Khan of Khan Academy at TED (video)

I've heard countless people rave about Salman Khan and his teaching methods - both here and away from HN. The truth is, I had no idea why he and his teachings were such a big deal...<i>until now</i>. I had seen some of his videos before and read some of the articles about the Khan Academy, but had never given them my full attention. To me, it was just another guy with his own teaching methods.<p>But when I see him talk at TED, it makes perfect sense. Not only is he a superb speaker, he gets his points across clearly.<p>Probably the best point of all is this one:<p><pre><code> "What I do is I assign the lectures for homework and, what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom." </code></pre> As radical as that may seem, this idea has TONS of potential. Do we really need teachers there in person if they are just lecturing? The real use of being there in person as a teacher is for interacting with the students. What better way to do that than by helping them with the work (i.e. homework) and letting the Khan Academy lecture when little interaction is needed.<p>I am definitely going to hop on the bandwagon now and join everyone else in following Khan while appreciating his pure genius. In fact, the best way to describe him is to combine all the great things people here on HN have to say about him:<p><pre><code> &#62; He's amazing. (joshu) &#62; I really do think Sal Khan will revolutionize teaching. (solarmist) &#62; Hero material. (MikeCapone) &#62; Future of education. (omfut) &#62; Really wonderful reminder of what just one person can set in motion. (runevault) &#62; Simply amazing that a guy armed only with a tablet and a microphone can have this much impact. (keiferski) &#62; He is a big inspiration for anyone looking to change the world. (omfut) </code></pre> The list could go on forever. And it's not every day you hear people talking about someone and their ideas in such a way like they are now about Khan and the Khan Academy.<p><i>If people are saying it is amazing, then there's a pretty good chance that it truly is amazing.</i>

Really wonderful reminder of what just one person can set in motion. I could easily see him becoming considered one of the most important people of this century based on what he is doing for education and its globalization.

As a university math TA, my students would often say "you're so much better than the teacher, why don't you teach the class?"<p>Hearing this is definitely an ego stroke, but what the student really means is that he learns better by practicing problems than by listening to theory. I feel this is even more true in a younger school environment.<p>The teacher's and TA's roles are simply different in this respect, so I take no credit for "being better than the teacher".<p>But what Khan Academy does is really interesting, because now the teacher takes the role of the TA. I feel this is a much more effective way to teach. And ultimately the student will benefit. Thumbs up to this philosophy.

Over the years I've found lectures less and less useful to attend in person as profs and other presenters post their lectures and powerpoint slides online. I can just watch/read those and get everything I need from those materials, then when I'm in class I can ask much more useful questions and cover the details that really make the difference.<p>I love how the Khan Academy is institutionalizing that idea. I can't see any reason that lectures need to be done in person, but being able to work through sticking points with someone. Now that is valuable.<p>I really do think Sal Khan will revolutionize teaching. At least in the areas this model is applicable.

This man is certainly one of my heroes. I love this part from the FAQ on the Khan Academy:<p><pre><code> What topics do you plan to cover? My goal is to cover everything. Yes, everything! ... My goal really is to keep making videos until the day I die (which will hopefully not be for at least another 50 or 60 years). Should give me time to make several tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject."</code></pre>

After viewing this video I logged into Khan academy to check out the practice tracking features highlighted in the video. Mainly I wanted to see the categorical branching of subjects that they showed.<p>Its a pretty amazing idea and execution. From one basic subject, addition, they expand and branch out all the way down to basic calculus. It would be really amazing if they continued expanding this out to the point where all subjects where mapped out, even the less mathematical ones. Just to see the path from addition to trigonometry is a pretty good refresher of what the mechanics of the trig functions actually entail. Imagine seeing the path from addition to linear algebra.<p>More to the point, imagine a world in which a student uses this system throughout their educational career. I can't even fathom the difference that that level of tracking and relational mapping between ideas would have on a students understanding of material and motivation to tackle new subjects.

Khanacademy is neat but I find it odd that people on HN either aren't aware or dont care about other earlier sources such as :<p><pre><code> - MIT's OCW - USNW eLearning channel on Youtube (esp Richar Buckland) - TIMMS (Germany, possibly the first of the video resources) - UCBerkeley youtube channel - Dr. Adrian Banner (Princeton) - Harvard (esp Michael Sandel's lectures, amazing) </code></pre> The above can be easily searched for and are hardly a comprehensive list as that would be large. Here is a website which is a sort of clearinghouse for video lectures: www.cosmolearning.com<p>A search of HN shows less attention given to these original sources than perhaps they deserve. In my opinion MIT OCW was the best known initiative till recent times and started this wave of online video learning. <i>BTW, I highly recommend Michael Sandel's lectures on ethics and politics, available on YouTube.</i>

I actually swelled up in tears when he showed the spreadsheet of student progress, and suggested having the students with red blocks (those who are stuck on a concept) being given help from the students with green blocks (those who mastered it).<p>That is <i>so</i> beautiful.

I found it very interesting how he applied data-analysis techniques [at time 12:33 in the video] to provide teachers with a better and correct understanding of each student's shortcomings (probably from his insights from his earlier profession on the Wall St.) that will take the student/tutor interaction to a new level!

Here is a link because ted.com is just as awesome as youtube.com<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...</a><p>Also is the youtube video a strange colour red for anyone else?

After reading a few comments, I haven't seen this point made so I'm gonna go for it:<p><pre><code> &#62; The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, &#62; but does not expect mastery. &#62; We encourage you to experiment [and fail], but we do expect mastery. </code></pre> This, in my opinion, is the most potential ridden idea made by Khan. Today, middle schools is ~3 years, high school is 4 years, university is 4 years, etc.; we discretize learning into these rigid chunks of time - partially out of (deprecated) technical necessity - and in the process we isolate kids - the so called dumb kids. When Kahn showed that graph of a so called <i>dumb</i> kids spending 2-3x as long on a single topic, only to resume the same learning rate as the <i>smart</i> kids after they understood the foundational concept they were originally struggling with, it made me see how much potential there truly is in this system.<p>Imagine a world where the baseline level of education is produced by a Khan style system. Schooling wouldn't be as tractable (i.e., it might take 2 to 6 (or more) years to go through high school instead of a nice predictable 4), but everyone that would come out of said system would have the same (ideal) level of knowledge needed in order to move on to the next best thing (e.g., college, work, life's passion, etc.). There wouldn't be kids competing for GPA's or stuffing their resumes, and there wouldn't be kids who didn't know how to tie their shoes; there would be kids who KNOW calculus, kids who UNDERSTAND physics, and kids who GET American history. The variation would be in the idiosyncrasies of the topics, as opposed to the core concepts.<p>Now imagine further to what this does for higher education. In this proposed system, it would simply be a fact that graduating kids would know - at mastery level - what their school's curriculums listed off; it's the equivalent of everyone having a 1600 on their SAT's. College acceptance becomes less of a selectivity problem, and more of an efficiency problem; where are all these geniuses going to study!<p>Ahhh, the potential is so exciting...<p>That being said, as sort of an aside I think it's noteworthy to say that the idea of fixing the tuition-based University model is a bit more complex than the high school model, but as user arjn said bellow, there are plenty of free lecture repositories out there already; perhaps if prior educational systems encouraged and indoctrinated students to be more self-proficient (as in the Khan system), University learning becomes more about educating yourself, and those free lectures will (naturally) replace the pay-to-learn model. I don't know, but it's a thought...

I worked with Sal when we were both at Oracle. one thing i think is that what he's doing with khan academy ties directly to his strengths.<p>he was very good at explaining and teaching, and liked analyzing data.

This is wonderful. Education is, IMHO, the most important thing in the world, full stop, since it forms the basis for what we are able to do and more importantly how we think.<p>Personally, I found school boring and tedious (and got pretty average grades) until going to 6th form college where I discovered something amazing - learning isn't defined by a failed teaching system - learning done right is a joyful and wonderful thing (unsurprisingly my grades significantly improved at this point).<p>The fact that learning is a joy is one of the most important discoveries you make in life (or don't, unfortunately I think most people don't) and anything that allows people to discover this is a vastly important thing.<p>(It's important to note that learning, as with everything else, isn't 100% joyful all the time, but that the joy of it infinitely outweighs any difficulty and pain encountered along the way).<p>I've noticed a pernicious worship of ignorance that pervades, at least, my country (the UK) - the idea that learning is boring and there's something wrong with you if you seem to enjoy it - that alone is to my mind incredibly dangerous. Nothing could be further from the truth, literally. This is nothing, though, compared to countries where ordinary people are simply unable to access quality education or even any education at all where the Khan academy is an example of the internet at its democratising best.<p>Go Sal!

It was a great talk. Future of education. I loved the way Bill interacted with Khan.

Saw this live. He's amazing.

Because the site doesn't make it obvious, Khan Academy is an Open Source project: <a href="https://code.google.com/p/khanacademy/" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/khanacademy/</a>

I think what could eventually be even more impactful than the videos themselves is the statistics tracking he showed. With that kind of data across thousands or millions of people, you would see patterns of people who had the same problems and questions in the same places, and you could redo the videos to be more clear in those areas and answer those questions preemptively. With a web-scale audience you could do A-B testing experiments and optimize the performance of your teaching material. I think a curriculum optimized in this way could eventually be dramatically better than even the best traditional education has to offer today.<p>Today teaching is an art; this could turn it into a science.

Simply amazing that a guy armed only with a tablet and a microphone can have this much impact.

Actually, I got so excited (and moved) when I saw his talk at GEL:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTXKCzrFh3c" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTXKCzrFh3c</a><p>That I started my own channel for Programming in C++, for my students... I have 74 videos already... (in Spanish, sorry)<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/paueky" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/paueky</a>

And it all started with him tutoring his cousins long-distance while maintaining a busy work schedule. There is something real special about that - willingness to spend "free" time, willingness to tutor in spite of the distance (he was in Boston and his cousins were in Louisiana).<p>Either of these reasons would have been sufficient excuses for him to not help his cousins. Lucky for them and for all of us that such an amazing talent was so generous with his time and insistent on using technology to overcome the distance barrier.

Idea HN: Make transcripts of all videos in KhanAcademy and have them presented with blackboard images and all, nicely organized in a web page with links to original videos.

As a kid I had ADHD, I found myself staying up all night programming and sleeping in my classes. The skills I leanred then have served me well but if the classroom was more engaging maybe I wouldn't have had such a difficult path.<p>I hope this spreads like wildfire.

I've been looking at the Khan Academy site a bit.<p>I find the exercise dashboard kind of strange. Is math the only available subject? And do you have to go through all the prerequisite exercises to progress to the next ones?

I believe his method has a ton of potential. First saw Khan on This Week in Startups: <a href="http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-startups-94-with-salman-khan-founder-of-khan-academy/" rel="nofollow">http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-start...</a> and was impressed to learn that Bill Gates invited him to talk. I think his method works for many people and could change the way many people learn.

As someone who was often bored during school lectures, I think the idea is great. One of the things I love about the Internet is that, in many cases, only the best rises to the top. That means people everywhere can have access to the best information on a subject, or in this case, the best video lecture. I think that is awesome, because it seems that the smaller the town/school/college, the rarer good professionals are.<p>There are a lot of problems tangled up in in this that also need to be solved. His model relies on students watching lectures at home. Not everyone has broadband; some don't even have a computer. What do you do for those kids? Do you send home DVDs? What if there is no TV? (probably rare in the US, but still) Do you give every student a free laptop? I understand Los Altos is a pilot program, but quoting Wikipedia: "It is one of the wealthiest places in the United States." What do you do in the inner city or in very rural areas?<p>Obviously the people behind this are very smart and I'm sure they are considering all the issues involved, this is just my brain dump after watching.<p>I like the lecture-as-homework idea. It seems that less of everyone's time will be wasted with that method. Teachers/parents will have a much better idea of how long the "homework" will take, because the video is a fixed length +/- the rewinding/fast forwarding. In the classroom, everyone gets the attention they need.<p>Things I'm curious about: What about the students who work faster than the rest? I guess they eventually reach the end of the curriculum for that particular course. Do they move to the next classes' topics or is there some set of optional topics that they can choose based on personal interest?<p>What kinds of tests are there? He talked about the current models shortcomings(some student fail the test, but the class moves on anyway), but are there any big tests or final exams on the model? Or, is it entirely "quizzes?"<p>Have the teachers noticed an improvement in student behavior? Do they spend less time on disciplinary action due to the more interactive sessions?

The record keeping is a double edged sword. Maybe one day institutions will start using your Khan record as a metric for employment/admissions. And that's the day people will start cheating. I guess this means standardized tests like the SATs and GREs aren't going anywhere.

The long standing ovation at the end was so well deserved. I had a smile on my face as I watched it.

Besides other good things about shifting teacher's work from lecturing to actually spending time with kids that were mentioned here, I would like to point out that some teachers are really bad lecturers. My most vivid impressions are from early collage math courses but it is as valid for high school as well. The professor can lead the lecture at million words a minute constantly erasing the board so you don't have the time to copy the material, let alone let it sink in. The professor can have heavy accent, so you spend most of you attention just trying to understand his words.

I love this idea. I've been watching the KhanA videos for a while now, and learning about the U.S history ;) economy, and what not (I'm from Mexico), I'd love to see these videos in multiple languages.

I thought eLearning was something impossible to do efficiently - before I saw this video.<p>A compelling argument, and a great method! I can't count the startup ideas that could come from this.

I admire Khan. Although he is not unique in his approach, he is uniquely positioned to deliver this message. By quitting his job and giving away his time, he is an ideal ambassador to the message of "scalable pedagogy". As he has described, if Isaac Newton had recorded his lessons on Youtube, Khan wouldn't have to.<p>By giving alway classroom tools like test management and monitoring, he is also equipping teachers to become more scalable and as he described - data driven.

I think most people miss the point that the statistics provided by the Khan Academy is equally kick-ass as its videos. He mentions of a "teacher driven" design process.<p>TDD? ;)

This is great, but I wish there were some lessons on coding. Computer programming at some basic level at least should be required of all students - even if they don't make a career out of it, being able to work snippets of code will come in handy across all disciplines in the future - finance, medicine, media, or repairing that broken fridge in your e-home.

He has great videos on his site esp on "Valuation and Investing" and "Venture Capital and Capital Markets". After you watch those everything just makes perfect sense.

Beauty of the graph at 13'50" - It is good to believe in children/people and do sthg about it as Khan does.

Awesome speech. What's wrong with the YouTube video quality, though?

nice post wb. does he use prezi for his presentations?