Successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who, in creating and running their businesses, clearly understand the importance of understanding the market and testing how effective their products are, seem to leave those important instincts at the door when they comment on -- and these days increasingly get involved in -- K-12 education. When it comes to making important business decisions, they will regularly seek the advice of domain experts, often at considerable cost in consulting fees, but they fail to recognize the equal importance of domain expertise in education.
The always interesting and provocative reflections of the legendary Silicon Valley investor (and Sun Microsystems co-founder) Vinod Khosla provided the latest example of this when, in his Feb. 19 blog-post in TechCrunch, he wrote:
"Education 2.0 [...] we have not experimented enough with [...] out-of-the-box approaches but have instead tried to force-fit [...] traditional (often broken) ideas into the 'computerized' model."
Which might sound fine if this statement were not preceded by his explicit mention of Khan Academy as one of the new experiments. For KA is precisely a traditional approach transported onto the Web, namely one-to-one instruction, sitting side-by-side with the teacher. Is KA valuable? Sure it is? But "all" Sal Khan has done is take the traditional textbook instruction and put it up on YouTube.
Those quotes around "all" just then are important. It proved to be a significant leap forward, in large part because Khan is a good instructor -- he explains well in a highly non-threatening, "I am your friend" way. That's not an easy thing to achieve when the entire information channel consists of his voice and a screen-trace of what his hand writes on a tablet screen.
But what resources like Khan Academy provide is instruction, not teaching/learning. Anyone who has been lucky enough to experience good teaching will know the difference, but it's a sad fact of American life that most people's mathematics schooling consisted entirely of instruction and exercise sheets. They simply do not know what teaching is, or what it feels like to learn from a good teacher. They watch a Khan video and think "That guy is doing it at least as well as my teacher (often a lot better) and I can play through his explanation as often as I need." And they are right.
Vinod is probably like me. We learned in spite of not being taught well. Some of us figured out early in our education that the most efficient way to progress was to skip, or at least pay little attention to, classes we found boring or pedestrian, or even incomprehensible, and "teach ourselves," seeking out help from more advanced colleagues or, in my case, the teacher whose classes I largely ignored.
But for all Sal's charisma and instructional talent (and I am using his first name, since I sought him out when he was just becoming widely known and got to know him, since I recognize a valuable talent when I see it), what he is delivering is instruction -- a one-way information feed. And instruction is just part of teaching and learning. Watching videos of people playing golf will surely help you learn to play, but you won't get very far without going out on the fairway, frequently, and doing so with a good coach who can watch what you do and correct your inevitable errors. Not once but many times, over a long haul. That's teaching. It's interactive (bi-directional). And it's very human.
The traditional, instructional blackboard lecture should perhaps have been relegated to an occasional part of teaching with the invention of the photocopy machine, though maybe some people preferred a dynamic delivery by a friendly person. In which case, resources like Khan Academy should now put to rest forever math classes that consist primarily of blackboard instruction followed by "do all the odd numbered exercises on page 156." (BTW, Khan himself recognizes the importance of the teacher, and advocates using his videos as part of a "flipped classroom" model of teaching, a concept that goes back well before YouTube was launched.)
In the flipped model, teachers devote most of their class-time to the important activity that no technology can provide (at least today): helping students to learn in the same way a golf coach helps beginners (and not-so-beginners) to learn how to play golf.
Meanwhile, it will help if those who provide the technology platforms, people like Khosla, apply to education the same principles they adopt instinctively in running their businesses: seek advice from the experts. Sure, there are education experts who are still living in the past. But the same is true in technology: Xerox, IBM, and Nokia, to name just three of many, all had painful experiences as a result of not listening to those who could see that "the times they are a-changing." There are plenty of knowledgeable mathematics educators who use modern platforms and can provide good advice. Dan Meyer, Karim Ani, and Marilyn Burns are three that I know personally, but there are many more. A Silicon Valley (or Redmond, Washington) executive who wants to make a useful contribution to education could do well to spend an evening checking out just those three sources.
Follow Dr. Keith Devlin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/profkeithdevlin
Why haven't the administrators and teachers created a National Recommended Reading List in the last 50 years? Are the students really there for them to make money off of? Maybe with computers and proper software the students don't need the teachers so much.
But how do you sell to that market?
Does that mean you are a Guru?
A guru (Sanskrit: गुरु) is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom, and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (teacher). Other forms of manifestation of this principle can include parents, school teachers, non-human objects (books) and even one's own intellectual discipline, if the aforementioned are in a guidance role.[1]
In the religious sense the term is commonly used in Hinduism, as well as in other Indian religions and new religious movements. Finding a true guru is often held to be a prerequisite for attaining self-realization. In contemporary India, the word guru is widely used with the general meaning of "teacher". In Western usage, the meaning of guru has been extended to cover anyone who acquires followers, though not necessarily in an established school of philosophy or religion.[2] In a further Western extension, guru is used, or even misused from the original religious meaning, to refer to a person who has authority because of his or her perceived knowledge or skills, such as in business.
Now, let the bygones be bygones.
I love you. Admire you. Let me take a deep breath here. I need it.
For heaven's sake, you are are a confirmed "math-madist." A numbers' guy. More in theoretical sense than in business (of educating young kids).
Chill out. Go count Fibonacci's numbers or something.
...and I am Sid Harth@topcogitoergosum.com
Not having to grade drillsheets, create them, and having a metrics dashboard (this magical dashboard conveniently highlights in red any student who is struggling on any module) is the real advantage of KA. In this day and age, the fact that teachers are still hand-grading worksheets is absolutely ridiculous. A waste of time and money.
Drilling isn't everything...but anyone who thinks some drilling isn't a necessary component of math mastery is fooling themselves. Ask any country whose kids do well in math. They do both drilling math and critical thinking math.
If KA was just about YouTube videos, then Sal has done a remarkable job. He explains better than me, sadly, and he is a lot more patient than me, happily. My wife and I always scout the net looking for good material to help our kids LEARN their subjects faster, and better. Heck, we even printed scanned problem sheets that was posted by some parents whom we don't even know. Talking about old being reinvented. Anything is worth a shot. We do not discriminate. So KA tops them in the number of times we revisit when we have problems specially in Math.
As an ex-teacher, KA dashboard is what excites me and make believe that this use of technology is a game changer. True, schools and homes without Internet may find it useless, but that is beside the point. I wish I had something like this when I was teaching. I don't have to come up with questions because the dashboard has them. I won't come up with hints, because the dashboard has them. I won't have to grade, because the dashboard does it. I won't have to give rewards, because the dashboard does that. And kids love that more than Star of The Week. I wil just spend time making sure that those who
Btw, thanks to this dashboard, I realized that my youngest daughter is a lot better at multiplication and division than addition, and subtraction. Is that a bug Sal?
I suspect that the problem is that a significant fraction of elem teachers are elem teachers because they did not 'get' math. Their teaching results reflect it. More insidiously, they reinforce the notion that people who do 'get' math are a small minority and it's therefore OK if most of the rest of us don't.
I think we need to start moving the teachers that 'get it' down to the middle levels (grades 4-8) to first: make sure the students get a firm arithmetical foundation; and second that they get a positive role model. They need to know that it's not really that hard and can actually be fun and useful. Besides, having kids arriving at 'serious' math (algebra and up) with 8 different levels of arithmetical ability is starting the high school/college teachers of with just too big of a chasm to jump.
Anyway, that's my 2.71828 cents.
The fact is, the human mind can find a pattern in data or in behavior remarkably quickly. But what can you conclude if a student gives a "correct" response, like Cena or Benny? Just that! They gave the "correct" response. They have found a pattern. But you have no way of knowing it is the pattern you wanted them to recognize.
Then there is the danger of undesirable meta-learning outcomes, as I point out in http://profkeithdevlin.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/how-to-design-video-games-that-support-good-math-learning-level-2/
3. KA has never been about replacing teachers. It has always been about rethinking the classroom. We believe that technology can enable truly differentiated instruction that frees up time for true open-ended exploration. For example, the Marlborough School in Los Angeles is using KA in a mult-age setting (7th through 12th grade girls working alongside each other). There is significant peer-to-peer instruction and their amazing teacher has been able to spend much more meaningful time with the students. The ideas of non-age-based cohorts, peer-2-peer instruction, true differentiation, and project based learning are very old, but they have never gone mainstream because they were logistically difficult. Technology makes them viable options.
4. We think that we are in the very early days, but we are trying to improve and iterate on a daily basis using real data from our nearly 5 million users who are doing over 2 million exercises per day on our platform. It is by no means perfect but we think it can only get better. We're also excited about what we see as a new wave of investment in the area. On the for-profit side, there has been investment in codeacademy and udemy amongst others (we get emails for newly fund ed-tech companies on a daily basis) and on the not-for-profit side you have initiatives like KA and MITx.
The reason I ask is that often when education is discussed it seems that we are talking about the US or as if the educational process is monolithic and unaffected by culture and language (we being the general we). If the market model is going to be beyond the US what adaptations are needed to make educational models and technologies functions across multiple languages and cultures?
While I have spent many years in the technology world at least a quarter of my experience has been hands on in classrooms. Some brick and mortar and some virtual. From teaching DOS to the administratve assistant moving off of a typewriter to Finance in an associates program that is online. I would add to that several years now teaching a traditional martial art. Even in that limited space I have found that there are a broad set of students who have very different perceptions, experiences and learning modes.
I do agree with your last sentence on 3. I think in the end we have to enable at least four modes. One to one, One to many, Collaborative and Self Directed.
I love what you are doing with KA. I feel like it's a first step towards redefining how we look at education. In fact it is mandatory for my kids to work through your math videos.
I just got back from Caracas Venezuela this week, and was speaking to an engineer friend about KA. Just as in many other 3rd world countries, most of the population is very poor. They are almost piled up on top of eachother, living in very poor conditions. I was remarking how effective your instrucional videos can be for a country in this type of situation. The internet has given man the opportunity to knock down so many previous barriers to advancement.
I also had mentioned, that the next 2 steps would be cheap / durable hardware and free access to WiFi. Interestingly enough this morning I read an article on CNN Money about a guy who has designed a $100 tablet that is solar powered! The last step would be the free available WiFi......
I guess the point of this post is that you are doing a great service not only to guys like me who live comfortably and have access to all the tools I need. You're also creating opportunites for those who would never have them in places that are in desperate need of a spark. Thank you for that Sal.