> 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.
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 am having my kids learn math with Kahn academy if we don't have anything better by that point.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
"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.
It is the highest level of learning, but still a level of learning.
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.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
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.
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.
(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...
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.
[0] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5138/Teaching-MachinesThe-...
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?
"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.
Khan: Videos + rote exercises
Learning: Projects, complex problem-solving, exploration, argumentation, etc.
Dewey is worth reading.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
And the essay's premise is: this man wants your child to watch a video.