I've done this and it didn't work. It was a disaster. Students weren't willing to watch the videos. They weren't willing to do even this small amount of work.

My experience is that they prefer the lecture/test format. It allows them to slack off. A couple of days before the test they will study. The prefer to go through this cycle 4 or 5 times a semester than to continually have to work.

This actually points out the issue perfectly: Khan Academy is great for people who are actually interested in learning. They seek out the website themselves and are already motivated to watch. General education seems to me like it contains a lot of teaching things to the unwilling.

At the community college there is a lot of unwillingness, as you put it. It's what makes the job tough. I care much more about my students' education than most of them do.

I'm bad at motivating people. I suspect that to be a great teacher one should be great at motivating people. Knowledge of the subject isn't as important as I once thought it was.

What is a problem now is that there is no current mechanism for the self motivated to use Khan Academy or MIT's open courseware and get credit for it.

I've observed that students often aren't willing to do even a small amount of work in some classes, take every opportunity to slack off, and study a few days before the test in some classes, while in other classes those same students are engaged; work hard, enthusiastically, and willingly; and in general are model learners.

I have no explanation for the split personality these students show. Theories, anyone?

I've been thinking about that on and off for years, and I think the most important factor is the teacher's apparent level of respect for the students. In the classes where the students actually worked, the common thread I noticed was that the teachers of those classes visibly expected the students to work hard and do their best. And vice versa: the teachers who were the most obsessive about controlling their classes were also the ones who got the least cooperation in this from the students. (I think the causation goes both ways here.)

So if I were teaching, say, a math class, and I wanted to use Sal Khan's videos for the lecture content, here's what I would want to do:

1. Have less class time. They're watching videos outside of class, so it all balances out, and makes the videos seem like a more legitimate part of the class.

2. Let the students know that, if they just cram before tests and don't watch the videos, they'll probably flunk. Contrariwise, if they keep up with the work, they should do just fine, and if they're having trouble, I'm happy to help.

3. Keep grading standards high enough that the preceding statement is true.

4. Have the first test be difficult but not weighted heavily, as an official kick in the pants to stir laggards from their lethargy.

I think this would go a long way toward creating the right mind-set in students, if it's matched with the corresponding respect from the teacher.

Is it as simple as the student liking or being interested in the subject?

I like math, I worked hard, paid attention and learned as much as I could.

I wasn't nearly as interested in what was taught in my English classes, so I did everything at the last minute, and did just enough to get the grade I wanted.

I think past 10th grade or so, the value of forcing a wide liberal arts education on people declines significantly.

Different people are interested in different things. If a student just does not care about math, they're going to devote a lot more of their effort to their science classes and do the bare minimum to pass in Algebra.

They don't see the relevance of that class, the class isn't as important to them as another class, etc. Tons of reasons they might deprioritize on class over another.

Ive dealt with classes and have seen both types as well.

One hypothesis is it's the energy between students and professor: Ones with higher energy in the class make change faster. In order to keep up, you have to think and do faster.

Then I've been in classrooms where the professor did not want to be there. He knew it, the students knew it, and the interactions cemented it. The 'energy' was completely in the shitter. At best, it was rote memorisation and drudge work. Big surprise: most of the class slacked off and cheated, and did the 12 hour cram before tests.

There is the 3rd category: in which the professor cares, but the student had to take this class for one reason or another. The general idea here is the student only minimally cares. I've seen this, where the student says to others "I dont care as long as I get a C." I'm guessing these are the most infuriating to professors.

You're right. I probably wouldn't watch videos on a single subject every day while taking a full courseload.

However, for me, the issue isn't the desire to slack off. Instead the problem is that I'm taking a bunch of other classes. I find it quite difficult to slice up my subjects into small pieces that I work on each day. So, I tend to get things done in a serial manner, and my natural lack of organization means that the priority usually depends on how soon the work is due. The result is that I often don't study or finish a problem set until just before the due date or test day.

(Meta: I'm disappointed you're getting voted down for sharing your real world experience. That's bullshit in my book.)

edit: grammar

I probably shouldn't have used "slack off". That has a bad connotation. The students I deal with - at an urban community college - have kids, full time jobs, heavy course load, etc. They have plenty of valid reasons to slack off. Teachers tend to think that their class is the only thing going on in their students' lives.

There is also the problem - at my institution - with a large percentage of students not being interested in learning. They are there for the degree, the piece of paper. It's an economic reality that they need this paper for a better life But still, to get it, one does have to learn and learning is not easy for a lot of people. It requires work and the payoff isn't immediate.

I don't know what can be done. I have my own version of Khan videos. I have video book, if you will, and I've tried several times to get students to watch the videos at home and concentrate on problem solving in class. It just doesn't work for me and I suspect there are fundamental problems with the idea.

I'm interested in hearing more about this (failed) experience. The only stories I've heard about trying to integrate KhanAcademy into the classroom have been from their pilot program in Los Altos, which to my knowledge has been very successful so far. So I'm interested to hear what the difficulties have been for people that haven't gotten it to work so well.

Did you have pop quizzes or anything to test their knowledge of the videos? As non-students, we think of a "watch-this-video" assignment as being really easy and something that surely everyone will do, but to students they probably interpret such an assignment as "it's-not-important-that-I-do-this," and thus don't waste their time unless they're particularly driven or bored. But I wonder if somehow quickly testing their knowledge on the subject in the videos could completely turn that structure on its head.

That students aren't willing to put in work sounds like a failing of the students, not of the videos.

How in the world does a lecture/test format allow students to slack off unless they have material they can visit at their own pace at their own time? (either a book, or recorded lectures)

Your particular failure to successfully implement an idea doesn't indicate a flaw in the idea as a whole.

In a lecture/test format there are around 5 tests per semester. A student doesn't have to keep up each day. The time between tests is around 3 weeks. More if there are fewer tests.

Between tests a student can slack off for a couple of weeks. Then spend a week catching. Going to the math center or talking to a tutor. They take the test and then repeat the cycle. Most teachers give practice tests and for the most part it's obvious which type of problems are on the test. Just need to learn those types of problems. The material covered in the class is much more than the few problem types covered on the on the test.

Obviously my particular failure doesn't indicate anything. That's why I wrote:

"My experience is...."

The flaw is that when students don't watch the video it can't be hidden in class. When doing group problems or in when discussion occur it's clear they are lost. It's cleat that the work wasn't done. It's this embarrassment - the confrontation with the reality that they didn't do the work - that is upsetting to them. It causes problems and is a great pain to deal with.

I believe that the format proposed only works with motivated students. My belief might be wrong. I don't think it is.

There is positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. In this case, embarrassment may not be sufficient, you may also need some mechanism (e.g. a quiz) to dock the grade of the unmotivated student.

Lecture/test allows people to only demonstrate competency in subject at the time of the test, meaning that even if they have a vague understanding when attending (or skipping!) the lecture, they will use the period of time just before the test to cram and acquire the necessary knowledge to pass the test.

In fact, I did this a couple weeks ago myself for a course in which I had no particular interest and yet was forced to take as a graduate student, doing the minimum amount of studying necessary to be reasonably certain I would get an A (spending my nights and weekends hacking instead of studying archeology).

The wider problem then, I suspect, is people studying things they aren't all that interested in, which encourages procrastination and cramming. This may be a necessary feature of any sort of broad curriculum -- people should show competency in areas even if they don't have a particular interest in them. If so, then this does indicate "a flaw in the idea," insofar as the presumed idea will not work across a large spectrum of people and thus may not be implementable at the collegiate level.

That said, you could theoretically modify it to have more frequent gradable quizzes on the lectures that people are supposed to watching at home, forcing them to watch them at the assigned times instead of attempting to assimilate the information at the last minute before the test.

This suggests that tests should be more frequent.