Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

This articles core argument appears to be that a live instruction is better than a video because there can be feedback at the moment of confusion while a video can't. But that depends on student's impulse being triggered and I'm not sure if its any better or in some cases can be worse if the teachers content is not as thorough as Khan's or anyone else's video - as these benefit from a worldwide audiences feedback on correcting any confusing or unclear parts.

In the classrooms I see through my kids, the teacher is doing roughly what a Khan video does: walking through a worked procedure at the front of the room. If a video fails to provoke the "wait, why does that work?" moment, then a teacher following the same flow likely fails in exactly the same way as the author claims and missing the opportunity for hands'on learning. A video actually allows the learner to go back and review content if anything was unclear, and presumably any interactive AI agent can help with the feedback part even though the teacher in the video isn't.

I also wish the piece had stayed with Khanmigo, where nobody has a good theory yet on where the ai tutoring loop actually breaks and why people fail to engage it and that putting it in their face may not work, why exactly personalization at that scale hasn't produced the gains it promised.

Also irked by the title built on a pun on Khan's name, sets up an awkward framing that kind of lets me know it may not be unbiased.

Overall, I do agree with the thesis but:

> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?

> Watch a video.

I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.

From what I know of the Khan approach, it's akin to "flipping the classroom" [0], which has gained pretty wide acceptance. It was pioneered by Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur.

(I use the flipped classroom approach extensively. But the legal profession being the eager embracers of novelty that we are </sarcasm>, I refer to the approach as "enhanced Socratic method," given that Socratic method was something we all endured in law school.)

For math and engineering courses, the basic flipped-classroom approach was used at West Point for over 150 years: In the so-called Thayer method, students study textbooks in advance, then in class, they work on problems on chalkboards. The instructor moves from chalkboard to chalkboard, coaching the students in real time. [1]

(I do much the same thing in my contract-drafting classes: In small groups, students do drafting exercises using online whiteboards. I lurk on my laptop, quietly coaching in person as needed.)

[0] https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/flipped-classrooms

[1] https://flippedlearning.org/syndicated/avoiding-flipped-lear...

> What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn

As anyone who’s met Sal will attest, this characterization is incredibly off the mark.

The author extrapolated from the product as opposed to understanding the person and how the product came to be the way it is.

The only thing more irritating than the AI assisted unfair attacks on Sal is the font it's written in.

As someone who has earned over 3 million points on Khan Academy over a 3-4 year span about ten years ago, I am very appreciative of my experience. What I appreciated most is when Sal would derive formulas such as the quotient rule in Calculus from the power rule by using negative exponents. Deriving formulas rather than memorizing them opened up a new perspective for me.

This article appears to focus on the chat bot which I have not used and was not part of my experience. At the time, I had a subscription to Wolfram Alpha that was helpful if I got stuck on an intermediary step.

The high level of goal of the post which is directed at asking good questions raises a point that seems valid to me.

K.A. has always helped me immensely. Often I will add a video as a 2nd "I do" before our "we do." If there is extra time after small groups we typically answer the math unit questions as a class. Students are thrilled to come up in front of the class to defend thier reasoning before finally seeing if thier choice was correct.

The AI voice of this article irked me. Pangram says 44% of it is AI, for the chunk I was reading.

For generic trope-y content like this, the voice can't be left this AI-ish. It has to be about something really interesting for this AI tone to be bearable.

Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning", or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did.

[0] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5138/Teaching-MachinesThe-...

[1] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/

Is the article about something else than how math on Khan Academy was thaught?

I remember minimal videos (3-13 min, usually 5-8), and then exercises drilling the techniques until you understand it and don't make mistakes. If you got a perfect score (no mistakes whatsoever), you went a little faster.

That's learning by doing, or am I wrong? Or are there no exercises for things other than math?

I have been using Khan Academy for over 7 years growing up. It has helped tremendously and taught me to be a critical thinker. There are exercises, quizzes, and unit tests to test a student's understanding and if they get something wrong, KA marks what videos or articles they should go back to and review. I agree with one of the commenters here, this article is uncharitable.

I'm not a fan when schadenfreude indulges in someone failing to make the world a better place.

I think there is a simple reason why AI tutors are not terribly successful.

AI is just not good enough yet, they are only just now capable of performing tasks, getting them to do those tasks involves a degree of careful guidance and the ability to handle frustration calmly and rationally.

Those things require a high motivation to have the task done.

They are not the properties you want in a tutor, a few students have the drive to learn in conditions that are not ideal. They are a small minority.

What you need is a AI that has a deep enough understanding of the ideas behind the metals it teaches and is engaging witty and charismatic enough to get that information across to a student.

When it has those abilities there will be a lot of parents that won't want it to have access to their kids.

Off-topic and may be found rude - I find multiple instances of "Kahn" in the comments. Is it really that difficult to put in the effort to learn the correct spelling of "Khan" specially when it is everywhere in TFA, the post title, and other comments?

I think there is more to this.

Here's a presentation that, kind of claims the opposite. More specifically, it claims figuring it out on your own is not as good as having a teacher tell you, and then having you use the info, and it claims to be backed up by research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ

The article starts by talking about how interactive learning with Khanmingo failed, and then goes into depth about how watching videos isn’t enough. That’s disappointing. Khanmingo should be superior to passively watching a video because you can interactively dig deeper just like the author says is necessary.

It feels weird and unfair to focus solely on Kahn here when he’s competing with some random teacher or professor’s droning, confusing, non-interactive lecture that’s less engaging and just as lacking in interactivity or application.

I also don’t think he ever purports to be “all you need” to learn.

It reminds me of the people who criticize Duolingo because you can’t actually reach perfect fluency through their app--like wasn’t it always obvious that it was never meant to be the only education you need; wasn’t it always obvious that you need to actually _speak_ a language to learn it? And yet it’s still a great app that has helped millions of people learn languages.

I'm curious if maybe the mistake was in assuming we needed AI for the teaching part of the process.

Maybe we should focus only on having AI for the correcting/internalizing part instead? A purely deterministic grader and problem creator creates an endless stream of problems and solutions. The LLM's job is just to help you get to the point that you can assign a random problem from this problem set and the student will be able to answer it without assistance. Hopefully the teachers lecture at the beginning of class helped with understanding as well (I suspect that it would), and also provides a more broad "theory of mind" about what we are doing than the myopic LLM's "Let's get you solving this problem" does. Also, humans are social creatures, and being taught by another human being (even if it were less efficient) is likely beneficial to most people.

tldr; Normal human teacher, deterministic grading to gauge progress, and LLM assistants to help the student get to the point that they can pass the deterministic grading.

Yeah? That's what the style of teaching is about.

Think less science and more a conversation; establishing syntactic and semantic ground rules for the speakers grasp of a behavior relative to problem.

It's not necessarily about teaching something concrete. It's about teaching a social style in an abstract way. It's discussing a painting or piece of music, in math the symbols used to represent possible number/geometry generators.

I never just watch the videos. I rewrite what is written out. To recreate the song and dance so to speak.

Pragmatically speaking life is just performance art. Only a few specific realms of science move the needle for humanity; biological health maintenance (across all contexts; housing, food, not just medical) and our research in energy infrastructure.

Everything else is just one's relative outcome. Result of their sensory experience. Feels like this should be obvious at this point.

The studies that show brain activity goes down as we use AI. Yeah. So? Is it great to stimulate ourselves so much with ultimately arbitrary content our biology immediately tries to forget due to entropy? Heart attacks are up in <60 crowd relative to last generation. Constant interaction with flame wars and tabs v spaces (functional languages and Nix or gtfo!) computer config wars level inanity is not good Bob.

Comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411243 by @dabedee is dead from downvoting but shouldn't be.

Isn’t education often a you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-but-you-can't-make-it-drink problem?

Why are there people in this comment section who are just downvoting opinions that they don't agree with?

That article is spot on: we learn by doing and experience, not being told the high level outcomes (which is not without value as a guide).

Sal could not get to his cousin's house every afternoon to do math with her, so he recorded the sessions. She said she preferred the recordings, because she could rewind them and because he wasn't sitting there watching her not get it. He put them on the internet. Then he spent about fifteen years building an exercise engine, a "mastery" model, and a teacher dashboard around them, and told everyone who would listen that the point was to move the lecture out of the classroom so the classroom could be used for something better.

And the essay's premise is: this man wants your child to watch a video.