Interviews: Ask Lead Developer Ben Kamens About Khan Academy 69
Ben Kamens spent over 5 years at Fog Creek, eventually working his way up to VP of engineering. However, after watching one of Salman Khan's talks he started to volunteer his time at Khan Academy, and is now the lead developer. In-between providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere, he's graciously agreed to answer some of your questions. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Higher Education (Score:5, Interesting)
Joel Spolsky has famously stated that he prefers software engineers who come from highly accredited universities, preferably Ivy-league. His thought is that one has to distinguish oneself in order to be granted admission to such places. Do you think that Joel's opinion, and those of other elitist employers, will change with the introduction of free, quality online education?
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Conversely:
It has been argued that Ivy League schools, and to an extent, other well-regarded schools often distinguish themselves not necessarily by having the best educating, but by being able to select the best performing individuals. Either way, they stand out, either because they are a good filter, because they provide a good education, or some combination of the two.
Taking into account the "filter" issue, and success-breeds-success, what does Khan Academy do to make it's students stand out compared to
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teach them the difference between it's and its?
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No. The teaching is arguably better and the controls that assure that the student who is given credit for the course on the transcript is actually the same student who attended class and took the tests to achieve the grade on the transcript are definitely better.
What about the Federal Learning Registry? (Score:1)
As somebody who works in the educational workspace providing information management services to schools, I would be fascinated in your take on the Learning Registry's potential for making low cost content available to teachers/students [learningregistry.org].
Question for slashdot (Score:2)
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>> When will we start seeing responses?
Let me get back to you on that.
lead dev (Score:2, Interesting)
Lead dev, eh? I'm betting you sit in on lots of spec definition meetings. Maybe with The Man himself. Does he give informal presentations just like the real lectures or ? Feel free to lie if the answer would get you fired. Hmm maybe this question sucks.
Ah F it that was dumb lets ask something more realistic. I always ask coder/tech types whats their coolest hack / coolest piece of code. Not something else someone else did, not some giant overall project or vague thing like "world peace" just your coo
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Ah F it that was dumb lets ask something more realistic. I always ask coder/tech types whats their coolest hack / coolest piece of code.
Ugh, I hate that question. It always seems to "make the cut", and the answer is invariably dull, uninspiring, and boring. It's such a complete waste of a question.
Please people, quit asking the stupid "coolest hack" question, or at least don't vote it up!
Platform For Schools (Score:3)
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To help google for it, its an old TED talk maybe came up in the rotation a year ago. I saw the presentation you've only heard of. It was fairly cool.
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I use Khan Academy to teach my daughter math since I don't have time to, and I use the tool you are talking about to monitor her progress. It is available to anyone who signs up for a Khan Academy account. You have the "student" sign up for an account and then ad you as a "tutor". Once this is done you can see all of their progress, statistics, and the likes. It is awesome!
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Or more directly, is that your personalized ringtone and what was salman's reaction the first time he heard it?
I used to have a personalized ringtone that said something like "Wife Alert" whenever my wife called, she was pretty pissed about it, still don't know why. Probably thought I had a "Girlfriend Alert" ringtone too.
Verification (Score:5, Insightful)
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To add on to this, P2PU is working with Mozilla's Open Badge system for providing a badge-based verification process; can this model gain traction in academia? (http://info.p2pu.org/tag/badges/)
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nor would I have any other way of proving my knowledge to other schools or potential employers
Google for CLEP tests, older than dirt or at least older than me.
One school I attended only allowed two CLEP tests per semester. I have absolutely no idea why both in this practical situation or in theory. Also they only accepted CLEP tests for certain classes. I'm pretty sure calc was one of them, but if there is a CLEP test for diffeqs and you pass yet they refuse to accept it via the xfer process, you're pretty much SOL other than the appeals process.
Potential employers don't seem to care about much o
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One school I attended only allowed two CLEP tests per semester. I have absolutely no idea why both in this practical situation or in theory.
Possibly because wider acceptance of CLEP test results for material learned online would put them out of business.
Hybrid courses (Score:2)
Apropos of this, a number of MOOCs -- don't know if Khan is doing this as w
Some of us would like to contribute, how can we? (Score:3)
I think the notion of going from paid books to free content is noble, and I'd be willing to work for well below a standard software engineer salary. How can I get in contact with you to possibly get employment?
ALL of you turn in your GEEK cards NOW! (Score:2, Funny)
Not one single "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" joke?!
Not one?!
You are a disappoint Slashdotters!
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Not one single "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" joke?!
Scroll up...
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Whenever my daughter and I log into our Khan Academy accounts, one or both of us will yell: "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN".
I imagine Sal probably rues the day that movie was made.
I'm sure he does. Right now he's wondering if you've heard the Klingon proverb that revenge is a dish best served cold. Soon you will feel his wrath.
Why would he rue? (Score:2)
I imagine Sal probably rues the day that movie was made.
I highly doubt that. Everyone thinks that moment was awesome, and his acting was awesome in it. Given that one goal of being an actor is to be well known, how could you rue being part of one of the most iconic moments in film history?
And again, it's not like people thought it was funny/bad, most thought it was awesome. Even though it's similar it's pretty much diametrically opposed in recognition and effect than the "NOOOOOOOOOO" moment in Star War
Where are all the CS courses? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are all the "traditional" Computer Science courses? I'm not asking about the "interactive manual" type courses like how to do loops in Python - there are a ton of materials about that all over the web. I'm asking about theoretical computer science, such as Turing completeness, Chomsky hierarchy, abstract data types, compiler design, that kind of stuff which is the backbone of a university computer science education.
The reason I'm asking is not to diminish the value of hands-on courses, but because many (including myself) were not able to get a "traditional" CS degree, coming into programming jobs from other disciplines (or no degree at all) and are largely self taught. Self teaching is great when it comes to practical stuff early on, but once you move on to more senior roles you start feeling the gaps of not understanding the theory behind your tools, design, and implementation, as much as you should.
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Where are all the "traditional" Computer Science courses? I'm not asking about the "interactive manual" type courses like how to do loops in Python - there are a ton of materials about that all over the web. I'm asking about theoretical computer science, such as Turing completeness, Chomsky hierarchy, abstract data types, compiler design, that kind of stuff which is the backbone of a university computer science education.
The reason I'm asking is not to diminish the value of hands-on courses, but because many (including myself) were not able to get a "traditional" CS degree, coming into programming jobs from other disciplines (or no degree at all) and are largely self taught. Self teaching is great when it comes to practical stuff early on, but once you move on to more senior roles you start feeling the gaps of not understanding the theory behind your tools, design, and implementation, as much as you should.
Khan Academy was launched to help school-age kids (they talk a lot about something called "K-12" on the site, but I have no idea what that means.
So for a variation on your question:
Is it likely that Khan Academy will expand "upward" into more university-level courses or does the current roadmap only plan for "outward" growth into other subject courses at the school level?
other forms of learning (Score:4, Interesting)
As Khan Academy, at least in my exposure to it, is about listening to someone talk watching writing on a board, do you think that this is teaching good pedagogy? Do you think it reinforces the idea that visual learners are the smartest people, the people who deserve to be educated? Is there any plans to expand the current format ot include other learning styles. For instance, I am not one of those that thinks manipulative have to be used in math, but I do think a math classroom with no manipulative is not as reaching to as broed a learner base as it could be. Or having an interactive element where a formative assessment might be conducted during the video?
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... It sure didn't work for you!
I don't know... his English was good enough that you didn't notice he was a non-native speaker, so his education must have been pretty good.
Sorry AC, there's only one person showing poor education around here, and that's you....
Plans to make KA easier for researchers to use? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a middle school teacher experimenting with using KA with my classes. I think it is an amazing tool, especially for differentiation -- helping teachers to help their students who are behind have successes in math and, ideally, work towards getting caught back up to their peers. I think it can allow math teachers to do more interesting and fun (non-drill) types of work in the classroom, such as focusing more on students learning by doing open-ended, authentic, rich projects with each other.
The key word there is that I *think* it must be helpful to the type of classroom described above. I want to know it is, and as part of our practice in Ontario, Canada, it is encouraged that teachers engage in personal inquiry projects to get more data on whether what we think is working actually is. It is difficult to get the data I need out of KA. We're having to do a lot of manual grabbing of student usage times and populating spreadsheets with that. Any plans to extend the external API to allow more sophisticated queries? Or, perhaps plans to provide a tool allowing more extensive data dumps which researchers can use?
And if you don't have plans at the moment, does this post influence that? ;-) With a more thorough access to student data, I expect there will be researchers who will be more interested in investigating KA in their research and fleshing out the actual benefits (and also any issues that might be addressed).
My students and I thank you!
(mr.walker at walker-clan dot com)
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My question: Is an efficient API in the works for those who want to extract data for hundreds of students and process them offline using traditional analytic tools?
If you don't have too many students (like maybe less than 150), it's pract
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Explanation vs exploration: Pedagogical challenge? (Score:3)
I've heard a criticism of the Khan Academy pedagogic approach is that it is explanation based (effectively the old model: the teacher talks, the student listens, the student carries out an exercise, listens again) - while schools are moving towards exploration based learning (where students are encourage to try and approach problems from different angles supported by teacher-as-facilitator).
To what extent does Khan Academy replicate a very old fashioned rote-learning form of education (albeit delivered and presented via a new media with minor improvements like pause and rewind), and in what aspects does it offer significant new pedagogical advances in learning?
e.g. UK, enquiry based learning (Score:3)
For example the UK, where there's growing interesting in enquiry based learning [ofsted.gov.uk] - this links to a report by Ofsted, the government's "Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills".Enquiry learning (called inquiry learning in the USA) also has its champions in North America (e.g. Roy Pea). A quick look around suggests that this approach also has been tried with success in Scandinavia [wiley.com]( "Context of teaching and learning school science in Finland: Reflections on PISA 2006 results" by
What impact will online courses... (Score:1)
Traditionally, the cost of a course is divided between the limited physically present students. With the advent of online universities and courses, that cost can be divided across students across many geographical boundaries. A student in his parent's basement in Malawi could theoretically take a Political Science course
Effectiveness (Score:2)
How do you know how effective your programs are? How do you calibrate your presentations? How do you accommodate different learning styles?
I ask because most of the methods that rate teaching effectiveness is thin. That is, “Does New Math work better then drilling students?” “Does this video work for dyslexia students?” etc.
I have seen may teachers guided by antidotal evidence or heuristic rules – which makes sense because you need to evaluate students taught by thousands of te
Why videos? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the big things about Khan and other massive online course systems is videos. Yes, videos. E.g. I once saw this 5 minute video explaining why dividing anything by zero was not defined. Rather than, plus infinity. I summarized it as:
OK, so the question is: why videos? You are cutting off most of the world's population who do not have access to decent Internet and thus can't download and watch all these videos. If you provided text (even if just a transcript along with some screenshots where necessary) you would be able to reach a much bigger audience, including those who could benefit most.
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KA Lite
If you need to use Khan Academy in an environment without internet, we recommend using KA Lite, an unofficial volunteer-driven initiative to provide a version of the Khan Academy videos and exercises that works offline.
Internships (Score:2)
Curriculum (Score:1)
Internationalization and Localization (Score:1)
How do you plan to implement support for I18N in the exercises ?
Grammar on KA (Score:1)
Should we cut degree into smaller chucks that (Score:2)
Should we cut degree into smaller chucks?
That are a better fit for people who want to learn but don't have the time / funds for a full time college?
Can make tech / trades schools have more meaning and not be roped into the older degree system.
Fix the skills gaps issues
Let people who learn betting by working hands on get something out of it.
Get people in the armed forces something to to say that they can do X job with out having to go to school for a full 2-4+ years to get a piece of paper saying the same th
Jude the Obscure (Score:2)
Fundamental Development Methodologies (Score:1)
Solving bugs (Score:2)
Why is it that a bug accepted in 2010 [google.com], and which received a lot of comments from others with the same problem, is still not acted upon? Is it lack of resources?
Disclaimer: I filled this bug report.