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.
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 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.
Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).
OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
Ironically, spaced repetition is the key to successful learning.
Obviously one can overdo it. And there is variance in what people require. But not giving things time, instead giving in to the dopamine-craving, that's killing your learning abilities.
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him after a Robitussin bender.
I've not tried it myself, but I consistently hear good things about Math Academy. It uses a knowledge graph so that it knows whether you've satisfied prerequisites for a topic, and it adapts itself to your level. I've never taken the plunge because it's very expensive at $49 a month, but it seems to be the one that serious maths learners use.
I did the trial of Brilliant the other day. You can get 7 days free, then another 7 days added if you cancel the first trial before the end. After that you can continue to get 2 free lessons per day with ads. I think it's about $20 a month for unlimited lessons. The maths problems are more visual (which makes them quite intuitive) and it has a nicer, more polished UI than Khan Academy. It's easier to stay in the mood for doing more lessons. The main downsides compared to Khan are that the explanations are quite minimal (short descriptions, no videos), and it doesn't reach as advanced a level as Khan. I'm looking at it as more a way to do a refresher on the maths I already learned at school rather than a serious learning tool. If it were $5 a month I'd probably consider subbing for a couple of months and trying to blitz through all the material before switching back to Khan to fill in the gaps.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:
"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."
Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:
- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).
- No room for outside innovation.
- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.
Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
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?
Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.
"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"
It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.
Particularly in early mathematics and language acquisition (but also in most learning domains) you need both rote learning and exploratory learning. Fundamental concepts + exercises to build muscle memory are foundational to enabling students to participate fruitfully in meaningful projects, complex problem-solving, exploration and argumentation.
If you're flailing around without having memorized basic trigonometric identities, you're going to struggle severely to apply them to classical mechanics. If you can't do basic matrix multiplication, you're not going to build a graphics engine.
The article tries to damn Khan with an example about probing how neural myelination works. If you understand the foundations of electricity (by learning about capacitance and impedance) and have done some grueling foundational learning in organic chemistry, ready answers might spring to your mind. You need the former to make asking the latter fruitful or meaningful.
Khan deliberately uses the term "scaffolding" - which since we're throwing around dead education theorists harks from Vygotsky - which is precisely what a teacher provides by pantomiming elementary concepts for a child. Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence.
I really don't understand this article. Two things can be true at once.
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.
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 agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Kahn here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.
I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.
Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.
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.
The concept of Khanmigo was great. The implementation was basically useless.
It was a great attempt, but the article explains the problem:
"early OpenAI access"
This was literally the world's very first attempt at an agentic tutor, with (initially pre-release) GPT-4. That is worlds away from what's being built with fable or sol-grade models in 2026, or what will be available in 2028.
I can't speak for anything that came later, but in the early videos the majority of the benefit was that the presentation was exceptionally clear, and focused on developing one little piece of a subject at a time, it gently paste format that you could easily pause and rewind over and over.
It was never about replacing exercises, it was there to help you do the exercises from your actual coursework, and to serve as a refresher reference for things you might have already studied but forgot some details about.
Also the videos usually consisted of a while of time spent physically writing out and talking through examples.
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/
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?
There are only two comments with that spelling. It's not a big deal.
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.
Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos.
"Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."
Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.
While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).
OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
I'd love to see studies about this.
There's a difference between pacing (good), and repetitive speech (bad). Between pacing and repetitive speech.
Ironically, spaced repetition is the key to successful learning.
Obviously one can overdo it. And there is variance in what people require. But not giving things time, instead giving in to the dopamine-craving, that's killing your learning abilities.
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him after a Robitussin bender.
This is exactly what my kid said about why he doesn’t like Kahn academy.
What would you recommend over khan academy?
I've not tried it myself, but I consistently hear good things about Math Academy. It uses a knowledge graph so that it knows whether you've satisfied prerequisites for a topic, and it adapts itself to your level. I've never taken the plunge because it's very expensive at $49 a month, but it seems to be the one that serious maths learners use.
I did the trial of Brilliant the other day. You can get 7 days free, then another 7 days added if you cancel the first trial before the end. After that you can continue to get 2 free lessons per day with ads. I think it's about $20 a month for unlimited lessons. The maths problems are more visual (which makes them quite intuitive) and it has a nicer, more polished UI than Khan Academy. It's easier to stay in the mood for doing more lessons. The main downsides compared to Khan are that the explanations are quite minimal (short descriptions, no videos), and it doesn't reach as advanced a level as Khan. I'm looking at it as more a way to do a refresher on the maths I already learned at school rather than a serious learning tool. If it were $5 a month I'd probably consider subbing for a couple of months and trying to blitz through all the material before switching back to Khan to fill in the gaps.
While I am a strong supporter of KA, I just use regular schooling to review and back up what I learned on Khan.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:
"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."
Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:
- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).
- No room for outside innovation.
- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.
Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
The idea is for the students to watch the videos outside of class and this frees up time for the teachers to provide individual help.
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?
Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.
"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"
It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.
You are wrong in understanding the article.
Khan: Videos + rote exercises
Learning: Projects, complex problem-solving, exploration, argumentation, etc.
Dewey is worth reading.
Particularly in early mathematics and language acquisition (but also in most learning domains) you need both rote learning and exploratory learning. Fundamental concepts + exercises to build muscle memory are foundational to enabling students to participate fruitfully in meaningful projects, complex problem-solving, exploration and argumentation.
If you're flailing around without having memorized basic trigonometric identities, you're going to struggle severely to apply them to classical mechanics. If you can't do basic matrix multiplication, you're not going to build a graphics engine.
The article tries to damn Khan with an example about probing how neural myelination works. If you understand the foundations of electricity (by learning about capacitance and impedance) and have done some grueling foundational learning in organic chemistry, ready answers might spring to your mind. You need the former to make asking the latter fruitful or meaningful.
Khan deliberately uses the term "scaffolding" - which since we're throwing around dead education theorists harks from Vygotsky - which is precisely what a teacher provides by pantomiming elementary concepts for a child. Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence.
I really don't understand this article. Two things can be true at once.
Sounds like you should read the article if you have questions about what the article is about?
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.
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 agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Kahn here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.
I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.
Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.
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.
I am responding to the comment, not the article.
The concept of Khanmigo was great. The implementation was basically useless.
It was a great attempt, but the article explains the problem:
"early OpenAI access"
This was literally the world's very first attempt at an agentic tutor, with (initially pre-release) GPT-4. That is worlds away from what's being built with fable or sol-grade models in 2026, or what will be available in 2028.
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).
I can't speak for anything that came later, but in the early videos the majority of the benefit was that the presentation was exceptionally clear, and focused on developing one little piece of a subject at a time, it gently paste format that you could easily pause and rewind over and over.
It was never about replacing exercises, it was there to help you do the exercises from your actual coursework, and to serve as a refresher reference for things you might have already studied but forgot some details about.
Also the videos usually consisted of a while of time spent physically writing out and talking through examples.