Tag: Online Learning

Why I disagree with Mr. Kahn

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I have to say that I am not usually a controversial blogger – I’ll just put that out there right away.  However, I am so frustrated with the conversations, blog posts and articles that are zipping around the blogosphere about online learning, MOOCs and Khan Academy that I have to say something about it as a teacher, teacher educator and responsible learner, myself, about education theory.  I have taught online classes, taken online classes, used open source materials for my classes and definitely promote the idea of equal “world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”  However, I have yet to see how that quality education occurs online and especially the way that it is promoted in Salman Khan’s book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.

Now let’s just put something else out there right away – it might be that I am frustrated by the fact that he has no background experience in education (which he admits – “I had no teacher training”) and I am offended that he is speaking out of turn speaking as if he does.  For example, he says “There’s an old saying that ‘life is school.’”  Hmmm, I wonder who said that? And I’m not sure that’s really the right saying.  Or it could be that he is attacking the very discipline that I am working so hard to change – mathematics.  I totally agree that there is a lot that is wrong with the way mathematics is taught in the U.S.  But NOT going all “rogue” and working against the people who have already done some research on the subject and know a little about which they talk, might be a good place to start.  There are many things that Mr. Kahn discusses in his book that he seems to purport as novel ideas like Mastery Learning, Flipping the Classroom, etc. that are not his ideas.  So let’s pretend that the fact that he wrote a book of concepts that seem to be a compilation of educational reform ideas that have been around for a while is not what really annoys me.

What really gets my goat, if I seem to have his idea right, is that he is advocating for “a free world-class education, for anyone anywhere” but I’m not really seeing how this is going to happen.  He advocates for the use of the Khan Academy for mastery learning in the classroom (in a school system) where the students watch the videos and then come to class and do “projects” with each other in the “one room schoolhouse.”  I actually agree that this is a wonderful learning scenario that promotes creativity, independence in learning and individualized lessons for students of all ability levels.  Besides the huge government and system-wide testing restrictions that are currently in place and teachers’ current use of assessment, it would be very difficult (but not impossible) to change this system.  Kahn very naively writes a 5-page chapter on Tests and Testing, which again is nothing new, on the evils of standardized testing and why they don’t really tell you anything about students’ knowledge.  His “one room schoolhouse” is an idealistic utopia of learning for someone who has never been in the classroom and dealt with classroom management, assessment, review or planning of these open-ended projects.  I do believe that a great deal of teacher training would need to be reformed and reviewed in order for something like this to happen and before any school thinks of moving to a model like this they should think wisely about the ways in which teachers are ready to handle the change of the classroom culture and how they are ready to deal with it.  Students will still have questions about the material and will all be at different places in the content and the projects, which will probably demand more planning from the teachers (which again, is not a reason not to flip the classroom, but a necessity of which to be aware). I found what he put forth as the ideal classroom short-sighted and with many limitations.

Secondly, what about the “anyone, anywhere” Idea? Even if children in third-world countries have access to internet-ready computer to watch these videos, where are the teachers and schools to have them do the “world-class” learning with these group projects?  Where is their utopian learning environment?  I am confused about how watching videos online is giving them a “world-class” education (although I could see how it was free if Mr. Gates donated a bunch of computers and Internet access, etc.).  Mr. Kahn also realized that “teaching is a …skill – in fact, an art that is creative, intuitive, and highly personal…[which] had the very real potential to empower someone I cared about.”  Yes, Mr. Kahn, that’s what teaching is all about.  Teaching is about, as you said, “genuinely [sharing  your] thinking and express[ing] it in a conversational style, as if I was speaking to an equal who was fundamentally smart but just didn’t fully understand the material at hand.”  How is that supposed to happen for someone sitting alone watching a video?

In the NY Times article, The Trouble with Online Learning, Mark Edmunson wrote:

“Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates. You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.”

This is the heart of Relational Pedagogy, that the interhuman connection between people is what constructs knowledge and the trust, authority, and value of perspective that is shared and given to each other is just as important as the content that is exchanged – most especially in mathematics, it’s just taking us a lot longer to figure this out, Mr. Kahn.

To Kahn or not to Kahn in PBL

Recently there have been some discussions going around the Internet concerning Kahn Academy and other Internet-based “teaching tools” and their applicability or acceptability in terms of pedagogically sound classroom use. You can check out Dan Meyer’s blog or tweets about the MTT2k project, which I find pretty amusing actually, or Kate Nowak’s blog entry where she stated “Enduring learning requires productive struggle and time to noodle out unfamiliar problems, posed by a teacher who knows what you’re ready for, and can provide expert scaffolding. Lecture-only instruction focused on mastering procedures is an impoverished substitute for doing mathematics, and it doesn’t matter if that lecture is in person or in a video.” To that, I, of course, say, “here, here.” I spent some time going over the Kahn Academy website this past spring when my son was having some trouble studying for his science final exam and he was looking for some review materials and I actually thought it was something of a helpful resource for him. However, I’m not quite sure that it would’ve been a helpful way for him to have learned about genetics the first time around.

On the website, Kahn Academy has a great mission of having open-source curriculum for everyone, everywhere, which I am wholeheartedly in favor of. I believe that education needs to be the great equalizer and one of the best ways to do that is to actually allow everyone equal access to the same quality of education. However, they also seem to take pride in the fact that there are now “5th graders relentlessly tackling college-level math to earn Khan Academy badges” perhaps at the detriment of their understanding or even at the skills that they should be learning at their grade level (and I am definitely not against kids exploring interesting advanced topics or even discussing non-Euclidean geometry before they get to college, for example). So it’s important for there to be balance, as I always say, between content and process.

So overall, I would say, I have no problem with Kahn Academy’s (or any online institution of learning’s) pronouncements that they are helping to “spread the wealth” of education, but I do wonder about the quality of the instruction. They have some very, very smart people working there with very good goals about making education accessible, with which I totally agree and for that I commend them. However, there are lots of theories of education – both online and face-to-face that need to be considered in order to claim that any actual learning (whatever definition of that you are also claiming) is actually happening.

Before educators who are within F2F classrooms move to using online tools to “flip” classrooms in order to substitute for other methods of instruction and claim to be using Project-based or Problem-Based Learning, I encourage everyone to really explore the pedagogical methods of that online tool. Is it congruent to what you would do in the classroom? Does it actually help facilitate the type of learning you would want your students to experience? Does it ask the questions or help with the explorations that you would want them to grapple with themselves? Do they get to the confident explanation and security in the knowledge that they would in a discussion? If not, look for something else. Or even better, ask the questions or pose the problems yourself or get the students to ask each other.