventional schooling, and everything designed to help with conventional schooling like Khanmigo give in to this systemic gravitational pull of measurement (we must know what they are learning). And from that ensues your standardized curriculum, measuring the visible and easy, because that's easier than something like "mathematical thinking", and the focus on mechanics (multiplication tables, fractions, chemical names, whatever). And in doing this we leach out all meaning and focus on the drills.
Chatbots, the way they are set up now, are doomed to fail because the entry point is mechanics. "How do I solve this particular quadratic equation?" It's a meaningless question to a child because it simply does not connect to their world. We cannot start with that and work Socratically towards meaning. We must instead offer or build a world where meaning and sense-making are possible. (Wrote about this here https://blog.comini.in/p/why-khanmigo-will-fail )
Personally interesting for me is how meaning-making and sense-making are essentially the core of conscious experience. We, bundles of experiences, cohere and conspire and collaborate to create a meaningful experience from the sensory data that assaults us. Data that would be meaningless without a perspective.
So in education we are doing the same thing that the mind does so effortlessly by existing and being in the world and grappling with it. But we shoot ourselves in the foot by taking a reductive lens and split it into elements.
That's worked well for us only until we encountered complex adaptive systems that need us to also focus on the whole. But the system has been built to focus on the narrow and hope that these come together at some point. And so we end up with this meaning crisis we are all navigating, in school and outside.
More about Meaning before Mechanics here: https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
Nothing beats a well-written book.
I'm curious if maybe the mistake was in assuming we needed AI for the teaching part of the process.
Maybe we should focus only on having AI for the correcting/internalizing part instead? A purely deterministic grader and problem creator creates an endless stream of problems and solutions. The LLM's job is just to help you get to the point that you can assign a random problem from this problem set and the student will be able to answer it without assistance. Hopefully the teachers lecture at the beginning of class helped with understanding as well (I suspect that it would), and also provides a more broad "theory of mind" about what we are doing than the myopic LLM's "Let's get you solving this problem" does. Also, humans are social creatures, and being taught by another human being (even if it were less efficient) is likely beneficial to most people.
tldr; Normal human teacher, deterministic grading to gauge progress, and LLM assistants to help the student get to the point that they can pass the deterministic grading.
Yeah? That's what the style of teaching is about.
Think less science and more a conversation; establishing syntactic and semantic ground rules for the speakers grasp of a behavior relative to problem.
It's not necessarily about teaching something concrete. It's about teaching a social style in an abstract way. It's discussing a painting or piece of music, in math the symbols used to represent possible number/geometry generators.
I never just watch the videos. I rewrite what is written out. To recreate the song and dance so to speak.
Pragmatically speaking life is just performance art. Only a few specific realms of science move the needle for humanity; biological health maintenance (across all contexts; housing, food, not just medical) and our research in energy infrastructure.
Everything else is just one's relative outcome. Result of their sensory experience. Feels like this should be obvious at this point.
The studies that show brain activity goes down as we use AI. Yeah. So? Is it great to stimulate ourselves so much with ultimately arbitrary content our biology immediately tries to forget due to entropy? Heart attacks are up in <60 crowd relative to last generation. Constant interaction with flame wars and tabs v spaces (functional languages and Nix or gtfo!) computer config wars level inanity is not good Bob.
Isn’t education often a you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-but-you-can't-make-it-drink problem?
Comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411243 by @dabedee is dead from downvoting but shouldn't be.
You know you can vouch for a comment right?
No, I didn't know that. Just did so — thanks for the tip.
The only thing more irritating than the AI-assisted unfair attacks on Sal is the font it's written in.
That article is spot on: we learn by doing and experience, not being told the high level outcomes (which is not without value as a guide).
I can't speak for anything that came later, but in the early videos the majority of the benefit was that the presentation was exceptionally clear, and focused on developing one little piece of a subject at a time, it gently paste format that you could easily pause and rewind over and over.
It was never about replacing exercises, it was there to help you do the exercises from your actual coursework, and to serve as a refresher reference for things you might have already studied but forgot some details about.
Also the videos usually consisted of a while of time spent physically writing out and talking through examples.
Why are there people in this comment section who are just downvoting opinions that they don't agree with?
I looked at Khanmigo fairly early on. I tried it out and thought: this is ChatGPT with a system prompt. And not a good system prompt either. In addition to what felt like rote math it had some had some experiences, like you could "talk" to Plato or some other figure. Each of these was also pretty awful; simplistic prompts that spent all their time on guardrails and none on the experience itself. (What it the student thinks they are ACTUALLY talking to Plato?! Avoiding this seemed very important to the makers.)
In the more core experience they were super focused on not giving kids answers. I suppose built on a fear of subverting the teachers or classroom environment. But again it became a fixation that took all attention away from teaching itself.
But I figure you put something out in the world and see what happens. Yet I came back to it a year later and it was exactly the same. Nothing had changed. It baffled me then, and still baffles me... I had done enough to know the whole experience was easy to manipulate and yet I couldn't see any evidence of effort. It felt very much like "we tried nothing and it didn't work". Maybe I was missing something, I don't know.
I think there's a few different problems here:
1. I think the author is correct to highlight that underlying motivation, which is so important to teaching. We can focus on a high-minded Constructivist ideal of intrinsic motivation, but motivating students is also what grades are for, and classrooms, and learning with peers, having someone pay attention to your work, and so on. I do think that the AI chatbot is not capable of providing that. But the AI can still ENGAGE with that motivation. I have a feeling Khanmigo never did. I suspect some of their privacy controls also kept it from ever creating a good model of the learner.
2. The entire experience was very focused on answers, on solving problems. And yet it focused on that so reluctantly. The obsession with not giving away the answers had the unfortunate result in not engaging with anything but answers. It felt like it was always teasing at something it would withhold. But questions are cheap, especially rote questions, they shouldn't be treated as precious.
3. This may be unfair, but I infer the makers of Khanmigo did not build it with love and craft, which is unfortunate. I don't know enough to say why. Though there's a weird confidence to the product and to all of Khan Academy that I feel does not bring the necessary humility.
4. The chat experience was asymmetric in the wrong direction. In each turn the AI can and will spew out paragraphs of text, and the student types a couple words. Chatbots DO NOT have to work like this, they operate wonderfully with large chunks of user input. But you have to have the modality to receive it, the openness of experience to elicit that response, and the respect to make use of that response. Speech can be good, but it's a real challenge in a classroom environment (though if you are investing in Khanmigo, you can also invest in the other hardware to make it possible).
5. In some fairness, individual tutors don't represent any pedagogy at all. It's usually just someone making it up as they go. Motivation is a huge aspect, studying with someone sitting next to you, watching you study, will do wonders for keeping you focused! But also a tutor will have a natural theory of mind, hopefully the ability to see a student get the wrong answer and get inside the student's head to model their understanding and find a path to a correct understanding. That's a very challenging task, not beyond GPT-4 entirely but still quite challenging, especially if you are optimizing cost or time to response.
6. A good experience will do a TON of prework. I don't know if Khanmigo does that, if they've reshaped and expanded each educational module into a thorough playbook for the AI. That's where you have a chance to model things like wrong answers (there are actually SEVERAL books enumerating wrong answers in math), and use that to plan out responses.
If Khanmigo is not successful, I think that's on Khanmigo. Still teaching is very challenging. And maybe all of Khan Academy fails in this way: it does not seem to acknowledge the challenge of what they're trying to attempt. They seem far too confident in what they do, and not nearly creative enough.
Sal could not get to his cousin's house every afternoon to do math with her, so he recorded the sessions. She said she preferred the recordings, because she could rewind them and because he wasn't sitting there watching her not get it. He put them on the internet. Then he spent about fifteen years building an exercise engine, a "mastery" model, and a teacher dashboard around them, and told everyone who would listen that the point was to move the lecture out of the classroom so the classroom could be used for something better.
And the essay's premise is: this man wants your child to watch a video.