A game-changing bargain in primary education

Chances are excellent that you've heard of Khan Academy.  If you haven't, here's the gist:  One guy (Salman Khan) is a great tutor, and eventually gets so much business from friends and family that he starts posting YouTube videos on different topics using nothing but a screen capture program, a Bamboo tablet, and free drawing software.

Now there are over 3,000 videos in math, science, history, finance, and more, the majority of which he created himself.  Add to this a management back-end that keeps track of time on task, learning objectives, practice exercises, achievements, and stats out the wazoo.

And it's all completely free.

Adored by Bill Gates and Google; abhorred by some teachers

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, loves the idea of Khan Academy, and uses it himself on occasion!  (See here.)  Sal Khan's team has grown to include some really high-powered software developers and other talent.  (If you're wondering who Fog Creek Software is, they had a big hand in developing this little programming question and answer site.)  This grow-out was due largely to a cool $2 million prize from Google.

Not everyone is fawning over Khan Academy, though.  Some of his detractors:  math teachers.  Two of them go at Sal's video on multiplying positive and negative numbers, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style.  (I say “Sal” as if I know him; I don't.  Hope you'll play along.)  Some of their points were valid, some of them were splitting hairs on diction, and others just seemed more than a little mean-spirited.  That, and their critique video has none of the sound clarity that the original Khan Academy video had.

I said “had.”  The original video that was criticized has been replaced.  I listened to the critical review video, which showed the original Khan Academy video, and then watched the new video.  It appears that Sal addressed the valid criticisms point by point.  Here are five:

1. They said that using the number 2 twice might be confusing since two plus two equals two times two.  Sal used the numbers 2 and 3 in the new video.
2. They wondered why Sal didn't start with what students would probably know:  multiplying two positive numbers to get a positive number.  Sal did this one first in the new video.
3. They noted that Sal misused the term “transitive property.”  He didn't misuse this term in the new video.
4. They noted that sometimes he put the plus sign in front of the positive numbers, and other times he didn't.  Sal mentions this fact in the new video.
5. They note that he misspeaks when he says four times three is “four multiplied by itself three times.”  He says “repeatedly added” in the new video.

A game changer, like Wikipedia was for the encyclopedia

I wonder if this video interaction between the two “real” math teachers and Sal Khan had the opposite effect that the two math teachers were intending.  It speaks to the humility of Sal Khan that he took the the critical video, whose creators had an axe to grind, and fixed his video in such short order.  If they were aiming to poke holes at Sal's teaching skills, Sal learned from them, and plugged the holes.  Result:  better math instructional videos, available for free anywhere there is an Internet connection.  Sal's got these guys working for free, and they may not even know it!

Think what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.  Britannica has stopped printing.  Millions of people, each improving Wikipedia as they are able, not only manage to keep vandalism from ruining it, but make it a formidable starting point for virtually any topic one would care to learn more about.  Britannica couldn't compete.  This doesn't mean that Wikipedia is perfect, but for most things, it's very, very good.  And that's good enough.

Neither are Khan Academy videos perfect.  Sal has refined his tools, speaking, and technique noticeably over the thousands of videos he's created.  Even the latest video that replaces the one critiqued above isn't completely perfect the way a blockbuster movie is perfect, but it's very, very good.  And that's good enough.  The ones that still have lingering issues receive comments or YouTube notations that point out errors!  That by itself almost makes the errors disappear.  And that's just about good enough.

Khan Academy, and other sites like it, are already becoming game-changers in primary education.  For the cost of a reasonably high-speed Internet connection and time — or maybe not even the cost of the Internet connection, if you go to the library! — you can learn the basics of most of the core subjects.  It's little wonder that some teachers see this as a threat to their profession.  If they can't teach at least this well, they should be scared.  They're getting replaced right before their eyes.

I'd rather not pay for something I don't need, like a public school system.  There's the true bargain.