Khan Academy videos: Instructive or destructive?...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about producing more videos. I’ve certainly fallen behind my planned schedule of producing them – too many other tasks get in the way! Anyhow, I have to produce some so that my school can complete a project for HE-STEM. As part of this I’ve had to consider what makes a good video and for me one of the most interesting debates about videos in education has been triggered by the huge success of Salman Khan’s video series. You can see him explain the history and the philosophy behind it in the following TED video: Looks good doesn’t it? However, his videos have been strongly criticized. This is not surprising, educators were always going to object to an ex-hedge fund manager – backed by Bill Gates and with no educational training – coming in and saying “This is how you do it”. Nonetheless, many of their criticisms have foundation. I’m particularly against the “gamification” of education. Whilst games can be a useful tool in education when you wrap all learning in a game, then students lose sight of the importance of education; they see it just as collecting points for their scorecard. Audrey Watters gives a good explanation of the arguments against Khan and various links in her post The Wrath Against Khan which arose as in response to an article in Wired on the Khan Academy. (Aside: I think that video’s threat to teaching jobs is greatly exaggerated. When the printing press was invented people probably said “No more need for teachers, you can learn from a book”. Every new technology is predicted to revolutionize teaching and to cause the disappearance of the bulk of teaching jobs. People said it about radio, they said it about...