http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/
How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education
By Clive Thompson
July 15, 2011
Wired Magazine

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For years, teachers like Thordarson have complained about the frustrations of teaching to the �middle� of the class. They stand at the whiteboard, trying to get 25 or more students to learn the same stuff at the same pace. And, of course, it never really works: Advanced kids get bored and tune out, lagging ones get lost and tune out, and pretty soon half the class isn�t paying attention. Since the rise of personal computers in the early �80s, educators have hoped that technology could solve this problem by offering lessons tailored to each kid. Schools have blown millions, maybe billions, of dollars on sophisticated classroom technology, but the effort has been in vain.

Khan�s videos are anything but sophisticated. He recorded many of them in a closet at home, his voice sounding muffled on his $25 Logitech headset. But some of his fans believe that Khan has stumbled onto the secret to solving education�s middle-of-the-class mediocrity. Most notable among them is Bill Gates, whose foundation has invested $1.5 million in Khan�s site. �I�d been looking for something like this�it�s so important,� Gates says. Khan�s approach, he argues, shows that education can truly be customized, with each student getting individualized help when needed.

Not everyone agrees. Critics argue that Khan�s videos and software encourage uncreative, repetitive drilling�and leave kids staring at screens instead of interacting with real live teachers. Even Khan will acknowledge that he�s not an educational professional; he�s just a nerd who improvised a cool way to teach people things. And for better or worse, this means that he doesn�t have a consistent, comprehensive plan for overhauling school curricula.

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Even if Khan is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it�s not clear that the schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of students moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics�but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan�s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who�ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it �to stop students from becoming this advanced.�

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Many schools do not want students to progress at different rates.

Well, Khan works with math, right? And he's not the only one working with self-paced math. Some other folks have mentioned ALEKS (Which my sister and I could not get to work on any of three computers a couple of years ago, and found customer service to be singularly unhelpful).

These programs, and compacting curriculum in general, work very well with math because it is a well-structured field. There is tremendous agreement about the order in which students should learn bits of math. You must learn this before you can learn that. If you have got fractions down, you are ready to learn X, Y, & Z.

Self paced becomes problematic in subjects that are not as well structured.

I think we have to abandon the concept of grade levels by age to make progress in education.

The base curriculum should be the "conveyor belt" for the kids with the teachers moving the kids along the curriculum at their pace.


This is why you need a curriculum as a structure. These exist in all domains - every field has several structured ones and the homeschool suppliers have it down pretty good.

If you find a curriculum is confusing then more than likely the author has an ideological basis for making it confusing.

I've often had this thought about physics and mathematics textbooks. Some of them seem to make simple ideas unnecessarily abstruse.

The comment about Khan's make it sound like it's not so great. Well I't may not be for everyone but how wonderful it is there for those who can benefit from it. Khan could be used to supplement cirriculum.

Sure. American history books, for example, are created with the ideological bias that the US Government is an entity that should exist--an assumption that is rarely questioned. This bias tends to make them simple to understand, yet deadly boring.

I don't teach American history, I teach world history. Yet, the other teachers who teach the same subject with the same content standards in my school (two of whom are Native Hawaiian, one of whom teaches in a Hawaiian Language Immersion Program), tend to do different activities based on their own strengths in teaching. Few public school teachers are comfortable with talking about religion as much as I do, for instance.

I do not believe that the fact that we are all taking different approaches means that some or all of us are doing it wrong. In fact, I rather think we might lose more than we gain by standardization.