Is this the future of education? Khan Academy.

[Lyte]

After seeing this video, I checked out Khan Academy and I was hooked. I've been refreshing my math skills in KA for a week now, and I'm impressed. It is an easy "no pressure" way to learn and the education videos are well made, simple and easy to understand.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk&feature=player_embedded"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk&feature=player_embedded[/ame]

Khan Academy

Just click "practice" and try it out.

 

[Annie]

I've heard only good things about it. Many of the AP students use it for more advanced courses than they currently can take. The math teachers in particular I've heard discussing how the kids come with some challenging questions beyond the classroom after viewing and trying out the problems.

 

[psikeyhackr]

After seeing this video, I checked out Khan Academy and I was hooked. I've been refreshing my math skills in KA for a week now, and I'm impressed. It is an easy "no pressure" way to learn and the education videos are well made, simple and easy to understand.

Just click "practice" and try it out.

That is exactly the point. There are more math tutorials here:

PatrickJMT

The entire concept of teachers lecturing in front of a class is obsolete. It really has been obsolete since the invention of VHS tape.

It is our educational system that does not want to change. Teachers that are really boring and even teach stuff that kids don't want to know want to require kids to sit in their classes. Those videos will play on the $100 netbook by Sylvania from CVS. They will probably play on some cell phones.

Kids could watch videos on the bus riding to school. They could listen to lectures via MP3 players. We have the technology to implement an education explosion we just won't admit that our schools are designed to produce CONTROLLED IGNORANCE.

It began to dawn on me in my late grade school years that I was learning a lot more and more important stuff from reading science fiction books than I was from my teachers. If this society really wanted to educate kids it could have been done by just telling them the RIGHT BOOKS 40 years ago.

Look at the state of the economy. How is it our educators could not think of making double-entry accounting mandatory in the schools 40 years ago since double-entry accounting is SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OLD?

NO, NO! The workers are supposed to be DUMB!

psik

 

[Cain]

After seeing all that Math, my mind shut down lol. Joking, but it looks pretty neat. I hope someday to become a Military History teacher, but that is a long ways down the road, and I hope the education system advances more by the time I get to that point.

 

[HUGGY]

After seeing this video, I checked out Khan Academy and I was hooked. I've been refreshing my math skills in KA for a week now, and I'm impressed. It is an easy "no pressure" way to learn and the education videos are well made, simple and easy to understand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk&feature=player_embedded

Khan Academy

Just click "practice" and try it out.

Great post! I've got Kahn on my bookmarks ..have for a while. Great refresher.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

I love Euler's equation. It was awesome to see it in the first few minutes. I saw some Calc III in there as well.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

After seeing this video, I checked out Khan Academy and I was hooked. I've been refreshing my math skills in KA for a week now, and I'm impressed. It is an easy "no pressure" way to learn and the education videos are well made, simple and easy to understand.

Just click "practice" and try it out.

That is exactly the point. There are more math tutorials here:

PatrickJMT

The entire concept of teachers lecturing in front of a class is obsolete. It really has been obsolete since the invention of VHS tape.

It is our educational system that does not want to change. Teachers that are really boring and even teach stuff that kids don't want to know want to require kids to sit in their classes. Those videos will play on the $100 netbook by Sylvania from CVS. They will probably play on some cell phones.

Kids could watch videos on the bus riding to school. They could listen to lectures via MP3 players. We have the technology to implement an education explosion we just won't admit that our schools are designed to produce CONTROLLED IGNORANCE.

It began to dawn on me in my late grade school years that I was learning a lot more and more important stuff from reading science fiction books than I was from my teachers. If this society really wanted to educate kids it could have been done by just telling them the RIGHT BOOKS 40 years ago.

Look at the state of the economy. How is it our educators could not think of making double-entry accounting mandatory in the schools 40 years ago since double-entry accounting is SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OLD?

NO, NO! The workers are supposed to be DUMB!

psik

LSU is doing essentially this in College Algebra. Students meet with an instructor once a week for essentially a check in, then work on their own with videos, computer programs, etc, for the rest of the week. It's worked well, but parents and students still complain. They feel like they're getting cheated.

You're seeing this happening at the college level. Our courses have a large library of online material available to help out students. At this point in some courses, lectures persist pretty much for the students to ask questions of the instructor. I'm finding that I spend more time on questions than on lectures, as they can work it out on their own with videos, online homework programs, etc.

Ideally, that's how it'd always work.

Of course every student is different, so this approach may not work for everyone. But then, lectures aren't working for everyone either.

 

[Skull Pilot]

[youtube]wjd7L6txGLk&feature[/youtube]

 

[Dr.Traveler]

Ok, finished it. I'm seeing a lot of these same types of approaches pop up in the college level. You folks should check out Hawke's Learning System (which is also a mastery based approach), and compare it to Webassign and MyMathLab, which lean towards the more traditional.

You might also check out the Moore Method, which seems to have some stuff in common with this teaching philosophy.

Very innovative stuff in that video. I'm glad I'm watching this from the perspective of having seen this stuff implemented and tried these things, rather than from the perspective of being the dinosaur watching the meteor hit.

 

[psikeyhackr]

LSU is doing essentially this in College Algebra. Students meet with an instructor once a week for essentially a check in, then work on their own with videos, computer programs, etc, for the rest of the week. It's worked well, but parents and students still complain. They feel like they're getting cheated.

You're seeing this happening at the college level. Our courses have a large library of online material available to help out students. At this point in some courses, lectures persist pretty much for the students to ask questions of the instructor. I'm finding that I spend more time on questions than on lectures, as they can work it out on their own with videos, online homework programs, etc.

Ideally, that's how it'd always work.

Of course every student is different, so this approach may not work for everyone. But then, lectures aren't working for everyone either.

Yeah, the transition is going to be a problem. There will be students, teachers and entire educational institutions that don't want to make the change. But I don't see how anything can stop this technology from getting cheaper and faster and more ubiquitous.

The cyber-culture is upon us. Swim or sink into the cyber-chasm.

psik

 

[Dr.Traveler]

LSU is doing essentially this in College Algebra. Students meet with an instructor once a week for essentially a check in, then work on their own with videos, computer programs, etc, for the rest of the week. It's worked well, but parents and students still complain. They feel like they're getting cheated.

You're seeing this happening at the college level. Our courses have a large library of online material available to help out students. At this point in some courses, lectures persist pretty much for the students to ask questions of the instructor. I'm finding that I spend more time on questions than on lectures, as they can work it out on their own with videos, online homework programs, etc.

Ideally, that's how it'd always work.

Of course every student is different, so this approach may not work for everyone. But then, lectures aren't working for everyone either.

Yeah, the transition is going to be a problem. There will be students, teachers and entire educational institutions that don't want to make the change. But I don't see how anything can stop this technology from getting cheaper and faster and more ubiquitous.

The cyber-culture is upon us. Swim or sink into the cyber-chasm.

psik

Yep. It's here, and its changing how we ask questions and teach.

One example, totally unrelated to the Khan Academy: wolframalpha.com has changed how I teach math forever. It's a free site that can solve stuff up to differential equations in mathematics. I sat down with it about a year back and realized it could solve for the students about 75% of my Integral Calculus final exam.

Now, I don't allow students to use the net during tests (duh!), but there's nothing stopping them from using it on homework or trying to cheat with it. So the end result is that now I lean much more heavily towards story problems in all of my math courses. WolframAlpha can't help you cheat if you can't write down the equation, and the truth is that the ability to properly formulate a story problem as a mathematics equation is probably the most important skill I teach anyways.

 

[editec]

I think its more than safe to assume that techology and the internet are going to WILDLY change the education industry at least as much as we can already see that its changing the publishing and communications industries.

I think there must always be a place for real live carbon-based educating lifeforms, but much of what teachers do can easily be done by a clever computer program.

Incidently, the same can be said for diaagnostic medicine.

Last thing I read about that your average GP''s diagnotic skills are replaceable by a computer program armed with only about 200 different questions.

Kinda scarey, isn't it?

Sooner or later (and I think sooner than most of you believe) WE are ALL replaceable by machines and techology.

This is still another reason why the SOCIAL CONTRACT we think is writ in stone IS going to change in the next few generations.

Few of us are going to be economically viable as workers (even highly skilled and mind based workers) by 2050.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

Few of us are going to be economically viable as workers (even highly skilled and mind based workers) by 2050.

That's the truly scary thought. I'm not sure what happens at that point, but we've been seeing trends in robotics and computers putting people out of work for a while. We all celebrate the increased capacity for efficiency and production, but at some point you end up putting us all out of work. And then what?

 

[psikeyhackr]

Now, I don't allow students to use the net during tests (duh!), but there's nothing stopping them from using it on homework or trying to cheat with it. So the end result is that now I lean much more heavily towards story problems in all of my math courses. WolframAlpha can't help you cheat if you can't write down the equation, and the truth is that the ability to properly formulate a story problem as a mathematics equation is probably the most important skill I teach anyways.

OMG, does that bring back memories. In grade school most of the kids hated what were called word problems. I loved them. Math was fun. But it is like a lot of people that can do the plugging and cranking to solve the problem can't analyze reality to figure out how to solve what is going on in the real world.

Then a lot of teachers teach physics as though the math is more important than the physics. Do this math and prove to me how smart you are. WHY?

And now we can get quad-core computers with 8 gig of RAM for a few hundred bucks.

WHAT DO WE DO WITH IT???

psik

 

[HUGGY]

LSU is doing essentially this in College Algebra. Students meet with an instructor once a week for essentially a check in, then work on their own with videos, computer programs, etc, for the rest of the week. It's worked well, but parents and students still complain. They feel like they're getting cheated.

You're seeing this happening at the college level. Our courses have a large library of online material available to help out students. At this point in some courses, lectures persist pretty much for the students to ask questions of the instructor. I'm finding that I spend more time on questions than on lectures, as they can work it out on their own with videos, online homework programs, etc.

Ideally, that's how it'd always work.

Of course every student is different, so this approach may not work for everyone. But then, lectures aren't working for everyone either.

Yeah, the transition is going to be a problem. There will be students, teachers and entire educational institutions that don't want to make the change. But I don't see how anything can stop this technology from getting cheaper and faster and more ubiquitous.

The cyber-culture is upon us. Swim or sink into the cyber-chasm.

psik

Yep. It's here, and its changing how we ask questions and teach.

One example, totally unrelated to the Khan Academy: wolframalpha.com has changed how I teach math forever. It's a free site that can solve stuff up to differential equations in mathematics. I sat down with it about a year back and realized it could solve for the students about 75% of my Integral Calculus final exam.

Now, I don't allow students to use the net during tests (duh!), but there's nothing stopping them from using it on homework or trying to cheat with it. So the end result is that now I lean much more heavily towards story problems in all of my math courses. WolframAlpha can't help you cheat if you can't write down the equation, and the truth is that the ability to properly formulate a story problem as a mathematics equation is probably the most important skill I teach anyways.

Schools and instructors should always keep their eye on the ball which is a graduating student's job marketability and the real reason they are being paid to prepare young people for adulthood.

It is not an US vs THEM game. It is the hiring game. Best prepared is not the kid that brings a chalkboard into his job interview. In business time is money so the fastest answer to ANY question, if correct, is the best answer to any question. If studying transportation we do not require a trip to the stables to learn how to clean, shoe and trim horse hooves. That knowledge is obsolete except for the amateur enthusiast. I recommend teaching the FASTEST way to solve problems utilizing all available methods and stop wasting a student's time with rote.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

That knowledge is obsolete except for the amateur enthusiast. I recommend teaching the FASTEST way to solve problems utilizing all available methods and stop wasting a student's time with rote.

Rote has it's place. Rote helps build up instinct, which helps you recognize illogical and incorrect answers. I can always tell the students that are working using WolframAlpha because once they go off track, they go seriously off track into la la land. Worse, they can't even tell their answer is wrong because of the blind reliance on the machine.

But I do think that we need to emphasize rote work less. The real value in a math course is, was, and always will be on the story problems. Computers and calculators can do the rote work once you have enough understanding to recognize the errors. The real value for the non-mathematician is in how you apply the techniques.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Schools and instructors should always keep their eye on the ball which is a graduating student's job marketability and the real reason they are being paid to prepare young people for adulthood.

If the schools are so concerned about the economic interests of the students why haven't they made accounting mandatory in the schools for decades? Double-entry accounting is more than 500 years old.

History of Double Entry Bookkeeping

Fifth graders can learn accounting as well as collegians

The schools are designed to produce people that can be used not people that can serve their own ENLIGHTENED self interest. The government talks about education in terms of need to compete with other countries but they are supposed to be dumb enough to go into debt for junk designed to become obsolete when made in this country or any other.

The Laws of Physics are the same all over the planet but Harvard graduates can't explain winter and summer.



Hardly anybody's job depends on that but it is pretty ridiculous not to know it. So people are only supposed to know what helps them be used economically. If employees aren't in debt then they are not so dependent on the job.

Economic Wargames

psik

 

[whitehall]

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of a government bureaucracy is to get bigger and get more funding. You almost gotta laugh at the disconnect where left wing congressional politicians (including the president) send their kids to private schools while supporting the corrupt unions controlling the failed US education system.