[ExI] education

Sun May 22 16:37:55 UTC 2022

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] education

>…Spike - what if you had a teacher whose STEM skills were so low that they could not get a higher paying job in industry?  Could they supplement their teaching with Khan Academy?...

Of course, and plenty of them do exactly that.  Thanks for the question Billw, for it allows me to bang on one of my favorite drums.

A prominent calculus teacher in the Los Angeles area did a lot to promote Khan Academy in the early days, when Sal was getting it moving.  Khan didn’t really have a lot of content there yet, but had some, and it was good.  This calculus teacher recognized the potential and what was already available, promoted it, encouraged his students to get going on that.  Some did, and those students demonstrated what was possible in what we now call asynchronous learning.  The ones who had some drive, some giterdun, would look ahead in the syllabus, check it out on Khan Academy, listen to Sal’s explanation, come to class prepared, get more out of the lecture, way more.  This calculus teacher eventually contributed to filling out and rounding out Sal’s previously gappy (and at times cobby, incomplete) curriculum, they created KA’s World of Math, which has somewhere over 1100 videos with exercise sets, all free.  If a student went thru all of that, the student was ready for anything college throws at them.

>….A teacher coming into the classroom, turning on the TV and sitting with their paperback book while the class watches, brings to mind my experience with teaching psych 101 by TV…

Nooooooo that isn’t how Khan Academy is used, and it defeats the strength and value of asynchronous learning.  The students don’t view anything simultaneously and don’t use up class time on it.  They go on their own time and progress at their own pace.

The calculus teacher in the first part of this post realized that if he let all the calculus students study and progress at their own pace, forget teaching them all the same lessons at the same time, then true: the gap between the best and weakest students opens dramatically, however… the class, collectively, the average student does better.  The class average goes up dramatically.  The teaching is far more efficient.  The average student gets more, the best students get waaay more outta the class.

>…Students hated it.  I suppose Khan is better?  bill w

Ja, Khan Academy is way better because Sal Khan recognizes a fundamental truth about education which he writes about in his book: every classroom contains both eagles and pigeons.  Accept it and work with it.  

Billw, you are a professor, so you know exactly what I mean.  Asynchronous learning doesn’t pretend to produce equal outcomes for all.  It freely acknowledges that to do the most good for the most students, we just hafta do what Khan Academy does best: it lets the pigeons peck and the eagles soar.

Do comment on the previous paragraph please Billw.

spike

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