Khan Academy - First Thoughts

I'm a middle school math teacher.  When I saw Salman Khan's TED talk in March about the Khan Academy, I was ecstatic.  Finally, technology that would automatically individualize instruction for each student's educational needs, would scaffold their learning with hints and tutorials, and would give me tons of data so that I could be a more effective teacher!  I immediately logged in and got started, emailed my principal with the details on the program, and started spreading the news about it to other teachers.  Within a few weeks I had my Pre-AP class logged on with accounts and working on it, and the next week my Grade Level class was working on it as well.

We've been working on it for the better part of a month now, and spend at least half of our class time each week on it.  The kids' responses have been generally positive.  The most common response is that they like going at their own pace and not feeling rushed or slowed down by the rest of the class.  I have loved getting the detailed data in real time on my students' progress.  It has made it so easy to pinpoint where I am needed, and give appropriate attention.  Also, the kids are engaged.  I don't have to spend lots of energy making sure that they are paying attention and following along - which is great!

I want to make clear that I am a fan of the Khan Academy.  I appreciate what they are doing and the service they are providing.  I think it is great that Salman Khan and his associates are trying to tackle some of the real issues that teachers deal with every day in the classroom (student engagement, individualized instruction, targeted teacher support, etc).  However, if they are trying to provide a framework for an entire math curriculum - early elementary through advanced calculus - there are a lot of areas for improvement.  The practice activities are just rote drills.  They aren't taking advantage of the power of their medium - the computer.  The activities could be much more interactive, and constructivist.  Much of my feedback is going to be focused on these areas of possible improvement, but again this is feedback from a critical friend.  I think that they have made a great start, and are providing a great service by giving free access to their curriculum to anyone in the world.

Things I think that Khan has right:

We should use technology to humanize the classroom.  Free up time for teachers to interact with students over meaningful content.  The most powerful teaching happens when I am interacting one-on-one with a student, or with a small group of students.  It might not seem like students working individually on computers would increase the number of meaningful interactions that they had with their teacher, but I have found that it has.  I spend less of my class time in whole group instruction and less time disciplining.  I don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy making sure the rest of my class is engaged, so I can really focus and help the students who need it.

There should be mastery before moving on.  This is especially true in math.  I am teaching 6^th grade math right now, and most of my grade level class does not know their addition/subtraction fact families (they still count on their fingers), or their multiplication facts.  For most of what we cover in 6^th grade math – fractions, ratios & proportions, decimals & percents - students need to be efficient with multiplication and division facts.  It makes it very difficult to teach new concepts when they are not proficient in the math that they should have learned last year or the year before that or the year before that.  I agree with Salman Khan - that students often end up having "swiss cheese gaps" that end up causing them to hit a wall with the level of math they can do.  There is a lot of talk about having high expectations for students - but he actually puts a system in place to uphold these expectations.  Currently in the education system we can tell students that we expect them to learn something, but when they don't there aren't very many consequences.  With the Khan Academy the student actually has to live up to the high expectations in order to advance.

Use technology to differentiate for different learners – in a way that is manageable and realistic for the teacher.  I know that the best thing for my students is to be given individualized lessons, based on their individual needs.  When you have a class of 25-30 students, this is very difficult to accomplish.  It means planning 2-3 different lessons for each class, preparing different sets of materials, and hitting all the different objectives and levels during each lesson.  A program like Khan Academy lets students work at their own level and pace, without putting a huge burden on the teacher.

Use technology to gather meaningful student data so that teachers can make educated decisions about who and what they should focus on.  The Khan dashboard has been incredibly powerful to use in my classroom.  They collect data on the activities that students are working on, and it updates the student data in real time, so I can constantly know what my students are working on, and if anyone is having difficulty.  This has been made it so easy to target the students who need my help, and give them my individual attention, instead of trying to make the whole class listen to me teach something that most of them might not need or not be ready for.

Students love the individualized pace of the Khan Academy and in many ways it is safer than the traditional classroom environment.  Students can go back and get hints on their practice activities as many times as they need.  They can watch the video tutorials as many times as they want.  This is much safer than asking for clarification of a topic in front of your peers.  Some of my kids have told me that they like Khan Academy because they don't feel rushed and can take their time to really understand the concept.  Other students have told me that they like it because they aren't forced to wait for the rest of the class - they can move ahead and feel less bored than in class.

Suggestions to Improve the Practice Activities:

Concepts should be first practiced in more concrete ways, then move toward abstract algorithms.  For example, the concept of addition and subtraction should not just be drilled with simple algorithms.  Though students should eventually become efficient at knowing these facts by heart, there are many things that they can do to build this fact knowledge instead of rote problem drills.  Software could be such a powerful way to provide other models for learning instead of just worksheet problems on computer.  They should have activities with dot configurations, number lines, math bars, hundreds squares, arrays, base ten blocks, word problems, and scales to name a few.  Activities should start as more concrete (i.e. students choosing which amount of dots is more, or which side of a scale should be heavier) and then move towards abstract activities such as algorithms. 

Concepts should be broken down into finer granularity.  This is closely related to the previous point.  The steps between activities are too big.  For example, students should be able to practice multiplying positive fractions, instead of having to multiply negative and positive fractions right away - even if they have already "mastered" multiplying positive and negative numbers.  A new concept should be introduced in the simplest possible way, and then subsequent activities could become more challenging.

More and better scaffolds should be provided.  Students should be encouraged to use them – not penalized, as they are now when their streak is erased.  Perhaps if they get a hint then the problem wouldn't count towards their streak, but wouldn't knock them all the way back, either.  Students should have choice into what type of scaffold they would like - number line, base ten blocks, math bar, etc.

Eventually it would be great if these activities were more game like.  The badges are a good first step.  My students kept wanting to play games on another math site that didn't have the tutorials or support because they felt more like video games.  I'm not saying it has to be incredibly flashy - but right now the activities are just like worksheets on a computer.  They could definitely be more interesting.  I know, Khan Academy is a non-profit - so they probably can't afford flashy game development.  It's just a thought. 

Mastery should vary based on the complexity of the task.  Mastery for basic facts needs to be very high – and data needs to be taken on individual facts, not just the whole objective.  Instead of data just on one digit x one digit – data on each table and each individual fact.  The facts that give the most trouble, should occur more often.  

Get rid of multiple-choice questions.  It wouldn't be that hard to make all the questions have to be answered with a number.  This would make the activities more challenging, and a better test on whether they had actually mastered a concept, or just got good at eliminating wrong answers.

For process skills that take many steps, like multi digit addition and subtraction with carrying or borrowing, or multi digit multiplication or long division, there should be a grid where students enter answers to each step – if they get it wrong the program should identify the step in which the mistake was made.  If a student continues to make mistakes in the same area they would be diverted to a different activity to review that specific skill.  Many of my students got stuck for long periods of time on some of these long process skills.  It was difficult for them to write neatly with the scratch pad - so it was easy to make a simple mistake.  When I worked in British schools, all 'maths' was done on grid paper notebooks, with only one digit written in each box.  This really supported the students in writing out their problems clearly.  I notice that my students here in America make many more mistakes because their work in not laid out clearly.  If the practice activity provided a grid for students to type into, than they would probably make less process mistakes and it would also allow the program to identify where the mistakes were made.

Suggestions to Improve the Tutorials:

The math videos available are extensive and great, but not all students learn from lecture.  There should be other types of videos as well.  Instead of trying to make them all themselves, Khan Academy should let other people submit them.  They should vet them and then post them for users to access and rate.  The highest rated videos should appear first.  Maybe eventually, the program could point you towards other videos that learners like you found helpful.

Suggestions to Improve the Structure:

Schools do not have the highest speed internet connections.  Lots of students working on this website at once – which needs to be constantly reloaded – really slows things down.  It would be much better if they could access this program as an app – which would periodically (every 10 min or so) send data back to a website so that teachers could still get real time information on students’ progress.

Teachers need to have more controls on what students do in practice exercises – it shouldn’t be totally open.  I had some students jumping to activities that were still gray (had not yet come up as suggested activities) and way too hard, just to goof off.  I think teachers should be able to control if students should be able to pick any activity or just the ones that are highlighted.  Also, it would be useful if teachers could choose an area that students needed to focus on - fractions or division, for example.

Teachers should be able to group students into classes – so they can view groups separately on the dashboard.  I have two different classes, and I see them all at once.  This is confusing when I'm trying to focus on students in the particular class that I am teaching.

Teachers should be able to enter names of students to go with accounts, so that they aren’t always trying to remember who “dragonscotdude” is.  (This is the real user name of one of my students.)

There are age restrictions on both Google and Facebook accounts.  We lied about ages to get around this – but this is not really a good policy.  There should be another way to login.  Also – almost universally in the U.S. facebook is blocked on school campuses.