I’ll be on Al Jazeera’s The Stream with Sal Khan tomorrow 10/2 at 3:30PM EDT as part of a segment on Khan Academy. You can watch live from their website if that’s what you’re into. I’ll update this post with the segment afterwards if that’s possible.

2012 Oct 3. Here’s a link to the entire broadcast. They give me two questions – one about the best use for those lecture videos in the classroom and the other comparing the Khan Academy model to math instruction in high-performing countries.

At first, Khan poses his lectures as a “first pass” or a “first scaffold” at new material. This is less effective and less engaging than a lecture posed in response to a precursor activity that sets students up to need that lecture and understand its context.

I pressed that angle in my second question and Khan then took a fairly agnostic approach to the instructional sequence. Basically, “do whatever works.”

Personalization is the point and Khan Academy has certainly figured out how personalize lecture delivery. But personalizing the precursor activity that sets students up to need those lectures is much, much harder. I didn’t get the sense from our exchange that that kind of personalization is anywhere on Khan Academy’s horizon.