The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.
This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.
“My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me,” he told me recently. …
Search for “Khan Academy” on YouTube, for short lectures mostly on science and engineering topics.
I always thought you were really smart. You certainly are smart enough to teach any number of subjects. Perhaps not university level engineering courses, but lots of others, and it seems most of them aren’t in Khan’s bailey wick. If Khan doesn’t know a subject, he immerses himself in it for all of two weeks. Calling noted experts or some that have taught more formal courses to pick their brains.
I have a small desire to start doing videos on the few subjects that I know a little about, but I think it will remain just a desire.
I have found that when I grok something it is harder to explain the principals. It is interesting that he is learning as he teaches.
I do wonder how many fields can be taught this way. History is filled with so many holes in knowledge that are filled with opinion and is often so self-centered that it cannot be agreed upon. Heck, California and Texas are fighting over history books in the class room at this time.
True about history. It could be tricky to fit any sort of history lesson, meaningfully, into 10 minute bytes. The format makes sense for topics such as equilateral triangles or quadratic equations, but I guess you’d have to simply give a brief dissertation on, for example, why Napoleon lost at Waterloo. (Hint: Read a couple very long chapters in the middle of Les Miserables for reference.)
10 minutes is a long time. Heck, most 30 minute TV shows only have 10 minutes of “content”. My high school English teacher use to say for school reports, “If you cannot keep the paper under the required pages, you have not chosen a narrow enough topic”.
Math is fairly straight forward, except for the pi=3 debate it is reasonably free from ambiguity. The more the postulates, the more agendas take root. How does one just stick to the facts when the facts are not provable but instead an agreed common belief specific to a region and time period.
The story of Little Boy and Fat Man is most likely told differently in Europe than Japan and yet again differently in the US.
The principle which I was taught in grad school, is this:
if you cannot express it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.
I believe this down to my toes. Understanding isn’t a warm feeling
or a light bulb or whatever–unless there is also the ability
to express the idea clearly again and again and again…
I believe that half the battle of university level education
is getting people to accept this. One is besieged by people
insisting they understand who haven’t a clue.
I will be visiting his vids. Maybe I can do the tacky remake versions.