The Kahn Academy is boring online trash dressed up with famous media hype, and this sounds like more of the same. They seem to have anti-learned the lesson from the year* of pandemic online school: So, that was terrible, let’s do more if it and make it sound like a 6 hour straight zoom meeting isn’t everyone’s worst nightmare.
Except those videos don't have the adaptive learning, practice exercises, and tests that KA has. Maybe the videos are higher quality, but introducing the material is only part of education, you also need, planning, assessment, and practice, which is where KA is unparalleled.
The KA assessment platform (at lest in Algebra and Geometry) is pretty a boring mainstream online problem delivery engine. What’s unparalleled about that?
Why would you say that? Can you elaborate? As far as I'm concerned, it is a great free online resource which makes learning accessible to everyone. Sal Khan is also an excellent teacher.
There’s like 500 way better online resources for any given KA topic. Take any KA video and compare it with the same topic from Numberphile, VSauce, or even just a random person who knows how to teach.
A. You didn’t look very hard. B. Okay, try PBS space time, Dr PhysicsA, 3Blue1Brown, Strand’s MIT series, Red&Blue. There are so many wonderful resources online to learn from that just need to be meta-organized, KA is the bottom of every heap except for the meta-organization. (And, BTW, many of the others have internal meta-organization.)
You’re comparing short entertainment videos vs something meant to break down subjects and teach them bit by bit.
Nobody is using Vsauce to help them study a college course. The videos simply don’t exist, and I say this as someone who’s watched the channels you mentioned.
And Ps. I say this as a teacher, a cognitive scientist, a computer scientist, an education researcher, and most importantly a parent whose kid’s teachers have (thankfully rarely) forced his kids through the KA video tunnel of drone, which I’ve had to subsequently un/re-teach nearly every single time. (BTW, KA “lectures” are quite often, IMHO as a teacher, simply wrong in approach. It’s like they took a standard textbook and made a video out of every paragraph. What a nightmare. Even a book would be better - at least you could flip back and forth.)
Apparently you haven’t. DrPhysicsA is literally ALL of physics. Strang is ALL of linear algebra. For any topic there’s someone who’s done it better then KA. I agree that it requires meta-organization, and that’s a valuable contribution, but KA should stick to that par, bcs their teachers are uniformly soporific.
I love Numberphile, but they work best as an exposure to new concepts. I'm not watching Numberphile to help me with my statistics homework, I'm watching to be introduced to the concept itself in a relatively entertaining way. It's closer to recreational math than a learning aid.
On the other end, I find KA videos to be a bit dry, but are useful when I need help with a specific concept in statistics or calculus or something.
I am not sure about main Khan Academy, but Khan Academy Kids has been a great resource. Completely free educational app with no advertisement in it. It has been hard to find anything else that can compare. Does it go down hill from there?
