BTY, I owe you guys some thoughts from my previous comment on the democratizing video discussion:

Though I do agree that “every attempt by a learner to express and/or share how they’re synthesizing material is always valuable”, I don’t think video making it is something that could work on a permanent basis as a chosen pedagogical model for the Khan Academy website. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that making a video is a great learning experience in many ways, but I think there is at least one fundamental problem to solve before thinking on video feedback: Information overload.

In other words, video making as a feedback and a learning process is a great learning tool for the individual, but it’s kind of inefficient when you think about the masses. Take for example You-tube: I understand Google is trying to cope with annoyed users trying to find quality content in the site due to the enormous (and continously increasing) quantity of material available on the web.

The comparison made between Khan Academy and Wikipedia is interesting because of the peer to peer quality evaluation and curation process on the enciclopedia’s content. However, though I acknowledge the possibility of linking text and the spoken word (aka word recognition), I believe that video and text have a fundamental difference, which is that videos also show visual stuff to the audience. Agreeing on what the text should say AND what images a video should show is much more difficult than just agreeing on what a text should say, like in Wikipedia.

So, allowing all learners to upload their individual video-feedback or even learning material to the site could generate the same problems we already see in video sharing sites as youtube. Whilst, allowing all users by peer to peer colaboration create a single content for a single topic (i.e. 1 official video for one official topic) would be really tough and could create frustraion in users, but would be really interesting as an experiment.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I think designing the correct kind of excercises and semi-standarized projects for the rest of their content should provide the fundamental value Khan Academy is lacking to offer a really complete learning experience.

I also agree that it will be quiet a challenge for Khan Academy to coordinate to different video styles that are incoming in order to avoid messing up the learning experience and creating confusion and information overload.

Another challenge that Khan Academy has is finding a way to create a learning network of peer tutoring and support. On this subject, I don’t think that democratizing the video production and ditching the “sage on the stage” model is the way (more on this subject later). I think there are the other systems that can also offer the additional learning advantages of video making, such as collective and creative problem solving, peer to peer collaboration and support, project building, among others. Two examples of such systems are:

(1) the programming exercise model Proyect Euler has: http://projecteuler.net/ , and/ or
(2) online math exercise solving at Khan Academy as a peer to peer – student aided classwork

This brings me to my next point, which is what I think is Achilles’ heel when we speak of Khan Academy: There is a lack of learning assessment (except perhaps for math, in which the exercises are great, although they could have an additional and very interesting section by using including Dan Meyer’s ideas). What I mean is that after being video-lectured on many semantic topics, such as American history, art history, or even less semantic topics such as biology or economy, users seem to forget these ideas if I don’t review the videos in a certain amount of time. Obviously video reviewing what has already been learned is extremely tedious and inefficient.

There should be some sort of analogous form to the math exercises where one could practice what has been learned, such as for example memrise.com or a modified version of that idea. However, I also do believe that the creative approach that Project Euler’s and Dan Meyer’s exercises have are essential to a real learning on any subject. For example, Dan’s excercises could be systemized as excercises in Proyect Euler are.

@Monika I wil be sending you and email to join the conversation with @Brit on Wikipedia and Codeacademy, though I think it would be most interesting if we could hold it in a public place so everyone interested coud join!

@Brit: Each and every attempt by a learner to express and/or share how they’re synthesizing material is always valuable. If Khan’s ultimate goal is to just create content in video form, then I’m not sure that’s terribly exciting.

My guess if what you’re thinking of Khan becoming is very different than what I would like it to be. While you’re talking about an authoritative and exhaustive collection of high quality learning videos, I’m talking about creating a learning network of peer tutoring and support.

As for a video wiki, that sounds like a pretty interesting idea, would love to see what it looks like as well :)