THANK YOU for sharing this! This is the conversation that needs to take place in a rational manner. There are many aspects of the Khan videos that reflect very poor mathematical teaching (and poor mathematics). Somehow discussion around the Khan videos has become linked to pro or con Bill Gates and corporate “reform” and not at all about the actual “instruction” seen in the videos. I am completely baffled as to how Khan’s “instruction” has garnered so much attention and so many accolades – other than the fact that he has done all this “for free.”

I have an idea. There are thousands of Khan Academy videos. Maybe this particular video is just a poor example, and all of the other videos are really good.

Maybe we can crowd-source some research. Each of us takes 1 or 2 videos and points out both the good and bad pedagogical aspects of the videos, and then aggregates the results somehow.

I think it would be fun to have an army of video critiques of each of Khan’s videos, but it would be much more useful from a research point of view to qualify these videos using some sort of standardized protocol (kind of boring, but this might be more useful for future critiques).

We could take the next step and generalize this protocol so that we can critique any video that we find fits the format of our critique (it would probably be difficult to take a video that is asking questions of the viewer rather than listing information and make a useful comparison). Further, it is likely that such a protocol exists already, possibly as a result of the TIMMS video study (I checked – they have a protocol they used).

HIlarious! This is amazing. This needs to be ‘stolen’ and posted all over the Internet.

And the video is now listed as “private” on Khan’s site!

The best thing KA has done is show us teachers that we need to be on the internet, making better resources than KA. There are already lots of “how to solve this type of problem” videos, and of course there are 101questions prompts, and Veritasium’s videos, to name only a few things teachers/educators have been doing. So, let’s keep going, and take our criticism and make corrections and edits, and make good, useful stuff that helps our kids learn meaningful things!
:-)

When you have actually taught a topic to actual humans, you discover all the tiny glitches, brain bugs, “wait, what?” moments that deplete a learner’s scarce, finite cognitive resources — the resources we NEED if they are to focus and learn. I am beginning to think of KA as Death By A Thousand Tiny Cognitive Cuts, and that’s for the ones that are *technically* correct. It’s those million seemingly small things like inconsistent use of + sign when discussing positive and negative numbers, for example. Each moment a learner spends wondering if that inconsistency MEANS something is a moment that could/should have even spent on what is important. And boy, did those cognitive paper cuts pile up in this video.

Of course this is no different from good product UX and UI design… every moment of a user’s precious cognitive resources (and time) should be spent doing the thing they want to do, not figuring out how to tell the interface how to do the thing they want to do. KA might read “Don’t Make Me Think” for inspiration and guidance, given that what the Web design classic means is “Don’t make me think about the wrong things”

I agree with Karl’s first point – I think that the snarkiness is going over well here because readers of this blog are likely to have the same opinions to begin with, but I worry that the snarkiness of it could backfire with other audiences. If the snarkiness prevents non-likeminded people from actually listening to the insightful criticisms, then the video’s just preaching to the choir.

I research math education as my job, but I’m not a teacher, and while I did find the insightful parts of the video to be good, I was also really turned off by the amount of snark. (I get that this video was riffing on Mystery Science Theater and that the amount of snark is probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I know that the reference would have gone over the heads of a lot of my acquaintances, meaning that the snark would just come across as overwhelmingly mean-spirited.) For example, when Khan writes out an arrow that looks like “=D positive” and they immediately jump all over it and start guffawing about “what’s D POSITIVE?”, that sort of snark came across to me as irrelevant, unfunny, and even intellectually lazy – it wasn’t the best arrow, but anyone who tried to decipher it for more than a few seconds would likely come around to seeing it as an arrow, and the attitude of making fun of it before even trying to do that was just incredibly off-putting. Like I said above, I think that this type of video would go over well with teachers who are ambivalent or negative on KA, but I have a feeling that some non-educators (esp. ones who aren’t familiar with MST3K and who’ve been exposed to the TEACHER-UNIONS-BAD rhetoric) would just see the video as defensive and technophobic – in other words, potentially making things worse.

Also, students obviously aren’t the intended audience here, it seems a terrible example to be setting for any students who did come across this — if I’m a student, and I see that a math teacher is making fun of and talking over another teacher’s lecture, I’m going to start thinking that this behavior is acceptable (especially because the Mystery Science Theater reference is almost definitely going to go over the heads of most of today’s students).

It’s usually the well-trained and engaged teachers who are most vocal when criticizing Khan videos. Many of the things pointed out in this critique would be seen if the highly qualified sat in on classrooms of the less qualified. I see it in high school science classrooms all over my state. It’s not about video. I think that is what Dan is getting at when he suggests this be training for new teachers.

The problem is severe in many states – STEM teachers are not required to have deep content knowledge and that is Sal’s biggest problem. He knows a lot but probably falls short of the content knowledge most of us well-prepared teachers expect of ourselves and our colleagues. He makes the mistakes one sees from incomplete understanding.

Unfortunately, the general public doesn’t believe that deep content knowledge is needed to teach K-12. The problem is compounded by support from successful people like Gates and Google – people who have succeeded without complete and deep content knowledge gained from study.

We need to make a better case that the best teachers have deep content knowledge. How is that done most effectively?

Kahn Academy is such a lightening rod.

I guess I just don’t understand the vitriol, disgust and passion with which math teachers seem wiling to attack things that are different. Is it perceived as a threat? I understand that various administrators may get turned on by KA’s advantages and I’m sure that there are school districts that are investigating ways to formalize its usage; what I don’t see or hear is anyone clamoring to replace classroom teachers wholesale with computer labs. I know that the California university system has made some bold statements and has some interesting plans, but I don’t know of anything similar at the secondary school level. Where is the emotion coming from?

My point, I suppose, is that the response of the education institution has been disheartening. KA represents something new, a potential paradigm shift in education for some students in some circumstances. I think that’s undeniable. KA doesn’t have to serve every student in every circumstance to demonstrate its value as a delivery mechanism. Is it equivalent to a daily interactions with a perceptive, deeply-skilled, passionate educator? Of course not. But it doesn’t have to be.

But you can rewind it. You can do practice problems. You can track your progress. You can access a curriculum you might have not have had access to before. As an educator, why not embrace that and try to make the best of it for the students that are in your sphere of influence? I can’t believe that there’s zero (or even negative, as some seem to claim) utility to something like KA for almost every public school teacher in America, to say nothing of an international audience. I can’t disagree with Rick Fletcher’s call for teachers steeped in deep content knowledge; why does it feel like an either/or? KA doesn’t obviate that need.

Technology adoption is increasing and won’t stop; the sooner we all come to grips with it and how it affects our praxis, the better. Harping on a new tool because it doesn’t exactly replicate classroom best practices and droning on about its drawbacks and limitations feels like a fast way to distance yourself from a huge component of the future of education.

My girlfriend is asking me to add a personal plea to provide feedback directly to KA, perhaps in a less stylized fashion than the video in this post, to improve the tool and the educational outcomes of everyone who can use it.

So I was hopping you could clarify something for me about this post. Specifically the point that “this is actually fairly poor lecturing that’ll leave students with shaky procedural understanding and even shakier conceptual understanding”

Is the argument here against the idea of video lectures as a tool for learning? Or that his video’s could be better made?

I have to agree with Karl and Rollie… the snarkiness only plays well for a niche audience and distracts from the overall point that John Golden and David Coffey are trying to make.

Is Khan Academy good pedagogy or curriculum? No. But I haven’t heard many people claiming that it is. Does it have to be? It would be nice, but as long as it is “average” — which it is based on my observations — then it is better than the pedagogy and curriculum that many students are currently receiving. It also comes across (I imagine) as non-judgmental; this is a huge advantage when so many struggling students come into class feeling defeated because they feel like their teacher has something against them. Is it annoying that Khan Academy is getting so much attention? Yes, but it has gone mainstream exactly because it is what most people think good teaching looks like, which is highly procedural. It’s not like people hated standards-based math programs until they got a closer look at them. They hated them because they couldn’t relate to them.

The main advantage of Khan Academy is the flipped classroom model and the fact that students can play the videos over and over again in a safe environment. I personally don’t think it (or any of the online education initiatives which are in favor right now) are a panacea because almost all of them are simply replicating the pedagogy and curriculum that exists in schools today. But at the same time, I think that they are difficult to criticize if you don’t have a better alternative to point to. As a newbie to the Math Edublogosphere, I’m curious to know if there is any kind of consensus developing as to what math education should look like, and where is it being practiced?

To be fair, not every teacher knows every conceptual connection to procedures. In other videos (e.g. “Logarithmic Scale” and “Negative Exponent Intuition), Khan does a better job.

Regarding Gates, it’s not accurate to peg him as an anti-constructivist technogeek. Afterall, he funded Marilyn Burn’s MRI project and a guided math curriculum called JUMP math. He also funded the MAPs project for the Shell Centre (feel free to google these). Clearly, a more complicated view is in order.

Incidentally, Dan, Week 32 of your algebra curriculum has you presenting completing the square without a single square on your slides. Other slides and handouts show similar gaps in conceptual presentation. Be reasonable.

@ Greg – nobody is clamoring to replace teachers with computer labs? Come to Idaho. State Superintendent pushed through laws last year requiring all students must take two online courses to graduate. He wanted 6 (of 48) compromised at 2. You need to get out more.

You can flip a classroom with a textbook. You can rewind a textbook.

I’m all for new technology. Video is cool.

But be accurate people. Don’t ascribe to a new technology advantages that aren’t. It’s just a repeat of the grand educational promises for television when it first appeared.

The Khan video was made private, but the comments are still there: http://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/multiplication-division/v/multiplying-and-dividing-negative-numbers It is interesting to read teactions by students and teachers over the last year.

Some of these comments deal with what is behind the rules, some of these try to give detailed explanations (which is a bit difficult without figures), someone links to a web page at http://www.mathsisfun.com/multiplying-negatives.html that does a much better job than the Khan video.

I am not a math teacher. And I confess that I liked the snarkiness.

Jared beat me to the punch: you can rewind a textbook.

To expand, you can find practice exercises in a textbook. You can track your progress in a textbook. A good textbook is non-judgemental (but God condemn the author who writes “it follows easily that”). Free textbooks are also available online (some better than others).

Sure, Khan’s videos are all sorted and in nice “bite-sized” chunks. But they are mostly sorted by procedure — the organization of the site itself helps inhibit the forming of the mental organization that will help our students. This is reinforced when he doesn’t explain the ideas behind why the procedure works.

I agree that video has its place. A few students have severe cognitive impairments that making reading the textbook completely out of the question. But when I poll my incoming first-year math majors, 98% or so of them have never read an entire section in a single math textbook! Never, and they are mostly planning to become actuaries, math teachers, and mathematicians! The simply CANNOT READ technical content. Sending students to Khan is easy, but does nothing to fix this problem.

I’ll part with this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbX44YSsQ2I&feature=related

I’m surprised at how many people think the guy just doesn’t know how to square and add. Of course he can! The problem is that neither he nor the audience can read.