Re:Why I Love the Khan Academy
by dinkumthinkum on Saturday October 02, 2010 @09:00PM
(#1751796)
The Khan Academy is great. But, and I'm not really making any accusations at all, I hope amidst all this praise for what an admirable job he is doing and all the opportunities this affords for underpriviledged people that he stays on top of the quality and accuracy of the material. I just remember there being a few questions about some of his stuff on linear algebra. I also hope he will continue to add more advanced material to the various subjects, but I think that is his plan.
I think that's what's great about the whole concept, if you want to replace a lecture with a better one at a later date you actually can, so in the long term it can only get better, this just establishes an initial baseline, nothing will ever make it worse than this.
Between Khan Academy and wikipedia education is pretty much limited by the amount of time you have to invest.
There was a character in a book that tried to learn by memorizing an encyclopedia, which as 'learning by rote' is not the most useful thing. But in wikipedia everything is interlinked, and you can dig down in to a subject as deep as you want, the references will give you the background. It's quite amazing how much you can learn about something just from there.
The Khan Academy is another part of education embodied in bits, a really good instructor that knows how to make subjects both interesting and understandable.