I get the sense that since Dan Meyer has done nothing but criticize KA since the very beginning, this MTTK Prize is simply a way to criticize in the guise of altruism.

This is pretty easily disproven:

• I would have loved Khan Academy in eighth grade.
• Khan academy helped me sister learn trigonometry and get into graduate school.

Anyone who puts the kind of expansive warranties as Khan has on a product as important as education, deserves all the fair, lucid criticism we can muster.

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“Look at the good we’re doing, helping the children of the world by creating overly sarcastic critiques of someone who had an idea and ran with it. ”

Please. KA is a work in progress. If you can create something better, do it and let people decide which product they want.

It’s difficult to make a statement like this without context. Are the students in a situation where some outside impetus forces them to answer the questions?

One of my frustrations making my own videos is how to convince students to actually attempt the questions. I tried in my logarithm video to include an icon at the same time as asking students to pause, but I have grave doubts any students really did so. Alternately, one could put a question at the end and have no answer provided in video form, but even given some students bother to attempt the problem how many will bother to check their answer?

Your response might be “they need a teacher to remediate”, but the whole point of Khan etc. is for students to be able to learn things without a physical teacher present. Khan’s solution is to then include electronically graded exercises to repeat a particular algorithm. (There’s some experimental stuff to go with the Brit Cruise videos, but that’s a very small portion of the site.) Clearly something is missing here, and I have trouble simply accepting the statement “good self-instruction is impossible”.

I’m looking around for a general system for coding instructional videos, and haven’t seen one yet. I’d hate to have to re-invent the wheel. I’ve looked at the ones designed for coding in-class instruction, but classroom instruction is such a different medium than video instruction that I can’t even see how to apply the specific coding methods to a video. The purpose of the coding would be to come up with ways of categorizing moments of an instructional video in certain ways, and trying to generate data about errors and/or omissions in instructional videos.

I wonder also how well one can construct videos so that they act as support for inquiry, so I’d especially like to use a coding system which is flexible enough to handle a variety of pedagogical formats in a video. Videos that ask questions of the watcher, and require thinking are far superior, I suspect, than videos which provide “the” correct solution. I think a classification system would be the only way to test this assertion however.

If anyone has heard of such a classification system, or knows of someone who has created one for themselves, please let me know.

@David Ng I would like to see some of your conceptual models. Have you or Will you be posting them on your website?

My thoughts on why constructivist education gets the short shrift is two fold:

1st it requires a degree of understand mathematics conceptually and connected to real life that many teachers don’t have. (Illinois endorsement in middle school math is I think 15 semester hours which for some means nothing more than calculus) [There is also no requirement to review/relearn conceptual understanding of math as part of professional development]

2nd professional support for constructivist education is usually based on collaboration something many teachers don’t seem to do very well.

Finally, to get on the point. It is not necessary for humor to be mean spirited, some might even say it shouldn’t. On the other hand I think the original video needed to be a bit scathing to gain attention of a wider audience. (look nobody was paying attention to valid critiques so let’s make fun of the videos and show people there are serious flaws that should be addressed.) It has done that job. Future constructive criticism delivered with humor should result in positive gains.

You can reach me at opticrope@gmail.com.

I think a lot of the reason that constructivism has not taken hold is that many education professionals and teachers have an extremely superficial view of constructivism. It would help if more people looked carefully enough to recognize that the vast majority of US lessons are essentially procedural — whether they are straight lecture, or have been slightly disguised by group work or investigations or brief questioning. Looking at the details of Khan’s lectures is a good start for taking a more nuanced look at lessons in general.

Regarding your second point: I agree that applying a conceptual veneer to our current practices is ineffective. Most math programs already try to do that; and it is just another thing that students have to memorize. Basically, we are trying to provide students with a mental model for understanding the mathematics that they are learning. However, mental models are constructed over years. Students need to be able to build on them and test them in order to refine them and trust in them. When I open a unit with three days spent building a mental model, and then move on (and the teacher the following year introduces an entirely different mental model), the mental model fails to be useful and is just excess baggage. A conceptual approach needs to span not just lessons and units, but also grade levels.

I have some example that I can share with you if you’d like to take this conversation private.